Reflection.

I'm a millennium child. I grew up poor - in Latvia, which was still recovering after the Soviet collapse, and soon hit again with the 2008 global financial crisis. Since I was 11, I was fascinated with computers, which started with a Soviet BASIC programming book. I was taken by all the possibilities of creation enabled by these machines. I spent day after day using them to learn and to make anything that came to my mind - games, art, music, websites, programming languages and more. It seemed like the one technology that truly crossed borders and granted opportunity to everybody, no matter where they were, to make their life better, to express themselves. I got a good job because of it and for a brief moment I saw a way out of my poverty. Not all of it was easy, but the future seemed bright and clear.

Like many of us, I was fascinated with AI since I was a kid. Much of the media of course depicted it as evil robots, but some of it was hopeful. In my naivety I believed that in the far off future, if we made AI a reality, it could be a source of companionship, help us figure out medicine, finally take over the backbreaking labour and more. I even wanted to make AI myself, not that I knew how to do it at the time, but I tried anyway. I loved my computer, so naturally I wanted to give it a voice of its own.

When Google Deepdream came out, I found it creepy, but fascinating. Around this time I started paying more attention to the real technicalities of the technology. Then came AlphaGo, then AlphaZero, AlphaStar, deepfakes, widespread facial recognition. Suddenly things became very, very serious very quickly. Somehow, I completely lost the appetite for AI, when I saw humans starting to decisively lose in specialty tasks, and the immediate application of the emerging technology for surveillance and abuse. When GPT landed, my first thought was how people will use this for fraud, writing fake news articles, books, run bot accounts. Not that it wasn't already done by humans, the problem that always concerned me was scale and fidelity. Computers are force multipliers. We can deal with abuse when it's human scale, but the moment you grant computers human qualities/capabilities - we lose. There are more of them than us, and they can do things all the time without rest. Of course quality at this time was terrible, I held onto hope that it would stay that way.

Stable Diffusion came around. We can now make images, art, pictures of people. I still hoped it would stay terrible, surely it has an upper bound somewhere. But no, it kept getting better, so did GPT and with every passing month I become more afraid. The abuse I foresaw started becoming real around this time, I started thinking about loss of jobs; with better models all talentless hacks started coming out of the woodwork seeking to exploit the industry. Well, I thought, people still want real human art, it's clearly not as good yet, people see how terrible it looks so eventually we'll get bored of it and move on.

We didn't move on. First we got drowned out by the machines. Scale trumps all. Then we started losing jobs. When nobody can hear you over the sheer mass of AI generated text, imagery, video, music, now code too, it doesn't matter who you are nor how good you are. I hoped my beloved programming would stick around for a bit longer but that wasn't the case. I lost my job that sustained my dream of someday becoming a game developer. I didn't think it would happen to me, I said, like all the others before me.

What gets me is that people only seem vaguely aware of the looming collapse. It's partly about the jobs, of course, they will be the visible catalyst of the recession. The main part is that the social contract is gone - trust between people. We all implicitly know AI is a "lie" embodied, and it's everywhere. So, today when you see something, your first question is - "is this AI?" For art, music, books, games, documents, even personal communication. You might even ask that about this entry. What you are really asking is - "are you lying to me?" The rise of AI has normalized this attitude towards everyone and everything we interact with. So, naturally, if you can't trust anyone, life becomes hostile. You can't be trusted with a job, you can't be trusted to be skilled at what you do, you can't be trusted to have your own opinion, you can't be trusted as a human being, period. AI lets you pretend to be all of it.

My problem with AI isn't that it will kill us, I find it laughable that this is what people are discussing in the face of the complete collapse of interpersonal trust and the resulting economic recession we are experiencing now. We are quickly losing grip on the whole system that keeps people fed. It goes like this - your job gets concentrated because AI "can do it faster", so you are asked do more of the same thing faster; you get additional responsibility; your peers are let go since there is not enough work to go around because you are doing it all; entry level is no longer hired because the small tasks are easily taken care of by AI; graduates are left with useless degrees since companies are no longer hiring for them and there's a surplus of seniors laid off. Education is degraded in parallel, with teachers using AI to generate the assignments and books, and students using AI to complete and summarize their work, so nobody learns. So skill, growth, understanding and knowledge is irreversibly lost throughout the whole pipeline. The poor people forced to work overtime that are left, get hospitalized due to burnout. Not all of it is caused by AI of course. There was a glut of hiring during Covid, but it does not explain the full failure we are seeing now, as much as people want to pretend it is.

