When I sit down and write these words the world finds itself in what many perceive as a technological and spiritual revolution. Some comepare it to the birth of the industrial revolution, others go even so far as predicting it as the highly anticipated second coming of a certain diety. But whatever prophecies are out there the world is stoked and the markets are primed to the max. Im of course talking about the arrival of the what is commonly referred to as the AI but for those of us who are more versed in the world, the arrival of the Large Language Model. However, since the term LLM is not part of the hype we can agree to use the word AI and the first question would be, what is this all about? The answer to that is it depends who you talk to, the average western world Joanna on the street, the deep computer nerd or the market person with money iwith lots of money to spend. Chances are they will all give you different answers which are relevant to their take on the subject matter. If we take Joanna first there is a good chance she doesnt have an opinion on AI, she has heard about it but doesnt really engage in the topic. However, its equally good chance Joanna has heard about AI and is an avid user of it and she will tell you how AI has transformed her life to the better in oh so many ways. Not only has she found a pal she can chat to any time during the day and confess her innermost feelings to, she will also tell you she gets all her news and information she needs from the AI to the point she even asks the AI for advice about her daily life and personal matters. In short, AI for Joanna is all cooked into one, a close friend, a therapist, a news agency and an information search engine which exists anytime and anywhere Joanna needs and she happily pays for the AI because her general sentiment is AI has made life so much better and above all easier. Its a success story and we leave Joanna at that and ask the deep computer nerd. She most likely has heard about AI due to the nature of her interests and there is almost a certainty she has used AI or uses AI daily for her work. However, the she has a different take on AI. To her AI represents a mathematical system which is specialised in guessing words i.e, a glorified word complete. She might also tell you that due to the random nature the statistical calculations which are foundational to AI she is vary of trusting it because whatever output the AI spews the statistical probabilities it is false, nonsense, fabrication and outright wrong are conciderable. As our friendly nerd has dabbled in using AI to help her with coding she can tell you the quality of the code the AI outputs is quite bad and she has to spend long hours pouring over the code to correct it and make it sound from an academical point of view. In other words, our friendly nerd sees the AI as a tool which can be useful in some very limited use cases but due to its error prone nature its of limited use in its current iteration. She will however confess she has an AI chat bot which she roleplays with and and engages in furry fantasies with to her pleasure. So all in all, our nerd is mostly sceptical but sees values although in a very limited scope. And that brings us to the market person with bucket loads of money ion her hands. She will quickly tell you that AI is a human kinds next big hope and a revolution surpassing all others and AI is going to tranform human societies as we know them. She will also tell you it is a sure bet on making lots of money because all these AI companies are going to be transformative and everybody, the people in the streets, the companies, the governments are going to take part which in turn will make the AI companies influential and powerful and earn the stakeholders limitless amounts of money really quickly. In short, she says, put your money on AI and you cant loose. Its all going to be a great future where AI controls everything and makes humans redundant so the companies can make even more money as they dont need the staff. Its all so cool, so futuristic and so bright once AI takes over. The market person will then show you a number of spreadsheets which demonstrate the projected value of the AI companies for the next eighteen months and the lines are all going straight up, even through the roof. For our market person life is good, even better than good because she is making lots of money on the promised land and the expectancy is great although when pressed she becomes a bit jittery because she has one nagging fear. All the AI companies she has invested in have yet to show any return of investment and time has been passing. But she shakes it off, surely it will happen soon. And there you have it. Three persons with very different views on AI and in a way they are all descriptive of what AI really is currently in our societies. For one it is the ultimate end user experience, the ultimate presence in peoples lives, for another it is a tool which can be used in a limited way to resolve problems and for the third its the ultimate money making machine. We might ask ourselves, which of them is right and the answer would be, all of them are right and wrong at the same time. In the first case we have a clear example of what could be called a digital dependency habit. This is not a new phenomena, it has been observed in various places throughout the ongoing digital revolution. People are drawn to an aspect of the digital world and it completely transforms the persons life for better or worse and here we have to take into account the digital revolution has indeed made improvements to the lifes of many people. The writer of these humble words can witness to that. Her quality of life is wastly improved by the digital revolution and its consequences There is no doubt the digital revolution has done tons of good but we also need to think about the darker aspects of it and digital dependency can have oh so many negative consequences. Excessive gaming, excessive social media and now excessive use of AI are examples of that and when it comes to AI it is very much on the companies as they unleash their products on to the world without giving it much though what consequences they might have on peoples lives. It all feels a bit like the common drug dealer pushing his product on to fresh faces knowing that some will get hooked and others not but the dealer just doesnt care as long it makes him money and the AI companies all have big dreams of making insane amounts of money as well as creating dependency levels previously unheard of. Never in human history has the stage been set to make whole societies dependent on one product with as much force as is being done with AI. Governments participate eagerly in this and help pushing the products on to the population. It remains to be seen how people will react when the push becomes nation wide and AI will be made a mandatory item in every persons life but which way it will be done it is important to take into concideration that AI use can and will be excessive to many people and it will transform their lives not necessarily in a