An engineer I admire was lamenting about AI. He said that his new programming agent is excellent at fixing bugs! And all that it costs is a bunch of energy and many litres of water.
He said that he could also have fixed those same bugs, and that he also consumes a bunch of energy and many litres of water.
Wait, What
What are we doing here? Like in the most philosophical, why exist? Is it to love? To serve each other? To nurture and grow?
I promise you you’re not here on earth to provide fucking shareholder value. Providing shareholder value is a capitalist’s euphemism for transferring power from labour to capital.
If anything, we’re here to enjoy ourselves, enjoy each other, and to pay it forward if we’re given the opportunity. Find people who are disempowered and empower them.
Humanity
A person’s value is not economic. A bus driver is not measured by the kilometers driven subtract the sandwiches consumed. The energy and water we each consume aren’t the inputs into a organic machine from which we demand commensurate outputs.
Being alive and getting a human experience alone justifies the use of those resources.
It’s a surplus if we also fix some software bugs, drive a bus, or raise a family.
But Capitalism!
Yes, I admit these are grand ideas in our capitalistic hellscape. Markets want bugs fixed cheap, and software engineers ain’t that. I don’t have new insights here.
But I do have a request for the participants in the AI discourse. Let’s not dehumanize each other by treating our desire for food & shelter as a liability.