Who are we Now? - Jessica Kerr

This was linked to in the recent Martin Fowler blog post that was discussed here, and I thought it was worth talking about in its own right. Although I appreciated the framing of verum factum vs. vexationes artium, I thought some of the other points were intellectually lazy and a little shallow.

There was a turning point last year where I noticed that not only are they useful, it is irresponsible not to use them, at least in conjunction with my own code.

A lot of functional programming advocates have made eerily similar arguments about the necessity of strong, static types and pure functions and programming at large has (AFAICT) stubbornly refused to be responsible. I don't think it's possible that they were wrong about their stance and yet the AI advocates are correct now about theirs.

”Is AI bad for us?” is not a helpful question. AI is here. As people, we don’t get to choose our circumstances, most of the time. Every big change is usually both good and bad. Ours is to choose how we respond.

This felt very "it's here to stay, get used to it" to me. I do personally think "Is AI bad for us?" is an extremely helpful question because the answer informs how we choose to engage with it or how much to push back, which funnily enough is exactly what she also said afterwards.

Care about artists? Support art!

Buy art from artists. Donate to community theatre.

Care about the environment? Let’s tackle fossil fuel extraction.

Care about water use? Let’s talk to golf courses.

Data centers are probably more significant than plastic straws, but they’re still small.

This smells of whataboutism to me and feels at least a little disingenuous: we're not going to meaningfully address a systemic change of this magnitude with individual action. I can't buy enough tickets to my friend's shows to offset the fact they're (potentially) experiencing a huge loss in income due to AI. And I already don't play golf.