good way. If AI is going to be a reality in our lives it is a force we need to tame in order for us to control it and not the other way around. We need to rule the AI. But lets go over to the second case, our friendly nerd who is by all terms a bit of a sceptic on AI and has lots of good reasons to be as she knows and understands the technology behind the AI and see through the smokes and mirrors of marketing. This girl has a fairly well grounded idea what AI can actually be used for and what one needs to be aware of when using it. She has, as a deep computer nerd, seen many things in the digital world come and go but she is fairly certain AI is here to stay but what role it will take in human society remains somewhat unclear and the reason for it is the ever lacking definition on what AI can actually do to make life better and more convenient. Unlike our first case our friendly nerd does not see AI as an all encompassing companion but rather a tool as she knows there is no ghost in the machine, there is nothing behind the prompt except statistical mathematics and random throws of the dice to determine the outcome which might look and sound human but is anything but that. She also knows there is no artificial intelligence in current days AI. Its only a mathematical guess what the next word should be with a random factor thrown in which makes it look more like a human response. There is no one at home and never will be with the current and forseeable tech. Clever as the AI people are they cannot beat math which is the ultimate mistress over the whole. So armed with this knowledge and experience our witty nerd goes about finding use of the AI and discovers much to her dismay that the use cases are few and limited in scope. Despite what the marketeers and the AI prostitudes say she is does not find AI to be specially crafty for her needs. For one, AI is unable to produce computer code of any significant quality and corrections with fundamental changes are needed in order for the code to be of professional use. In all, our nerd remains sceptical of the AI, both as a techncial concept and as an instrument for use in the IT business and that leads us to the third case, our chirpy market person who makes a living out of marketing AI use. Allthough a fervent advocate for AI and uses every opportunity to call for its adoptation she is unlikely to be an AI user herself. She is in this game for money and nothing else and as a true marketeer she doesnt so much belive in what she says but rather uses it for her financial interests. She will tell you during breakfast, lunch and dinner that AI is the future which will free humanity from its everyday shackles and make life both better and easier for the general population. However, when pressed on what exactly it is the AI is going to do she is prone to change lanes and start talking about the ultimate goal of AI taking over everything in human society. You see, our marketeer is somewhat of transhumanist and at the core she believes humanity can only be saved from itself through technology and she is not in any worry about the possible ethical clashes on the road to success. In fact, humans for her mean very little and she is void of empathy towards the common people and in fact they are in her mind a nusiance as the future predicts only the the chosen ones by technology will survive the approaching apocalypse and the new god of humanity, the AI will show the way. So at the same time she prophecises AI to make insane amount of money she deep down has almost a religious connection to the concept that an electronic god will save the chosen ones of humanity. She is unfortunatly not too well versed in current AI technology to understand its limitation nor that the will of the market to make AI work and take over is in reality is driven by investor speculation and an market oversold on a concept which might or might not work. Our market person is at the same time an evangelist for a pipe dream as well as being an acolyte of a movement within society whishing for a new god. And that is the crux of the matter. Much of the AI hype today is based on two things, market expectaions and almost religious beliefs of the need for AI to take over human societies. The market expectations are simple. People are greedy and AI has been sold as a particularly profitable concept which means investors and speculators flock to the AI companies and compete viciously for investing in them. The general sentiment is the return of investment is going to be enormous and soon. The optimism is enormous and at the time of writing the collective worth of the seven largest US tech companies has surpassed the GDP of EU and that that has many people worried but it remains to be seen if AI companies can deliver in time or if this becomes one of the more expensive bubbles every created in the financial market. The other thing the AI hype is based on is a peculiar mixture of spirtual belief, technological advancement and the will of the few but extremely powerful to enforce the idea of AI upon the world. I say spiritual belief because as we mentioned with our first case, Joanna and the third case, our marketing person, there seems to be genuine belief with many people of the world that AI is a spiritual savior in the modern world and it will lead to the betterment of people. This belief is a mix of science fiction and an embodiment of the desperation many people feel in their modern lives. Its nothing new, people have always been desperate but as AI is being pushed aggressivly in societies as the solution to every problem it has taken on a form of something which people can lean into and many do, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. As AI is still in its infancy we have very limited knowledge on the overall effects it will have on individuals and our societies but we already have early signs of warning where things are going horribly wrong. AI induced psychotic episodes, job losses, security deficiencies, the proliferation of AI slop on the web to the point it is almost unusable, degrading of support services and so on. The list is long and when looked on as a whole it seems AI technology is neither mature enough or ready in any shape or form to tackle the challenges put before it. We seem to be ahead of ourselves with the anticipation of the possibilities of AI and the main fault lies with the AI companies which furiously market their products. I wouldnt be surprised they know internally their technology isnt ready and possibly never will be ready due to its inherent mathematical limitations but they are all consumed by the greed of quick money and the pressures from the markets so they deliver ramshackle products which in many cases dont work as expected or simply fall for the pathological tendencies of AI to lie and falsify information which in turn renders it unusable for serious work. All in all, its too early to predict if anything usable comes from this overhyped, overpriced, over the top wave we are in at the time of writing. It remains to be seen if this is indeed all just hot air.