What I think about Artificial Intelligence

Posted: July 13, 2026

This blog post was 100% human made (with all the typos from yours truly).

Like me maybe you've heard stories of AI data centers popping up and depleting a rural communities resources and raising it's energy costs. Or maybe you've heard the AI bubble must someday bust and that the stock market will tank with it. Or that the rising costs of computer memory thanks to AIs computing demands is making personal computer costs skyrocket. Or maybe your a creative person who's thinking about loosing work due to AI replacing your craft.

Artificial Intelligence definitely is the hype du jour these days. It's all the rage from up in the Corporate Suites to down on Wall Street – enthusiasm for it seems to be boundless. But I just can't get past my cynicism and hesitation to embrace it. The hype for AI seems unreal. I mean, haven't we been here before with technologies like the blockchain, bitcoin, and NFTs ... all interesting ideas that push the technology needle a little further, but otherwise never completely live up to their immense hype. But this time it seems that so much (such as our economy) is riding on the promise of AI. I am not a Luddite - I am interested in the potential AI could have to diminish tedious work that should be digitally automated, but I guess I'm getting a little tired of hearing all the time about vibe coding, and token maxing, etc. Most of all I'm worried about the implications AI might have for human creativity and ingenuity, if corporate decision makers feel that all of those skills can be replaced with digital automation using the moniker of AI. I also can't help but feel some angst thinking that avoiding the AI future will mean being left in the dust.

One thing is clear to me: AI is not what I expected while growing up! As a kid of the 80s and 90s the promise of AI in films like Blade Runner, The Matrix The Terminator, Ex Machina, and ... AI ... or countless other Hollywood warnings ... is that technology itself could acquire a kind of synthetic consciousness indistinguishable from our own, with the risk that it could supersede human consciousness (and the question then: would it be benevolent or sinister in how it regarded it's makers?). I wonder if that is actually even possible, or more likely an impossible dream.

What really is AI? And how could it make our lives better (or worse)?

I find myself wondering what really is AI? What sets AI apart? Or how might AI be any different than other technology we've seen before? The sentiment frequently expressed that AI will be so effective at increasing efficiency and reducing costs is creating a lot of mixed feelings, from dread to delight. I ask myself, have I yet experienced any real benefits personally, or are we still in that potential phase? Is AI really so much better at storing, organizing, and presenting information that it could replace industries of people? Or rather could it make their work easier and more meaningful? The only difference I can really see, is AI has the ability to speedily regurgitate human-derived information in potentially interesting combinations (but possibly at reckless computing costs).

Taking stock of what AI truthfully is today, what is often more accurately described as Large Language Models (LLMs) - or powerful algorithms that respond well to natural human language, and with access to the entire internet of human-produced information (a.k.a. "training data"), can assemble an output that reasonably approaches something believable. This is now possible thanks to the culmination of available fast computer memory, massive energy-using data centers, and an unending supply of corporate enthusiasm for reducing labor costs. And with that vast amount of human-created information, it can rapidly assemble information as a mostly recognizable, somewhat helpful, but not necessarily novel, output This could hopefully make arduous tasks a lot faster (similar to the way that powerful computers helped scientists sequence the human genome). Beyond doing the arduous tasks that certainly should be automated (like sequencing a human genome, or compiling that human medical research tailored to a specific patient), and thereby freeing up people's time to consider more interesting work, one thing it seems to completely lack, is the ability to have an original thought.

AI is by and large an amalgam of much of human knowledge and creativity. It's an accessible rolodex of every thought or creative work any person previously publicly uploaded to their own website or blog, an answer on a Stack Overflow forum, a publicly viewable GitHub project, etc. This is it's strength and it's limitation - It needs the human mind as a source, and otherwise is incapable of imagining something new (it cannot dream of electric sheep, it cannot even dream). So what happens when all those places where innovation thrived online have been demonetized/disincentivized by the Great Copy and Paste that is AI? Where will new ideas thrive?

Artificial creativity?

