<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/09/if-youre-going-to-defend-ai-and-whine-about-its-critics-you-should-probably-be-honest-about-its-actual-harms/>
"I think this recent post by AI industry CEO Matt Shumer is worth a read. In
it, he basically explains how quickly LLMs (large language models) are evolving
to supplant many developers and programmers, and how that disruption is coming
to other industries quickly. He also warns critics of AI to adjust their priors
and realize the AI tools you mocked just six months ago, aren’t the ones in use
today:
“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe
what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft
I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from
my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well,
done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A
couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it,
making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.”
While the post is interesting (with the understanding this is somebody
making
and selling automation software), you might notice something: absolutely
nowhere in the blog post does he meaningfully acknowledge the widespread
problems with existing AI use. Either because his financial self-interest
doesn’t allow for honest acknowledgment of them, or because he simply
doesn’t
find those aspects all that interesting.
Maybe both.
There’s no mention of how these tools are causing corporations to blow past
their already tepid climate goal; no mention of how the affluent,
surveillance-obsessed exec dictating its trajectory enthusiastically cozied up
to fascists; no mention of how Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s data centers are
funneling pollution directly into black neighborhoods; zero mention of the
technofascist plan to leverage AI to decimate unions; no mention of the weird
and precarious financial shell games powering the sector."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
