There are many rants about AI. This one is mine.
There are many, because it gets things wrong in so many different
ways ways. The environmental cost, the unvarnished theft, the greed
for resources.
But fundamentally it doesn't work and it can't work as presently
constituted. Weizenbaum's ELIZA
Effect is an
authentication exploit into human consciousness: the way we mostly
subconsciously decide whether something feels like a person is that it
can communicate more or less like a person. So when the random number
generator hooked up to all the stolen books in the world returns a
sentence that's quite like other sentences that have been replies to
what you just typed, a core part of your brain is saying "person, pay
attention".
This, I think, is why the typical progress of AI enthusiasm involves a
Damascene conversion: people see one demonstration that gets it right,
and they become convinced that this time it's really working, this
time it really is thinking.
(Note that they will claim it's human-level intelligent but never
suggest paying it or giving it a choice about what to do? Slavery was
always the point, even for the people who actually thought it could
work rather than the cryptocurrency scammers who suddenly arrived in
AI land with a carpet bag full of someone else's cash.)
The forced adoption is simply a financial scam. Big tech needs to
deliver growth rates similar to what it had when it wasn't the case,
as it is now, that everyone who wanted Windows or MS-Office or Gmail
already had it. Continued real growth at this rate is obviously
impossible. So they chase after anything that can be expensive now
and promise huge returns later, like the successful dot-coms back in
the day. But to make the numbers good they have to get people using
the new shiny. And then some of the managers get brain rot, because AI
already does corporate speak and management by rolling dice as well as
a human…
It's worth remembering I think that people didn't need to be forced to
use video recorders. Indeed, they were enough of a threat to the
powers that be that Sony tried to prevent them from happening. Why is
it so important to the AI people that everyone must use their
product? Even for the ones who still believe it works, there should be
plenty of room for different styles, and if they were genuinely made
able to do things better by it, real competition would show that to be
right. But it doesn't, and so they have to erase the control group and
say "don't you feel more productive now?"
If I had to write a lot of boring boilerplate code I'd abstract it
into a library. If I still had to do it a lot I'd probably be stuck
writing Java rather than a pleasant language. Producing code is not
the hard bit; solving the problem is, and writing the code and seeing
it work is the fun bit. Writing the blog post or making the music is
the fun bit. That someone else will get use or pleasure out of it is a
bonus.
- Posted by Ingvar at
09:14am on
17 March 2026
I dislike "rote work" as much as the next sapient. So far, the extent of my "automate code writing" (outside transpilers, which kind of writes code for me, where I can express something in a fashion more amenable to what needs to be expressed, and then get compileable code in another language, not sure that 100% counts) is that I have a small bit of code hooked into my editor, where I can say "hey, insert a logging statement here" and if it's "warning or higher", it will automatically insert my typical name for the error parameter ("err"). Then leave me to populate the bits that are unique to the specific context (other things that should get logged, a descriptive log message, ...).
But, yes, I have never thought that my typing speed has been the limiting factor in my code production.
- Posted by Owen Smith at
11:47am on
17 March 2026
My target at work for productivity improvement by using AI is 10%. Luckily as my boss's boss said: "This assumes we have a meaningful way of measuring productivity" which tells you how seriously we're taking this locally. The directive for productivity improvement is coming from the CEO and board.
As it happens, my work is on an entirely proprietary system (OS, APIs, hardware, even the cpu) so the only code base AI has that can help me is the one I'm working on. So it knows no more than the team already knows anyway.
- Posted by John P at
08:27pm on
17 March 2026
I use AI for two things:
(1) Generating regex expressions 'cos life is too short.
(2) On Fridays at 1600 I ask it "what have I done this week?" so I can fill in my timesheet for the 1630 deadline. I don't actually use the results but they jog my memory.
- Posted by John Dallman at
10:57pm on
21 March 2026
It's "vital" that everyone uses it because there have been ludicrous amounts of money borrowed to build the datacentres needed to run it. That happened because Software-as-a-Service companies need to return to rapid sales growth. If they don't, the executive bonus schemes stop paying out.