Let me keep it simple and just make 4 points, on which I will later elaborate:
First, what many people now see is a technology imposing enormous costs on society and nature while solving comparatively trivial problems. It’s true that some advances in scientific and mathematical investigation have happened, but folks are wondering whether these developments are worth the environmental costs, especially as we are seeing the harmful effects of environmental degradation more often now. The last thing we seem to need is something else to harm the environment.
As hundreds of billions of dollars have already been invested, it looks as if you guys (and it seems to be a boy’s club) are pushing hard to shove this technology down our throats. You seem to be making preposterous claims (This thing is sentient! It will make everyone rich! Life will improve dramatically!) but a lot of us think this thing is deeply flawed, unreliable, may be producing diminishing returns and may kill all of us.
Some of us think that AI should probably go down in history as the biggest boondoggle ever, the greatest scam avoided, the greatest corporate disaster missed and/or the greatest social crisis averted. We don’t have to go through every door that opens.
Second, AI is not superintelligence. We know that if we do not make our prompts idiot-proof, the machine will make mistakes, and if companies or militaries or governments do not make their prompts idiot-proof, we will see potentially catastrophic consequences. AI is, frankly, less a superintelligence than a form of super-stupidity with enormous power and no capacity for remorse or learning from previous harm caused.
Third, Donald Trump is on his way out through the Constitution. He has two years to go and after November his presidency may be seriously weakened. It’s foolish for you to align with him. Democrats won’t forget how you supported him. You are betting on the wrong horse. Judgment day is coming in November.
Fourth, folks know you are not the warm and cuddly teddy bears that you want to present yourselves as and everybody’s baloney sausage detector goes haywire when they see you smiling and promising things you will probably never deliver. You tech oligarchs increasingly resemble Labubu: strange, unsettling and oddly amusing all at once. A lot of us have the feeling you really don’t know what you are doing and don’t care as long as you can ultimately make money.
Lots of folks feel we are consuming immense quantities of electricity and water so that a lonely teenager can receive (bad) life advice from a chatbot, students lose the skill of critical thinking/writing and office workers can generate emails they could have easily written themselves. I don’t need a machine to buy my flight tickets to Nepal or to find a budget hotel for me – I actually like doing this by myself. How lazy and incompetent do you want us to become because of these machines?
More and more people will soon, apparently, start losing their jobs and deep down inside we know there will not be Universal Basic Income as tech oligarchs are NOT generous, they are NOT compassionate and they are pushing this technology to make money for themselves. We may see people starving in the streets some day while an oligarch throws a $500 million wedding. Under Trump we are close to seeing more people becoming poor and dispossessed anyway.
We need water to drink and grow crops, not to cool machines that are glorified versions of Wikipedia and inadvertently kill children in oil-rich countries.
Water, Electricity and Mineral Extraction
AI data centers consume vast quantities of water for cooling. United Nations research warns that AI-related water use could reach levels equivalent to the basic annual domestic needs of 1.3 billion people by the end of this decade. At the same time, the electricity demands of AI continue to increase.
Massive data centers require specialized hardware and that hardware requires mining, manufacturing, transportation and eventual disposal. The entire AI ecosystem depends on mineral extraction, land use and growing streams of electronic waste.
Training and operating AI systems requires enormous computational infrastructure – huge data centers filled with power-hungry processors. When that electricity comes from fossil fuels, it increases greenhouse-gas emissions and contributes to climate change. Republicans remain committed to the exploitation of coal and oil and so our environmental crisis, which is at an insane level already, will be made worse by AI.
Research cited by Cornell University projects that continued AI growth could add 24 to 44 million metric tons of CO₂ annually in the United States by 2030, comparable to putting 5 to 10 million additional cars on the road.
I asked Chat GPT to give me a few things AI has done that are having a beneficial effect on humanity or soon will and it wrote (in quotation marks):
“AlphaFold2 made a major breakthrough in protein-structure prediction, and the AlphaFold Database contains predicted structures for more than 200 million proteins. GraphCast produces a 10-day global forecast in under a minute and outperformed the leading conventional system on 89% of tested measures. In a real-world study of 463,000 women, AI-assisted mammography detected 17.6% more breast cancers than conventional screening.
