The class of 2026 has heard enough about AI, thanks It's exam and graduation time in the academic year, and some students are making their anti-AI feelings heard. It's not the only place. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave the commencement speech to the graduating class at the University of Arizona on Sunday, and his line "The question is whether you will have shaped artificial …
"The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence"
No it isn't ! But if it were, the answer would be coffin shaped.
The actual question is more "have you got the stamina, fortitude, intelligence and sheer grit to remediated the foul cesspit of a world that shysters like yours truly are bequeathing your generation ? "
Anyone who is deliberately ignoring AI (in their work or home life) is in serious danger of falling behind. If you ask tech people (especially developers) what they think of it, you'll usually find that the more they use it (and the better they learn how to harness it) the less cynical they have become. This is certainly true of me.
However there's a huge difference between using it as a tool and trusting it to make important changes and decisions, and that's where a lot of the AI evangelists are going wrong.
> Please advise us how we should all be using AI
I'd rather not encourage them.
Remember, not that long ago, when "IoT" was the new shiny, and we were all supposed to dash out to buy wifi-enabled light bulbs and bathroom scales and other such twaddle?
I'd say AI in our "home lives" is even worse. And I pity the people who're doing both. Bad enough that the AI tech broligarchs are doing all they can to insert their latest con-spyware into every facet of our lives, there's no need to help them by inviting it into your home like a vampire.
> in serious danger of falling behind
It was only a matter of time before some bot-licker brought out the "OMG you'll fall behind!" argument.
Good! Great! Off you trot. I'll be back here looking for smaller, simpler tools that do less, take less space, work on smaller lower-powered hardware, on less well-known OSes with battle-scarred multi-decade-old components.
Ones where no contributor has ever touched it with so much as an autocomplete function.
Leave me behind. PLEASE leave me behind. I want no part of this. I would be delighted if you all naffed off so far into your personal bot-managed future that I can no longer hear or see anything you do.
If the programming languages don't also want to be package managers with rich ecosystems of supply chain attack vectors that you don't have to write for yourself, and where you don't have to be online or beholden to a fondleslab all the damn time, you're really selling me on this falling behind thing!
I may need to reconsider if you're talking about TempleOS, though, because I think it qualifies and I don't want people to imagine that I'm trying to commune with anything other than a computer when I'm using one.
How not to fall behind in your work or home life (Mo Bitar).
Bollocks to that. In my home life? How, exactly? How am I falling behind by ignoring AI?
My home is gloriously free of anything with the stench of "smart" attached to it. I need a light on, I walk over to the wall and press the switch.
Software developers are already complaining that being forced to use AI at work is turning their brains to mush.
We are supposed to control machines, not the other way round.
What a load of codswallop.
I don't see how any kind of AI will "improve" my home life, as I'm an adult and capable of making decisions for myself.
Likewise at work. My job is hands-on and involves fixing robos and associated systems for a living. I don't see a place for AI there, either. Diagnosis is done via experience and knowledge in my brain, not by asking a glorified chatbot questions.
Being retired I've lost contact with many active developers. One thing that seems to stand out is those making the most use of AI are doing so in areas outwith their knowledge base. Some are using it to learn and extend their knowledge base others simply accept the output. So on the whole I agree with your last sentence so have an upvote.
LLMs are a mixed bag, and while my cynicism has decreased, my overall feeling that it's easier to do something oneself than rely on them has strengthened.
They're relatively good at crafting regular expressions, and they keep me from having to visit the toxic hellhole that is Stack Overflow. Multi-modal LLMs can do pretty decently as OCR systems, converting snapshots of my whiteboard into plain text and process descriptions without needing a ton of preprocessing. (It's still a lot more costly in terms of cycles, but it isn't a whole additional workflow that I need to spend my time on.) If I let them actually engage in what I consider my day-to-day work, I see a noticeable decline in my faculties, and that scares the bejesus out of me.
Anyone relying on external, third-party Intelligence Substitute services that they do not have control over are in serious danger of outsourcing their livelihoods to corporations that will make a lot more money if they cut those people out of the loop and slightly undercut them in direct offerings to those peoples' employers and clients.
What is it with companies trying to foist shite on their users.
WE DON'T WANT IT.
Fine for those people who do, they can purchase it from you. But the rest of us don't want it.
Just like MS with their constant UI changes, and all the other nonsense.
"We've listened to our customers and then decided feck it, they don't matter, why would we want to listen to the likes of them, they're only paying our salaries..."
Looks like we are edging closer to tipping point. The common people may be deciding that they do not exist simply to make GAFA rich through multiple pointless dependencies.
After AI, Cloud and SaaS should be next for the chop. And then those stupidly expensive mega projects that cost 10x their budget, overrun by years and then have to be redone after the OS EOLs. Simpler, non-networked tech is a better solution.
They can fool C-suite suits and politicians because they aren't very bright, and investors because they are greedy. The rest of us are unconvinced.
We elect people to scam us and ruin our lives, and we didn't elect GAFA. Be gone with you.
I think it's Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple. People have tried to make an acronym out of big tech companies, but it runs into the problem that you don't always want to complain about the same subset every time and the letters don't line up very well. For a while, FAANG was the most common, except Netflix didn't really work with complaints about tech when they were more often related to complaints about entertainment and some people didn't have many complaints about that anyway. If you add some other large tech companies you might dislike, then you end up playing jumble to find a pronouncible permutation of FmOGaAINAMASOXt* and modifying it when you want to be more specific.
* Facebook (Meta), OpenAI, Google (Alphabet), Amazon, IBM, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Anthropic, Samsung, Oracle, X (Twitter).
I don't even have so called "Smart" speakers in my house and certainly don't use AI. Unfortunately it's on my phones and tablet, and keeps getting forced onto my PCs but doesn't get used by me (no, not even the Google Search AI crap) and gets disabled/deleted when it gets in my way.
The other day I got a spam phone call that asked my name, and then proceeded to use the name I gave it to build a whole sales spiel that carried on even when I told it to "***K OFF AI" and didn't so much as pause even when followed up with a stream of invective that would make a brickie blush.
I get that AI has uses and is good at some things, but like any tool it is limited and needs to be used appropriately. This "stuff AI into everything" mindset is going to backfire on a lot of people but other than it dragging down the value of my pension fund, I really don't give a crap.
Yes, I am an olde fuddye duddye and close to retirement and am becoming more and more resistant to change that adds little or no value for me. I really can't wait for the day I can turn my back on all this.