Hundreds of millions of white collar workers and creatives are about to flood the market with nowhere to go, being "optimized" out of the industry by the largest job providers to increase stocks, and let go by the smallest because they can't afford it, because the AI can do their jobs "good enough". The ladder is pulled up behind them. You can't work as a senior because of concentration and ballooning responsibilities and you can't enter the industry as a junior because there is no more entry level work. Entire sectors are about to be irreversibly damaged and locked into dependence on AI companies to supply the domain intelligence that is no longer being trained, because seniors retire and there is no place for juniors to grow into seniors. And right now we have hundreds of thousands of graduates across the world, who can't get a job in the industries they got their education for. Due to the surplus of people now seeking alternative careers, everyone else suffers, as the other industries cannot absorb all the people suddenly coming in. People right now can't even get jobs at a fast food place, in certain locations, because it's so saturated with people who have been let go. The creatives who got buried with AI generated content are also letting go of their dreams, yet another failing industry that is putting pressure on the rest.

I'm appalled at the irresponsibility of everyone involved, who made generative models, saw their abuse early on and then doubled down. So who will stand up and take responsibility for it? Certainly not the people or companies who did it. Who is held accountable for the current relentless abuse by AI providers, the felonies they commit, the destruction of environment, the destruction of jobs, the theft of intellectual property, the impersonation of humans, mental health impacts, floods of spam, unconstitutional surveillance, manipulation of politics and elections, the fundamental breach of trust? Who is taking care of the people who have become unemployable? AI is not a neutral technology, there is an overwhelming bias towards abuse of it, perpetrated even by the creators themselves, and it has been impacting us for years now.

All the thinktanks talk about is some theoretical AGI futures we don't yet have a path towards. Who is working on the immediate problems we have today? Is anyone there thinking about what we can do to keep the economy from collapsing right now? Because soon they too will be next on the chopping block, when people start going on riots because they can't afford food and currency gets devalued. We have not had such a rapid decay of the job market outside of complete government collapses like the Soviet Union. Do we really want this to happen again?

So now I'm wondering, now that I'm unemployable because I refuse to give up my brain to AI, untrustable because everyone is pretending with AI and back to being impoverished, what is left to do? I don't want to live in a world where a few bunkered trillionaires get to dance on the remains of the human ingenuity, creativity and trust they destroyed. I dreamed of a time when I could build things to entertain people, make them feel better, to help. Now I have to find which mining job will be the last to get thrown in the chipper, because the former is no longer possible, they refuse to hire me. I spent 15 god forsaken years day in and day out carving out my future from the bottom of the ladder, eating dry bread, only for it to be taken away by some narcissistic nepo asshats playing God.

Venture-funded corporations, using borrowed money, have stolen our culture and have the audacity to pretend they are now the arbiters of truth and ingenuity which they will package and sell back to us. Their tools are used for monopolisation, surveillance, mental and physical abuse, fraud and theft, political manipulation and war. I reject it fully. I am fed up. I am burned out. I will fight it tooth and nail. People, individuals, those who made AI, themselves have committed immoral acts, felonies and borderline treason using these tools, to develop them, further establish their power and see just how much abuse we can take. Who is holding them accountable? "Progress" is not an excuse, it has never been. I don't give a shit about theoretical future benefits or utopias or potential dystopias, it is doing damage right now because the high and mighty people like Amodei, Altman, Zuckerberg, Pichai were irresponsible and still are, chasing gold not realising they are about to end their own gravy train permanently, because nobody will be left to afford their bullshit. Can we finally learn from history and stand up to these narcissists playing God? Our basic livelihoods are at stake, not theoretical Terminator scenarios they want to distract us with. We are impacted right now, the social fabric is fraying and our economies are in freefall. It's not all because of AI, but AI a significant part still directly within our control to stop right now. The worst is yet to come. We have to stop it.

At least reconsider whether sacrificing your future is worth the promise of riches made by people who have never fulfilled their end. Our humanity depends on it.

D.K.