Unintentionally Bleak

Recently I was asked to complete a questionnaire, and one of the questions was broadly: On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “Worse” and 5 is “Better” what is the world getting?

Initially, I smashed “1”, spent a couple of minutes freewriting incoherently into the comment box, took a screenshot and sent it to my wife, and one of my friends for the lolz.

When my friend suggested that I posted it on the internet, I instantly dismissed the idea, because I didn’t want to think too hard about it. I fully intended to delete it, change my answer to somewhere around “4”, and write something sincere but ultimately meaningless.

But then my wife suggested that maybe I should try and articulate some of the reasons I was feeling so bleak lately, instead of doing what British men of a certain age have typically been raised to do and man up! (Stiff upper lip and all that), I thought - maybe I should, maybe it’ll help.

Well. I don’t think it has. But here it is anyway.

I feel very bleak about the future. When I look out at the world outside my house I see most societal structures being eroded. People seem to be becoming less tolerant, less friendly and less able to communicate their desires, goals, and ideals in ways that are helpful to them and not harmful to others. NHS waiting lists are getting longer, unemployment is getting worse, wages have fallen against inflation in real terms for basically the entire of my lifetime. Everything is getting more expensive.

There are multiple large-scale wars happening around the world which are (quite aside from the vast human cost) raising prices, destroying international norms, and are having huge impacts on our climate.

I don’t see any appetite from people in control, to meaningfully address the signs that our climate is changing for the worse. If anything society at large is encouraging the acceleration of some kind of Anthropocene extinction event, by promoting over-consumption, ultra-consumerism, and generally negligent behaviour.

I could easily fill 2 sides of A4 with my thoughts on LLM’s and the utterly baffling rate at which they are being integrated into every facet of our lives, with few people seemingly willing to pause and think about the motivations, or the consequences of this.

There seems to be a blind spot when it comes to AI evangelism where it’s seemingly taboo for one to be excited and intrigued by the technology and what it could allow us to do, whilst also being vocally concerned about the power structures it introduces, the potential ecological damage it could do, and the very real economic damage it is already doing (junior level programmer roles, and RAM prices are just the first two I thought of).

In addition to this there are the long term implications of a system that, due to the suboptimal diversity of it’s training data, is exclusionary by its nature. The majority of training data is gathered from the Internet, and due to historical considerations of access, ownership and cost: content on the Internet overwhelmingly trends white, western and hetero-normative.

The impact of taking these exclusionary systems and baking them right into the core of State level decision making (the NHS, state housing decisions, disability benefit, insurance claim status etc) is potentially disastrous for large groups of people.

So the summary is that I think the world is getting worse at the fastest rate it’s ever got worse.

I am not anti-AI. I do use LLMs every day at work, and I can generally articulate the use-cases I have for them and the specific value I get out of them. I find the ideas behind the technology fascinating, and I’m looking forward to the day where PC component prices have come down enough that I can experiment with the tech again.

However, I am concerned about the current AI industry, and how the mechanics of the systems we currently have are evolving, as well as how few people seem to be willing to consider an alternative: An egalitarian, kinder, more considerate and empathetic vision of the future. Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t see why it’s not possible to have that kind of world if we try.

I believe strongly in the resilience of people, and our ability to create meaningful positive change, even when the situation seems dire, and I’m trying really hard every day to find some positives, and signs of hope, but I’m struggling. I can’t seem much of anything at the bottom of Pandora’s Box and I’m feeling increasingly wretched about what kind of life I will have to prepare my children for.

None of this was written by an LLM.

Disclaimer that I have neither fact checked or verified any of this in any way. To quote the ever eloquent Tom Stuart: Please give these opinions the weight they deserve: They are what one man thinks.

Anyway, I don’t really know why I’m posting this, other than to give you a small window into the screaming void of my brain, and to reassure anyone who associates with any of this, that they’re not alone.

This will probably be the last I write about the subject.