I was listening Late Night Linux podcast episode 264 and they were chatting about AI, as usual. This post was inspired by the discussion, but not really related to it.

In podcast it was mentioned that current AI is like T-Ford of our era. I do agree. There are potential good in the tooling, but something else came up in my mind:

Guess who is going to end up cleaning up the mess that those "AI T-Fords" go crashing around, destroying lives, causing damage and such? On top of the climate change issues and other fun stuff we're currently suffering from?

The clean-up generation

First let's make it clear what I mean with this clean-up generation:

• Anyone who actually cares about their impact on the world
  • Going "convenience and productivity is the king" route every time can be harmful
• Anyone who isn't rich (if you got +100k in your savings, I'd say you're rich.)
  • This also includes rich parents and family and whatever
• Our children who will have it way worse

All these new inventions that cause distress are often made by rich dads, who take resources from the clean-up generation to create more and more, often useless things. When things go wrong, they tell their children to clean up.

It's akin to those dads coming to your house, taking all your Legos and pouring them all over your house, then when they create a new shiny thing, they take those Lego parts home and tell you to clean up the rest.

Progression comes with a cost

This is the go-to argument: There's no progression without some sort of cost.

Well, sure, but why is it always the clean-up generation that pays the cost? You rich dads have way more than enough money to clean things up. But you don't care, since you know you're not alive anymore when the problems really materialize.

And I'm tired of cleaning up your shit. But I'm expecting there's tons of clean-ups to be done in future.

I hope I do not cause such mess to clean up for my kids, if I decide to have any.

Happy 2024. Make sure your cleaning tools are ready.

Side tangent

No, copy-paste-bot for your code editor is not useful, and if you find it useful, I'm worried about your code quality. I wouldn't trust anyone who copies code directly from internet without second thought, why would I trust a bot that does same, especially since it does not give a thought at all?