Artificial Intelligence
Originally written on March 27th, 2026.
Edited on May 12th, 2026.
There really is no difference between an AI sycophant and an AI doomsayer. One confidently claims that AI will solve every problem we've ever faced. The other claims were essentially five years away from AI killing us all. Yet, both believe completely in AI. Both equate AI to the level of a god. Although it often feels like the former only does so for the grift. Sometimes, the doomsayer feels more like a true believer.
But, despite rapid advancement, infrastructure development, and product release, Artificial Intelligence does not exist. What has been produced to date is a faster and more complex search engine paired with a more human-like chatbot. That isn't an intelligence. And for all we know, the production of an intelligence within a computer is impossible: a scifi dream. Currently, AI cannot do anything without a human being prompting it to do so. Its just a complex call and response algorithm.
But it's hailed as the miracle technology of the future, one that can and will solve every problem humanity has ever faced. So we have to invest in it and invest in it massively. So they say.
But here's the grift. It can't solve our problems.
If it could, then rather than spending federal and state tax revenue on projects to clean to address, say, climate change, would we not be better served giving that money to tech CEOs who could develop an AI that would solve the problem for us? That would identify a solution to climate change?
Apply that logic to every problem that we face as a nation and as a world: Massive wealth inequality, political instability, climate change, the rising cost of healthcare, rampant gun violence, you name it. Invest in solving the problem? Or, hand your money over to the "AI" to solve the problem for you?
Currently, we’re on the trajectory of letting AI take a swing at it.
But, here is what is really funny to me. When they discuss the AI-promised land, they say that it will have access to all human knowledge, and so of course it will be able to come up with answers that we never thought of. But, it doesn't have access to all of human knowledge, does it? No. It has access to 100% of what is on the collective internet, which doesn't house exclusively objective human knowledge. It equally houses scientific facts, crank conspiracy theories, histories diluted by and manipulated across partisan lines, and critically it is founded on all of the mistakes of human beings and how we process, store, and transmit information. It is littered with racist, minsogynst, xenophobic, and also blatantly incorrect information. AI is trained by self help books, cult dynamics, nonsense Reddit threads, fringe ideologies, and debunked pseudoscience.
An "AI" will weight it all the same. There's a lot of garbage on the internet and the internet is its home base. It’s a fancy call and response machine, and the bank it derives its response from is overwhelmingly slop and garbage.
That's why specialized and specific "AI" platforms are intriguing. Feed an "AI" only information about human mammary cells and the various physiological changes that occur during the development and progression of cancer. Let it speed up the process of flagging biopsies. I have a friend who did something akin to this in the pathology space. Great idea. But one that has access to the everything that we as human beings have produced and uploaded to the internet? It's "solutions" will be no more impressive or viable than those that we can think of ourselves, or those that we already have proposed yet fail to fully invest in. In fact, if anything, I think the "AI" generated ideas will be less flexible and less adaptable. Because for all of the information that we could provide it, there will be information and context that it is unaware of.
Take climate change as an example. What solution is "AI" going to generate? Is it worth the environmental impact of the infrastructure that has to be built to operate said "AI"? We could instead, as we mere mortal human being have already thought of, massive invest in solar energy production, or wind production, but this remains less popular, or nuclear power, which remains unexplored. All would provide a viable alternative to oil production, reduce our reliance on middle eastern oil - which of course would have impacts that we would need to address for mid-east and global stability, which would take some creative problem solving - and massively reduce the rate of climate change. Additionally, we can and should address our culture of conspicuous consumption. I won't get on too much of a tangent here. The point is, we have solutions. We have not invested in them at all.
Okay fine, I’ll give you a tangent. Sometimes I think that very small, minor, and inadequate investments are made in, for example, clean energy solutions, only so that their antagonists can claim these solutions are untenable. It’s manipulation. Okay, back to it.
Instead of fully investing in solutions that we have at our fingertips, we now place our money in the hands of tech CEOs promising their "AI" will finally provide the solution.
That's just illogical. And, unfortunately, I fancy myself a pragmatist.
So, small, narrowly-scoped, specific, specialized "AI" platforms? Sure. Especially when we agree as a people in the value of the output. But, an "Artificial Intelligence" as touted by Sam Altman and Elon Musk? No, thank you. It is, at best, a grift. It’s a clever way to put more of the money that is in your pocket into their pockets.
Just like crypto, but that's a conversation for another day.
Fine, let me give you one more tangent before I wrap this up.
In brief, crypto is not a decentralized currency anymore, as it was designed to be. It's a centralized currency that technically doesn't get regulated like a currency, so political administrations can use it to accept bribes and gifts from domestic and international agents hoping to gain political favor. It's also a grift. You're being grifted, America. Your money is in their pockets and they've done nothing at all for you.
Anyway, I suppose that summarizes my ideology as it relates to "AI". This ideology would underlie policy: Tight regulations against data theft and personal data use, data privacy laws, limits on claims during fund raising, federal investment into truly transformative uses and small producers, strict environmental regulations, massive investment in national clean energy production, storage, and dissemination in pursuit of energy sovereignty, robust public transit infrastructure to reduce reliance on gasoline powered vehicle and address the challenges of a national charging station approach of the Biden-era, including high speed rails with more connections between US cities and more intricately connecting the East and West...
I could go on.
What is important as we move forward politically is that we have grounded and foundational theory and ideology that is rooted in what is best for the American people, not the American CEO - while still recognizing, respecting, and supporting the role they play in American self reliance, advancement, and economic viability. That ideology needs to inform pragmatic policy and that policy needs to be powerfully and confidently enacted.
Anyway, thats what I’m thinking about today.
Leave a comment. Let's have a conversation.
