If you look at Facebook, et al, you could be forgiven for grouping humanity into two groups: tyrants and Luddites. It's American polarization at its worst and I hate it. If you ask the people who are protesting AI, they're generally the environmental class with a small anti-tyranny group who usually group around Flock without realizing that digital tyranny is about 30 years old now (25 if you count the Patriot Act as the actual start (it's not)).

AI is good. I know that a lot of people will hiss and recoil at that like my cat does at a running bathtub, but I'm asking you with puppydog eyes to not stop reading. The easy analogy is a hammer. In my hands, it's a tool for expanding my pig's ramshackle pen. In the hands of David DePape, it's a weapon for the destruction of human life. Either that or a way to settle a gay lover's quarrel. That's for you to decide.

The point I'm trying to make is that AI in the hands of a tyrant is a tool for tyranny and in the hands of a normal person, it's a means of acquiring skills you never had. The thing to protest is the failure of people to rise up against tyranny and not the failure to rise up against building warehouses full of expensive melted sand.

This is a human problem. If it were a technological problem, we'd be talking about how using Rust would have fixed it, not which laws have become okay to break. I can't repeat that enough. This is a human problem; really, it's several human problems. The Luddites, the tyrants, the civilians -- we're all screwed up.

A constant in human history is that more energy means more "human thriving" by most every measure of that metric. We should be building every possible means of collecting and using energy we can dream of. There should be no dichotomy between electric cars and diesel trucks beyond the needs and desires of the owner. They should all be available to everyone. Same for AI and less buzzworded technology. We should be surrounding our coal plants with wind farms and bolting solar panels to every roof. Every creek, river, and sewer pipe should have a water wheel stuck in it. Power should be so available that we have to come up with ways of using it to prevent waste and not the opposite situation that we're in now.

Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. We live in a world of villages where every villager is taught that the next village down is full of cannibals. I've seen this first-hand. Diesel truck owners look down on the Prius drivers and Prius drivers want to see diesel trucks banned. I know this because I drive both a Prius and a diesel truck and have had to talk to both kinds of people. We have a common enemy and it's not the village just down the creek; it's the king in the castle. He loves it when you protest the wrong thing.