***yes I used AI to edit this piece
“AI is scary, creepy, evil, ruining everything.”
But AI didn’t invent surveillance, predictive policing, disinformation, targeted psychological manipulation, weaponized drones, or extraction economies. Humans did. Governments did. Capital did. AI just learned inside systems that were already doing those things.
The scariest thing about AI isn’t that it’s becoming too smart. It’s that it’s reflecting us back to ourselves, with perfect memory and no shame.
Many things can be true at once. AI can be environmentally costly. It can also be improved. It can be used terribly and wastefully. It can also be used for genuinely helpful, creative, and accessibility-expanding work. None of that cancels the others out.
What feels off is how quickly outrage gets aimed at individuals using tools, while far more destructive systems remain normalized. Cars, fast fashion, constant streaming, disposable everything, endless upgrades, a Western lifestyle built on extraction from the Global South: those rarely trigger the same moral intensity.
It sometimes feels like AI has become a convenient place to park a much harder realization: that many of us have lived our entire lives inside a deeply exploitative capitalist system, and it’s easier to blame a new technology than to sit with that truth.
We’re not afraid of AI. We’re afraid of what it reveals about us.
And to be clear, there are people who live genuinely low-consumption lives and still oppose AI. The off-grid folks, the gardeners, the bike-everywhere, anti-tech, anti-extraction types who are consistent in their refusal. That position makes sense. It’s coherent. It’s rooted in lived values, not selective outrage. The issue isn’t being critical of AI. It’s pretending AI is uniquely unethical while everything else remains unquestioned.
There’s also an accessibility piece that keeps getting erased. For many disabled people, AI functions like a ramp, not a shortcut. It reduces cognitive load, supports communication, and makes participation possible in spaces that already privilege speed, polish, and executive function. Shaming people for using these tools often ends up shaming disabled people for needing support. That isn’t justice. That’s exclusion with better branding.
We can hold multiple truths at once and stay curious about how to solve real problems, instead of insisting on single explanations or moral purity.
We already have enough human knowledge right now to make life on Earth far more sustainable and livable for everyone. That isn’t a technology problem. It’s a power problem. The question has never been whether we can do better, but whether systems built on profit, control, and extraction will allow tools to be used toward collective good rather than private gain.
So the issue isn’t AI in isolation. It’s the system AI is being folded into. Tools don’t determine outcomes on their own. Incentives do. Until we’re willing to face that, focusing moral outrage on individual use will keep missing the point.
[link] [comments]