Outrage du Jour

June 24, 2026

I was at a music concert the other day. You know the scene: baking in the sun in an open field, huge speakers dangling from towers, big screens either side of the stage. And a band was jangling out two chord jangles with lyrics that were, well, a bit stupid. Something about the internet being a “pyramid scheme”. Yeah, it’s a tool that one can certainly implement a pyramid scheme on, but it’s hardly the best metaphor.

I could have let that go. Dumb song, who cares. But the singer…let’s name names: Alynda Segarra also yelled out “Death to A.I. now and forever”.¹ And the crowd roared its approval. I had to roll my eyes.

Now I have lots of friends who have also been talking, posting (and for all I know using an LLM to make anti-A.I. images) all sorts of condemnation and curses on A.I. and anyone who uses it. And I get it, there’s a lot of real issues with how it’s getting used, who is profiting from it, and how it’s getting implemented. Alynda might not pull much weight (though I bet she qualifies as an “influencer”). If she did I would call her myopic proclamation dangerous and ill-advised. Suffice to say it smacks virtue signaling, more a T-shirt slogan than a serious critique.

I’ve been working on an essay. An A.I. reckoning. I use it and have real concerns that I will lose … I was going to say “audience”. Lol. As if I have any audience to speak of. But I do have friends and comrades and I value their respect. So I’m putting a lot of work into it (using whatever tool helps to make it robust, articulate and accurate, wink wink). But this is not that essay. This is more of a rant on what I see as just the next outrage du jour.

And oh, for sure, there is much to be outraged about at this juncture. But what of similar past junctures. Where to begin? The printing press? It will spread heresy! The novel? It will degrade our morals! Television will rot our brains, comic books will corrupt our children, video games will promote violence … the internet and social media? Let’s all just call it a scheme and return to a time when we built real pyramids by hand to pass the time.

In the course of a conversation with a good friend (who took a very harsh stance on A.I.) he said something like “you know me, I’m no Luddite!”. And I thought why not just embrace the Luddite label. It might be inaccurate to cast the Luddites as against the technology per se. Smashing the looms was an act of protest. The factory owners used the technology to increase productivity. But the resulting increase in profits only accrued to the owners. Screw the workers and all their whining about being unemployed.²

And so it goes, over and over. New technology displaces and disrupts. That alone might be a cost worth absorbing. But time and again the people rolling it out care about one thing: their own gain. Side effects that could be addressed go unaddressed. Risks that could be anticipated get ignored. Little to no thought is given to those that lose their health or livelihood in the process. Because there’s no profit in slowing down, and first to market wins.

We make ever more powerful tools. They can be scary. In the wrong hands they can do existential damage. This is true of A.I. as it has been with nuclear power, GMOs, the internet and so on. But these technologies can and have done great things for humanity. We can have a reasonable debate on how much each has had positive effects, but I would submit that all have great potential.

Where A.I. sits along that continuum I’ll address in my A.I. reckoning essay. I’ll also point out that A.I. is not just the LLMs that choke your feeds with slop.

But let me close this little rant by pointing out that A.I. has indeed done some truly awe-inspiring things with vast potential for more.³ Perhaps with even a cursory look at these achievements, “Death to A.I. now and forever” might sound as asinine to you as it does to me.

I’m staying with “dumb” for the lyrics to Pyramid Scheme. But feel free to disagree: Hurray for the Riff Raff — Pyramid Scheme lyrics ↩
The Luddites weren’t anti-technology — they were fighting exploitation: NPR: ‘Luddite’ emerges as a political insult against AI skeptics and National Geographic: Before AI skeptics, Luddites raged against the machine…literally ↩
A.I. has made huge breakthroughs in multiple domains: AlphaFold solved a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology and earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (AlphaFold Protein Structure Database); AI is now catching notoriously difficult-to-spot heart conditions from a standard EKG (Michigan Medicine); it’s cutting rare disease diagnostic journeys that once took years or decades (BFHU); AI is controlling superheated plasma in nuclear fusion reactors (MIT Technology Review); and it’s predicting global weather anomalies days in advance in under a minute (Google DeepMind WeatherNext). ↩

Footnotes