The Immorality of the Pursuit of Artificial Intelligence

Capitalism proliferates by manufacturing scarcity. Sometimes, the scarcity looks like a dream - "Here's a Ferrari, but you can't have one. However, you can have this Hyundai in red, if you like." Sometimes the scarcity is a lie - "We simply can't get enough programmers to solve the information management problems of the world, so we need AI." This latter is becoming more prevalent as the venture capitalists seek greater and greater returns from a technology restrained by a genuine scarcity - margins of sustainability. The global energy and pollution limits.

The earth can only sustain so many "monkeys" at a given level of consumption. Fewer "monkeys" at greater resource consumption and pollution output, more "monkeys" at reduced consumption and pollution output. Venture capitalists believe in the fiction of infinite growth and, while we are limited to a single earth, this one we all share, our civilisation is built inside a finite "bottle", floating in an infinite ocean of unreachable space.

This is the first moral flaw of artificial intelligence, that the end justifies risking the very planet that is our only available home, because it might exponentially solve all the problems that infinite energy consumption is causing - environmental degradation.

Even renewables have sustainable limits when you view the Earth as a sealed bottle, a terrarium with zero connection to any other escape plan other than balancing input and output so that life prevails. There are days that I feel like I'm the only person on earth who realises this. I certainly feel like the only technologist and "citizen scientist" who seems to. (Except for Dr Karl. Dr Karl is a legend and a champion of living within the thermodynamic limits of the Earth's systems.)

The second moral bankruptcy of the artificial intelligence community is the headlong rush to replace humans. A clamour so bereft of humanity, the venture capitalists, who railed against artistic piracy in the arts sector over the last 20+ years, are absolutely willing to steal art, literature and research to train their dimwitted, pseudo-intelligent GAIs. The "hoovering up" of intellectual properties without payment or even "artistic exposure" (recognition) for the creators, to provide "training data" for machines that will make money (debateable) for their owners, has happened at a pace that makes the music "piracy" era look like a kid stealing a bag of mixed lollies from their corner shop!

The AI industry would be utterly, economically unsustainable if they had paid for the data they stole. And all that theft has rendered AI generated slop that is barely fit for publication. Ditties, badly rendered images, doggeral. All of it plagiarised from other creators, blended up into sugar-laden smoothies of trite, simplistic codswallop. Not an original idea or thought present, not an original-thinking creative paid for their involuntary contribution to the generation of this slop.

And the biggest motivation for creating this barely passable trash? That one day, we won't need humans to make rich people richer, so they'll get even richer by not having to pay human experts. The French Revolution's Revenge - the "aristocracy" eradicate the peasants.

Harking back to the Ferrari, above, the luxury, penile facsimile sought by the wealthy as the ultimate captured Pokemon token - imagine a Ferrari designed by AI. Even Donald Trump, the tasteless buffon he is, wouldn't want one. The very thing that makes that car (or my dream Campagnolo equipped Pinarello racing bike) so desirable is the human craftsmanship. From parts design to industrial design, the human input is the secret sauce. That human input cannot be faked by somebody without lived, human experience. It takes suffering and self doubt, sleepless nights, loss, pride of workmanship, even trauma, to create art. Machines make things. Artists make living things! Artefacts that speak of the pain of homecoming, to realisations beyond intellect. To the pain of true love, lost love or the love that could never be.

To seek to replace humans is to fail to recognise that humanity is that which is out of reach to mechanism. This is the moral bankruptcy that led capitalists to back Hitler and Mussolini. AI is as serious an ethical paucity as racist pogroms, because it is a pogram against human creativity.

AI prompt: "Buddha recumbent on a recumbent tricycle." Spot the many errors that make this image slop with no artistic value, whatsoever.