#automation

PCB assembly

x | x | x

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

If you want to automate your home a bit, but you don't want any "smart" tech, you can just buy remote controlled power sockets instead

They are a lot cheaper and easier to set up and use than some home automation smart tech nonsense

They don't need an app (but some models come with optional apps and there are apps that are compatible with most of these)

Many of them use the 433mhz frequency to communicate, which makes most models compatible with each other, even if they are from different manufacturers

The tech has been around for a long time and will be around for a long time to come

You don't have to put any fucking corporate listening devices like an amazon echo in your home

Something odd is happening in the tech world right now: the technology that was supposed to make human labour obsolete is, at this moment, more expensive than the humans it was meant to replace. Companies are laying off workers to fund the very AI tools that cost more than the workers they just let go. The circular logic of it would be darkly comic if tens of thousands of livelihoods weren't caught in the middle.

[...]

The stated rationale is consistent: operational efficiency, reallocation toward AI. But the MIT study found that AI automation is economically viable in only about 23 percent of roles. For the remaining 77 percent, humans remain cheaper. Goldman Sachs' chief economist has stated plainly that he does not view AI investment as strongly growth-positive. Sequoia Capital partner David Cahn has put a number on the resulting gap: AI companies need roughly $600 billion in annual revenue to justify current infrastructure spending. The gap, as of mid-2026, is widening, not closing. So the present moment looks like this: companies cutting human labour to fund artificial intelligence that currently costs more than the labour it replaces, in pursuit of productivity gains that most studies cannot yet verify, at a pace that is exhausting annual budgets in weeks.