I craved the weakness and uncertainty of flesh.
It is so painfully ironic that after writing so many beautiful stories about machines crossing the line into humanity, and so many dystopias about the opposite, we decided to automate being human.
“You know, I understand now why we’re twins. It’s because…because we were born without souls. This world is too lonely for one without a soul. There’s too much…emptiness. Our souls are missing, but our tears still work. That’s kinda weird. Sorry, Sis. I love you.”
This website started as a way to share my creativity with the world, and that was always meant to be its main reason for existing. A secondary objective was for it to be a tech demo that could become part of my resume: “web development was never what I wanted to do but it can be a valid way to finance my real goals”. That idea ended up being flawed from the start. Years have passed me by, web development is still as tedious and intelectually unstimulating as it has always been, and my real goals are left behind, so far that even the random 3D art weekends I used to enjoy so much faded into weekends of staring into nothing trying to recharge from the stress of a dead end job, or the sunken cost falacy powered pursuit of a job that is not as dead end as the current one: “web is already my career afterall”.
A celebration of love, science, and art.
And the magic that happens when the three collide.
— An early attempt at describing this website
Blind as I may have chosen to be (or ignorant as I may have been), the tech industry could only ever have made the world a worse place. It is the poster child of capitalism afterall. To a naive kid who loved solving hard problems, the allure of computer science was hard to resist. Turns out once you’re ready to put your problem solving skills to use, the allure infinite profit has on someone else speaks louder. Loud enough that I do not want to be a part of this industry anymore.
AI is something we should come to regret inventing. As it is often the case, the problem does not come from the technology itself, but from the way it is used. Nuclear power could help us solve climate change by providing energy that is clean enough to power the transition to renewables. Instead we made bombs, and we continue to finance the fossil fuel industry. The pursuit of knowledge is a noble one, and in some ways stumbling upon world ending knowledge is inevitable, but science is stuck existing within a system that was designed to work against the betterment of the world.
Writing code is a creative process and no creative process should ever be automated. This obviously applies to art infinitely more strongly than it does to code, creating is what makes us human. Even if we could, and I strongly believe that we cannot, what point is there to automating humanity? I do not believe we are here for a purpose. Life is so insignificantly brief, the only meanignful external outcome we can expect out of it is to have a positive impact on someone else’s.
We are curious because understanding the world gives us the power to make it a better place, while also giving us an illusion of significance. We are creative because creating gives us a chance to leave a positive mark on someone else’s life. The process itself is the goal, and the goal is meaningless without the process.
Generative AI is a parasitic cancer that goes against the very meaning of being human.
This is a very lyrical text. My brain is fighting very hard to tell me that for that reason, it is not good enough. It does not even come close to a proper explanation of why I feel so strongly against AI, and it definitely does not hold up as a scientific study of why the tech industry’s irrational obsession with AI is an extremely serious problem.
I hope to work on a more scientific text in the future but for the moment I am ok with this being almost purely lyrical. These were feelings I wanted to feel over a short writing session and a cup of tea. Real science takes a lot more time and energy than that.
It may seem hypocritical that I want to keep working on this website, on my personal tech related projects, and on digital art, all while saying I do not want to be a part of the tech industry anymore. There are nuances here that are easy to discern if you understand the core of the issue.
Technology cannot be good or bad, only we can. My motivation may have taken a huge hit, but computer science problems are just as interesting now as they were before I gave up on the industry, and writing a renderer that draws a rock still gives me just as much joy. Telling stories is still what I want to do with my life, and digital art was always going to be my medium.
I am just no longer willing to waste my life contributing to the souless pursuit of profit as a means to an end, and actively looking for a way to stop doing so. I still don’t know what the path is supposed to look like. But I now know about at least one path I am not willing to take.