I was at an AI expo a few weeks ago. Thousands of attendees, endless booths and demo stages, the usual circus. At the center of the expo, one booth stopped me cold: an AI confessional, set up right next to a Cybertruck.
I am not religious. If anything, I am an atheist with agnostic convictions. But standing in front of that scene, I felt disgust. It made me think about what I am doing with my life, and where we are heading as a species.
This essay was born there.
The mood around AI
Until two years ago, plenty of people were prophesying the arrival of artificial general intelligence. It was supposed to follow the plot of the most original science fiction films of the last seventy years and enslave us. Today, the mood around this tool is sharply adversarial, and the reasons to antagonize it are not hard to find.
The first is obvious: it will make the already too rich even richer. At the time of writing, Nvidia is worth around 5.4 trillion dollars. If you compared that market capitalization to national GDP, it would sit behind only the United States and China. It is larger than Germany's output, larger than Japan's, larger than India, roughly 1.6 times France and more than twice Italy. Market capitalization is not GDP, of course. But as an image of scale, it says enough.
The second fear is that generative AI will cost everyone their jobs, artists and developers alike. I am not omniscient, but I work with this tool every day, and I can say with a clear conscience that generative AI, as it exists today, will not replace skilled work. If you have a skilled job today, you are unlikely to lose it simply because of AI. No agent, no RAG pipeline, no elaborate setup of mirrors and levers is sophisticated enough to change that fact.
The concrete risk
It will not replace human ingenuity, or the human ability to specialize. What it can replace is the person who has not yet had the chance to specialize: the young person, or the not-so-young person, trying to enter a field without experience. That is the concrete risk. And no government seems ready to face it until it is too late.
What the tool actually shows
At best, this tool can be tailored to a specific job and make it more efficient. I work with code, and what GenAI has made painfully clear is that the bottleneck in software development is not programming as such. It is code maintainability. More than that, it is the ability to understand what is actually a good idea worth turning into a software product, and what merely looks like a good idea but does not become a product that actually deserves to exist.
I cannot speak for the art world. But while working on personal video game projects, it has become obvious to me that this tool cannot make up for my complete lack of experience in that field. Sure, if I need an image for a meme or a cover, I will not pay an artist. I will generate it with ChatGPT. But the point is that I would not have paid an artist before either, because I could not afford one. Quality artistic work will always require a kind of human skill this tool cannot replace.
The social warning
That is the technical side. The social side is the warning bell. If a tool capable of truly replacing human labor ever does arrive, no government on earth will be ready to protect workers.
Right now, there is no need for that protection. But just like with COVID, we are exposed. It probably will not happen. But if it does, we are cooked.
The only people who will be able to protect workers are workers themselves, with something like a 1792, a constituent assembly of labor. No one is going to take profit away from capital out of goodwill. And that is not even capital's fault. By its nature, it does what it is supposed to do: seek profit.
Progress without adults
What convinced me of this is what happened with the internet over the last twenty or thirty years. Only now are governments starting to consider limiting social media use for children under sixteen. The delay is staggering, but I am not here to point fingers. Politics is not easy, and it is not fair to expect someone else to save us.
The reality is that there is a total absence of responsible adults in the room. In practice, we are all children. The way a child plays with a loaded gun, we are playing with progress. The human brain did not evolve to handle the stimuli and pace we now find on the internet. But maybe this is inevitable. Maybe this is the price of progress.
We live in an individualistic age, where all of us are trying to bring home the bread, if not the Lamborghini. And it is far too easy to let go of moral restraint.
The last thing left
Maybe that is why the AI confessional next to the Cybertruck disgusted me. Not because I believe in confession. I do not. But because it felt like the perfect image of where we are: we have delegated to a machine even the last thing we had left to do alone, which is to look inward.
And I say that as an atheist with agnostic convictions.