In my heart, in my bones, in my brain, I am opposed to AI in many ways, and almost none of them have anything to do with the utility or usefulness of the technology. I am hung up and will remain hung up on all of the downsides, of which there are numerous. I’m not here to rehash them, just know that there are many, and even if you waved a wand and removed the worst three, there are at least a dozen more problems that are more than enough to allow my dislike to continue rationally.

My career is in IT infrastructure. To a lay person, I’m the guy who supports the bedrock on which most/all other technology rests. Beneath the code are the servers hosting it. Beneath the servers is the hardware running them. Connecting all those things are networks and integrations. All of this is joined by DNS, which is always the problem (if you know, you know). My particular slice would be called by LinkedIn nerds as “Modern Workplace.” This means Microsoft 365, email, Teams, Sharepoint, file storage in general, etc. I know most of the infrastructure landscape (I’m a “hyper-generalist” to most people), but this is where my career has set me. I mostly enjoy this work. Well, enjoyed.

AI is impacting my field like any other technology field, but not quite in the same way. AI is far less fit to replace my job in the short term for many reasons, but the main one is that part of my job is managing the AI.

The only reason this hasn’t turned my brain completely inside-out from stress and depression is that I’ve carved out a moderately-sane niche, where I’m primarily in charge of AI governance and security. I can stomach this because it means I end up being the guy telling you that you can’t use AI to do unsafe thing X or illegal thing Y (and more importantly, not the guy who helps develop it, nor the guy who has to be excited about it as part of their job description).

If it were just that, maybe I’d be OK. One problem is that now I just own an entire new pillar of Subject Matter Expertise on top of all the other things I do that for. The other problem is that despite being the “fences and walls” guy, I still have to learn how this stuff works, and that means I have to engage with it as part of my job.

There’s good bits to this technology. To say otherwise is plainly wrong. There are benefits in regards to accessibility, specifically in regards to communication. People like to make fun of “vibe coding,” and they should, but there’s stuff on the frontier that’s equal parts amazing and scary. There’s a lot of time-save for menial tasks, and before anyone wants to start the “well what if you unlearn how to do menial stuff?” argument (an argument I absolutely deploy in real life all the time for important things), I think it’s OK for AI to translate text into a Powerpoint because: do humans really need to know how to make Powerpoints? Are we losing something of value if we automate Powerpoint composition?

That doesn’t mean it should be injected into every single sector of life, nor does that mean we should allow its proliferation to continue in the hands of a startlingly short list of outrageously rich fascists. Being good at Powerpoint (or any number of things!) does not excuse all of the massive downsides to this technology’s continued force-fed trajectory in our society.

I could probably write tens of thousands of more words on this, but that’d miss the point I’m trying to make.

I hate that this is just my life now. I can’t escape this technology that sucks. It’s a part of my job, my entire life, all the time. It’s made me far less excited or even interested in a career I’ve broadly enjoyed for almost 20 years. It makes me dread for the future, both just in what I have to do for work tomorrow, but also what slanted hellscape the continued growth of this technology will bring us as it eats away at art, intelligence, learning, experience, growth; all the things that make life worth living.

This might have been true of something no matter the future, but I will be one big insufferable grouch about this, probably for the rest of my life.