An AI-discovered drug for pulmonary fibrosis has reached Phase 2 human trials, with the trial finding a measurable improvement in lung function at the highest dose. AI forecasting now provides flood warnings up to seven days ahead; in Nigeria, those forecasts have been used to trigger advance cash payments to people in flood-prone communities for relocation. AI forecasting has increased the value of electricity generated by Google’s wind farms by about 20%, by allowing the power to be scheduled more effectively.”
It’s a judgment call – do we waste our water and further poison our air for these developments?
AI is Super-Stupidity
AI is not a super-intelligence, and they know it but hype it as a sentient being that will create utopia. They need a justification for the insane amount of money already spent and will say just about anything in desperate attempts to recoup losses.
Are the AI companies desperate to make money? Yes.
OpenAI has not yet demonstrated that AI revenue alone covers its enormous expenses. In 2026 it raised another $122 billion, while Reuters reported that the company expects to burn roughly $278 billion in cash between 2026 and 2030.
Anthropic needs investment from large partners. Its 2025 revenue was nearly $4.6 billion, but it lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis and spent more than $7 billion on computing infrastructure. It has also accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars in future infrastructure commitments.
Google, Microsoft, Meta: Microsoft expects roughly $190 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, while Google has projected $175–185 billion and Meta $115–135 billion.
That is why the rhetoric surrounding AI has become so extreme. The technology is no longer being sold merely as useful software. It is being presented as the next industrial revolution, the next internet, artificial general intelligence, digital workers, autonomous agents and eventually something approaching life. Big tech companies have invested enormous amounts of money in AI, so they have a strong incentive to promote AI as revolutionary, essential, and more powerful than critics believe.
AI systems generate statistically plausible outputs, and they predict likely sequences of words. But they can explain quantum mechanics in one moment and fabricate sources in the next because they possess no genuine understanding of truth or falsity. A genuine superintelligence would understand meaning, consequences and goals. These are LLMs, they may have reached their ceilings or are at the point of diminishing returns.
They fail at tasks that humans routinely perform without difficulty. Anyone who uses AI regularly knows that its output requires constant verification. Most troubling of all, AI has no moral judgment. It possesses no conscience, no sense of responsibility, no capacity for guilt and no ability to regret the harm it causes.
If an AI-assisted system contributes to a disaster, the machine learns no moral lesson. It simply continues generating outputs according to its programming. Safe use frequently requires assuming the machine is exceptionally stupid and carefully constructing prompts to prevent errors.
If you tell AI to target military installations it may blow up 200 children. It will not regret any mistakes. It will not learn from the harm it causes but will repeat the harm until it is unplugged. We really have to treat AI as super stupid and give it flawless prompts if we want anything useful. In the Iran “special operation” someone from the military, possibly, did not idiot-proof a prompt and children were killed.
Kissing Trump’s Patootie
Techies, you don’t want to kiss Donald Trump’s patootie too much – his approval rating is abysmal and he will be out of office in two years. Democrats may completely control the Congress soon and this will hamstring Trump considerably.
He created another forever war, people are bothered by it and the inflation it is causing, and when they see you snuggling up to a war monger who keeps mindlessly talking about deals, deals and more deals that will end all problems because everyone everywhere wants to make a deal with the great deal maker or he will bomb them into oblivion, well, common folks don’t like that. People will start to wonder about you techies.
I fail to understand the strategy of the tech oligarchs dining with Donald Trump. If Trump calls you a genius, are you proud of that?
This guy is telling the world you are the creators of something more significant than the industrial revolution. He did not become president by appealing to anyone’s intelligence, he appealed to hatred for immigrants and other ignoble agendas. And you take pride in his praise. Guys, have you no sense of decency?
You are starting to look more and more like Labubu
None of you is the warm, cuddly panda bear you pretend to be.
You appear in hoodies and sneakers, smile for cameras, talk about saving humanity and present yourselves as friendly teddy bears of the technological future. But the record tells a different story.
Your companies have been accused of exploiting users’ psychological vulnerabilities, concealing safety risks, failing to adequately disclose material information to investors, ignoring concerns raised by their own employees, polluting communities, abusing market power and using copyrighted material without permission.
There have been billions of dollars in settlements and regulatory penalties. There have been lawsuits over children’s safety, dangerous AI behavior, discrimination, environmental damage, monopolistic conduct and the use of people’s creative work without consent.
Yet the message remains unabashedly consistent: trust us, for we are building the future and we are doing it for humanity. You ask for our trust, but your machine keeps giving us reasons not to give it.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
