Artificial Intelligence — Who will benefit?

As the year has passed us by, it has been hard to avoid one thing: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Everywhere you go you are confronted with some company touting its new AI capabilities, features, and tools. Self-proclaimed industry leaders are telling us that X thing is the next way to use AI. That without X our lives will be immeasurably harder, that we can increase our efficiency by Y, and reduce overhead. Every few months some new thing within the AI space has been released which reinvigorates the news cycle around it, whether it be a new sub-model for Open AI or "Agentic Workflows". What is becoming ever more clear is that this is not going to simply die down. Many, myself included, were holding out for the moment at which the fad would be over however I believe that the fad will not be over, despite us all knowing in our heart of hearts the true capabilities of these tools.

When cryptocurrency came onto the scene, we were met with a similar, albeit far less powerful, media campaign by those who believed in the technology. Wherever you went, someone was telling you about the money they made and in some small cases companies were trying to find ways to adopt the technology. Those who did, profited in some cases. But eventually, that tide subsided do to a variety of factors including the number of cryptocurrency scams, the lack of a real world application, and the consolidation of wealth within cryptocurrency among a small group of individuals. As cryptocurrency waned, we saw the emergence of other technologies, such as NFTs, which were touted similarly, received similar levels of hype, but died out shortly after gaining notoriety. AI is, unfortunately, different in this.

The difference being this: business leaders have sold themselves on the pipe dream of replacing their employees with AI. This means that billion dollar companies are betting everything on this, from the biggest names like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, to small start-ups backed by venture capitalists. If you company does not have AI integrations or is not looking for ways to "increase efficiencies" then it is likely you will not receive funding these days. All of this culminates in an immense pressure to use AI, but to what end? Is it truly increasing efficiencies? Is it really better than what we, the people, can do? No it isn't. It is far from it.

For the petty bourgeois, AI is seen as their ticket to the real riches, yet another way for them to exalt pressure on their workers to deliver even more in their day, all the while reaping no benefit themselves.

A shining example of this was a talk I recently attended which was focused on these so-called agentic workflows. I went into this talk with an open mind, ready to learn something new, thinking I had perhaps missed something along the way or that my judgement had been clouded by frustration with the AI space. As the speaker went through his talk, he described how you, the user of an LLM need to put real focus on "massaging" your requests, even when using things such as MCP server. You need to instruct the AI to provide you with a list of options for tools it can use to solve a problem, ask it what inputs it needs, and very carefully tell it what to do. At that point, I am left wondering why even bother? Well, the why was simple. He began touting the benefits of AI by posing the audience with a question, "don't you all wish you had more time to research?" to which everyone agreed. His response was that, rather than hire a dedicated researcher for your team you ought to instruct your LLM to do that instead.

The end result being that you, the human, are no longer learning how to perform research. You are not digging through sources, vetting each one, coming to your conclusions, rather you are relying upon a generative AI to do this work for you. I would argue that while Google can certainly hide information from you, when you the human are doing the research you can check a variety of sources and are not limited to what is in front of you. Hell, you can visit one of the dying libraries near you if necessary. Instead, we must rely upon the word of the AI to tell us the answer to our question, which may be intentionally manipulated or unintentionally hallucinated. We are using the LLM, not to take away the menial tasks in life to give us additional time for life's joys, but rather to make life easier to teach us things, to tell us how the world works.

All of this misses one big, glaring, elephant in the room. Why are we not questioning why our employers are not giving us the necessary time to research? Why are we being pushed to work the same number of hours while increasing our productivity?

The answer is simple, it is the direct result of the system in which we live: capitalism.

As we, the workers, continue to find ways to "increase efficiencies" we are contributing to our own demise. If you are able to do the work of two people as a result of the use of AI, you will not be paid the wages of two people. Rather, you will continue to be paid your regular wage. As you continue to integrate AI you will increasingly make yourself replaceable. The end goal for the employer is to reduce overhead and increase profits, is it not? As such, your increased efficiencies will end with your own replacement. Any monkey can sit behind a keyboard and tell an AI what to do, lets not kid ourselves about the prompt engineering field, it is not here to stay.

For me, a looming question continues to rattle around my brain. Should it all, all of this, be this easy? Should we be able to write a book or a poem, create art, whatever it may be, with a couple keystrokes? No. Should it be easy to perform research? No. We, as humans, grow through adversity, through some struggle and challenge. We continue to make things easier, to no real benefit. It is not as though these increased efficiencies have result in higher wages or reduced hours. The expectation continues to be that we will work our 8 hour days, that we will receive the same wages, and if we are replaced by an AI, good fucking luck. Hundreds of employees were laid off from IBM earlier this year, and according to some they were fired because their team was being replaced by an AI. The end result? They are left to fend for themselves in an increasingly difficult job market, as the American (and world) economy begins to circle the drain.

We must resist the temptation to integrate AI.