Originally, it was the scaremongering that was irritating, but now it’s hard to avoid the tiresome talk that the A.I. revolution is truly here and how it will shape our future. The claims are becoming increasingly ostentatious, both of its scope and promise – it will make essentials extremely cheap and it will dispense with at least half of the current working world population’s jobs are the boldest I’ve seen.

First, let’s analyse the optimistic vision. In a decade or so we’ll be living in immaculately designed and maintained communes. Most of us won’t have to work, free to spend all day obsessing over trivialities and hobbies: horticulture, making pottery, yoghurt, with the method and recipe supplied by A.I., no doubt, while singing an autotuned version of kumbaya surrounded by our pet llamas. Fantastic.

Yes, I’m being silly. My contempt for the great A.I. revolution stems not some trite concern of a ludicrous dystopian Skynet future where machines hunt humans for sport, but at the smug excitement of the entrepreneurial class. They’re only enthralled at the speed of the latest A.I. advancements because it could save them money. Their profit margins will look much fatter not having to hire whinging erratically behaved humans who demand terms and conditions to do rudimentary tasks that were all the rage in the bygone analogue age. Even the most craven government since Boris Johnson’s mob are obsessed with A.I.’s efficiency, mainly as an excuse to cull civil servants lying idly in their tepid baths. Then there’s my multiple personal gripes at A.I.’s supposed ability to be better at certain things I enjoy or aimed to learn. On the latter point I find I’ve come to find this encroachment demoralizing not encouraging.

One example: I’ve spent the last several years learning how to code, mainly in Python and C, and acquiring that knowledge now feels redundant, and worst still, a lot of time completely wasted or rather time I could’ve wasted playing Dark Souls 3 instead. Now I can just type a short description into Chat GPT or Open-Source and it’ll write me code quicker and far more effective than I could conjure. I guess I should thank A.I. for making me realise that my commitment to learning coding to a mediocre level truly wasn’t sufficient.

Look hard enough with a jaundiced eye and there are undesirable ramifications tethered to all change, but the downsides of this advancement are obvious to me – A.I. disincentivises us non-visionary geniuses to learn said skills, to adapt, sorry, “be agile”. It decreases our need to accumulate and retain knowledge, to read, or, worst of all, could dissuade us from artistic disciplines. Instead of slaving over that landscape painting of your dead dog, you can veg out, or cop out to your deepfake porn of choice and get one painted for you. Vincent Van Gogh would’ve hacked both his ears off.

Sniveling advocates will claim it’ll be a purity test of how dedicated you are to honing a craft and being an artist, and I’ll accept the charge that I’m concerned I’ll fail that one too. Will A.I. learn to write better than me? Has it already? Okay, that’s not going to be difficult, but what about somebody who writes with wit and panache, say Jonathan Meades, Christopher Hitchens or Will Self? Will a deluge of soulless A.I. prose make us not want to read even less than we do now?

Selfishly, I enjoy the process and challenge of making something out of nothing. Writing the first draft is fucking hard man, but also invigorating – all the time thinking, crafting an argument, and in fiction fleshing out characters and scenarios to figuring a way out of the corner you painted yourself into. Then the editing, the endless honing, a procedure so tantalizing, so frustrating and ultimately rewarding if you can arrive at something cogent. It’s why I don’t use Grammarly or some equivalent editor. They’re impediments to self-improvement. You’re not thinking adroitly, with nuance or critically if you get an app to iron out the kinks for you while you scratch your arse or torture an insect.

I guess that means I’m an A.I. infidel. The outsourcing of cognition and independent thought, to the degree the A.I. acolytes intend, diminishes the value of human consciousness and intelligence. Without using this we’ll be no different from cattle. Some would argue that digitization and the widespread addiction to social media has led us too far down this path already. A.I. will make our intellectual malaise permanent with forms of reliance and subservience.

But that’s not the most dismal aspect of the deep learning revolution I can envisage. Just as many incorrectly predicted that the world wide web would be a leveler intellectually and economically, A.I. will be the latest media engine of class warfare, and the means of ensuring the traditional hierarchical forms remain. Reliance upon it will allow the tech feudalists and billionaires to attain most of the means of production, and leave hundreds of millions, if not billions, of us destitute and socially immobile in totalitarian 1984-esque slums. We’ll be pacified with a cocktail of practical technological advancements that enhance living standards just enough, generic A.I. manufactured celebrity characters, dimmed critical thinking and propaganda on social media presented by the influencer subclass.

Donald Trump’s deranged vision for the new Gaza, post ethnic cleansing and obliteration by the IDF, was a warning shot of the way we can expect A.I. to be wielded as a propaganda tool. The subliminal messaging that accompanies discussions about A.I. are equally lamentable. Have you noticed how A.I. is as humourless as those who advocate for it? Well, it is artificial, after all. Worse yet these people have no class or taste whatsoever. They’re soulless goons without an ounce of altruism who manage to make those nouveau-riche Russian oligarchs obsessed with bling look as classy as a suited Don Draper.

Turn the future over to machine learning and applications written and controlled by these psychopaths? Fuck that. So, I won’t be using Chat GPT, OpenSource or any other that might pop up (you know there’ll be others, greed is good, remember). Sadly, I might be getting a fucking Microsoft Copilot “Your A.I. Companion” license at work soon. One last swansong of being berated and humiliated daily for not being efficient or smart enough by an application before it supplants me. Resistance may be futile, but at least I can say I didn’t capitulate.