There are different kinds of AI that have some alleged benefits: such as Agentic AI for people who are foolish enough to hand over control of their digital lives and important life decisions to algorithms who may potentially act in their user's best interests (this reminds me of a meme based on an IBM manual instructing users that a machine cannot take responsibility). There is also Generative AI, where all of humanity's artistic endeavors (art/literature/music/design/cinema/etc) having been copied off of the internet can now be repurposed or remixed ... but again to the discerning eye it will be with zero originality. It seems more than a little concerning to me when I hear someone cheer about something they could't tell was AI, or when they brag about using AI to "create" a creative work, for free. My hope is people's natural distaste for phony products will reign-in that exploitative enthusiasm for copied creativity.

Much like I felt as a kid when seeing commercials for the Nintendo Game Genie which inserted cheat codes into video games...letting you easily win a game without trying (where is the fun in that?), I feel very similarly about using AI tools for creativity. Personally I don't even like to use the suggested text that auto-populates in my email (If I care enough about a person I ought to type the actual words I want to say to them, darn it!) A cartoon by The Oatmeal creator also sums this feeling up perfectly with a similar anecdote about the Casio keyboard – this really resonated with me having had the exact same feeling as a kid, and I can't recommend reading it enough!

My niece wrote a blog post about what AI means for writers and creativity, and having genuine conversations. That lack of authenticity in AI created art is something I think will cause people to experience an uncanny valley-like experience when they are confronted with it.

Worst of all is the threat AI could pose to the creative professions when creatives are pushed out of career opportunities to save costs, and the talent that they might have learned developing their skills is replaced with artificial repurposed work. I appreciate the nuance in web developer CKK's policy as stated on his website where he describes the threats AI poses to creativity.

My concerns

Science Fiction has been warning us for ages about the risks of irresponsible technology. There was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I think is relevant today. In When the Bough Breaks an alien civilization has lost the ability to reproduce due in part to their technological dependencies. They resort to kidnaping the children from the Starship Enterprise, and attempt to provide them with their advanced technology that assists with their creativity, in hopes of starting a new generation to carry on their culture. Those abilities however are inauthentic for the children of the Enterprise, and it's exactly what's causing an environmental disaster that risks making their species extinct. It's one relevant and great episode in a series full of amazing social commentary.

If you look back at history, every technological advance comes with the promise of making our lives easier – but in practice almost always raises the expectations placed upon us. Where is that promised four day work weekafter all the the productivity improvements of the twentieth century? Fundamentally technology always stands the chance of rendering human efforts obsolete. But what usually happens is it just makes more time for humans to do more work?

More than the possible environmental concerns, or potential economic concerns if an AI bubble bursts, we should be worried about the risks to human ingenuity and creativity that might occur if/when corporations attempt to place the role of creativity in the incapable hands of AI, which might lead to human talent being undeveloped, and human potential squandered. Humans will always have the creative spark that is inherent in who we are, but we also need a means to make our ends meet.

If AI replaces the work people traditionally spent a career mastering, it's imprecise nature (i.e "hallucinations") could require more time spent overseeing it's results, since a machine cannot be accountable. Being an AI Supervisor is not something I imagine most technical or creative people are looking for as meaningful work. Another concern should be when AI appears increasingly more accurate to the point where humans might get so comfortable that their trust in it could lead to some catastrophic outcome when it gets a significant detail wrong. What happens when a critical piece of software is vibe coded and has a catastrophic failure?

The Bottom Line

I would be hallucinating facts to you if I said I was enthusiastic about the potential of AI. In truth I don't worry too much about if it will be an enduring part of the future of human work. But I am a lot more interested in another kind of AI – Actual Intelligence, in the form of human knowledge, creativity, ingenuity and wisdom. If LLMs can ever get to 100% accuracy and function as a service that correclty answers every question I could muster to ask it, then I may be more interested in it, but if that sliver of error becomes ever smaller making my effort to discern truth from fiction harder, I think I'll be more like a Luddite. Hopefully the never-ending hype for it will calm down, and it will do what it was meant to do: digitally automate the mundane segments of our work, and make room to accelerate our creativity!