The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess by Kyle Kingsbury

This book’s approach is interesting. Rather than try to make a bullet-proof case as to why AI is dangerous, it lays out possible negative results of increased AI adoption (such as the proliferation of misinformation that is increasingly hard to detect) across many areas of society. Taken together, all of these risks make it clear that an AI-infused future will not be as wonderful as tech companies want us to believe.

I was a bit disappointed by the conclusion. The book explains one depressing effect of AI after another, most of which are the result of general AI adoption rather than individual use, and in the end Kingsbury essentially says, “you should stop using AI.” I’m sympathetic to that idea, and I already hardly use AI at all, but my personal resistance isn’t going to make much of a difference if society at large continues to jump in head-first. I suppose there’s not a whole lot more that an individual can do, though. I likely would have been disappointed by any conclusion because I’m disappointed by the seemingly inevitable future.

Ultimately, what I most appreciated about this book was that it helped me feel a bit less alone in my concerns about AI. This paragraph from the final chapter really resonates:

It is deeply alienating to see so many of my peers wildly enthusiastic about ML’s potential applications, and using it personally. Governments and industry seem all-in on “AI”, and I worry that by doing so, we’re hastening the arrival of unpredictable but potentially devastating consequences – personal, cultural, economic, and humanitarian.

Among software developers, there has been more than enough discussion about whether AI actually increases developer productivity or has the potential to replace developers outright. It’s not surprising that people who make a living building software want to know the answer to those questions. Yet I’ve been disappointed to see relatively little concern over how AI will affect society as a whole. I’m glad that this book takes the broader view.

(Categorizing this piece of writing as a book is questionable. It was published as a series of blog posts on Kingsbury’s website. It’s also available as a PDF or EPUB, and I read it on my e-reader, so it felt like a book. Plus I just wanted to write up my thoughts on it. 🤷 You can read it for yourself online.)