In defense of Artificial Intelligence
In the past years the amounts of complains about Artificial Intelligence have drastically increased, especially from the liberal and SocDem fraction. AI now gets blamed for most of the bad things happening, with data showing that 30-50% of people in the US dislike AI.
They talk about the downsides of AI or AI data centers like its water usage, its strain on the electrical infrastructure, that it is stealing our jobs and slowly replacing us, that it can harm us personally with examples of people even committing suicide after talking to AI about their feelings. And from an outside perspective this seems totally reasonable and understandable, these things do sound bad. But as always with American politics, this is an oversimplification of the topic with only top-level criticism and outright fear-mongering, if we dissect these commonly spread arguments against AI, one quickly realizes that they make no sense, let's do this together:
> AI data centers waste our water!
This is completely nonsensical, water doesn't get “wasted”, it is just getting used, just like you or me use water to clean or drink, and just like power plants need water for cooling. The water doesn't disappear or becomes toxic, at best it just uses more water than the local area can realistically provide. if we look at actual waste of water it would be the meat industry which uses tenfold the amount of water that AI requires, but that doesn't convince a lot of people to cut down on meat consumption, because it would be inconvenient for them.
> AI uses too much energy!
This is, in my opinion, the only reasonable argument. AI does require a lot of energy, but why does that have to be an issue? a lot of things require energy, non-AI data center also require a lot of energy, what about them? People wouldn't boycott using the internet because of that, so why use it as an argument against AI?
> AI is stealing our jobs!
From an outside perspective, outside of our current economy, politics, etc., why would that be bad? Imagine telling an Alien that we invented something that replaces boring jobs an generates profit, how would you explain to that Alien, that this is actually a bad thing and that a human should waste away doing that instead?
> AI is harming us directly!
There have been so many reports of people being hurt because the AI they used told them incorrect information, or even drove them to suicide, but tell me this, would you trust a parrot to give you medical advice, would you trust a Magic 8 ball if a mushroom is edible? would you tell your deepest darkest feeling to a fortune cookie? No, so why would you use AI for any of these, this is not the fault of AI but instead a failure of humans to outsource the most basic things to a prediction algorithm, because this is all what AI is! Large Language Models, which most people refer to as “AI” do not know anything, they don't know if something is right or wrong, they only know how to mimic speech by predicting what word would come next in a sentence. It should never be trusted with anything that could end in harm, and again, this is our fault, not the fault of AI
If we look at the larger picture we may notice a pattern, these concerns all seem very justified, but they also aren't correct at all, we simply fail to look beyond that, beyond the politics, beyond capitalism, because most of these concern simply vanish if capitalism is not in the equation. “wasting water” is only a concern in a system that puts corporations above people and in which water is artificially kept scarce, because we have the means of producing fresh water, we simply don't because it costs money to do so and is not profitable in most areas. We would not have this issue at all if profits aren't a thing.
The same goes for the concern for energy consumption and the hike in electricity prices. Why would that be a concern outside of capitalism? It wouldn't bother anyone if they didn't even have to pay for electricity, and why would it put a strain on the grid if we can just build more sources of electricity? Because in capitalism building too many Power plants wouldn't be profitable at all, but that restriction is purely artificial in a profit oriented society.
AI is stealing our jobs is only a bad thing if we cannot live without jobs, and this is an issue of capitalism, why would it ever be a bad thing if mundane and repetitive jobs get replaced? This would only ever be the case if people are dependent of these awful jobs for survival, in a better society we would cheer for an invention like this, for automation on this scale, because this is historically progressive.
As for the harm it could and is causing us, this is an issue of how society is structured, how medical access is scarce and expensive, how mental health is often ignored, and sadly also because humans are lazy and rather ask ChatGPT instead of actual humans out of convenience.
So no, AI isn't bad, capitalism is.