AI Is Just Digital Plastic

September 18, 2025

Like plastic it originates from the remains of something that was once magnificent; in this case it is the remains of the digital life that used to exist on the internet.

What these new tools advertised as intelligent do appears to be misunderstood. They masquerade as intelligent but in reality are just statistical. The way they work is by consuming an enormous body of data and based on a given input guess what the next thing will be.

There has always been this idea of labor one day being replaced by robots and a poor economy can look like proof that (undeportable) robots are taking our jobs. But our economy doing poorly is not because of these tools. This bad economy is caused by the same thing that causes any other bad economy—wealth is not moving around, it is moving up.

There is still an infinite amount of useful work to be done and essentially an infinite amount of money in the sense that all money needs to do is change hands. If your friend working two jobs instead had one and was being paid more they could hire someone to clean their living space, essentially creating a job, and in their spare time could do whatever they wanted and be happier. They could even start their own business and create even more jobs, and another consequence would be that the persons friends would have more money to spend on their business. But right now tax law is preventing that from happening like it did before Raegan kickstarted the pillaging of the middle and lower class of American society.

These tools will never be able to actually think. Only ever guess. They need the input of others and never actually know anything in the sense that they can lack any kind of center and will readily contradict themselves. They will never be able to think. And so long as a task require thinking, self-driving cars will never exist. The only way to create self driving cars is to remove the thinking from driving, or kiss the dream farewell. But if we remove the thinking we will probably be better off using an algorithm as it is deterministic which would be reliable unlike something statistical that is just guessing.

In this mad rush to build more and find new applications for statistics we are likely going to harm the natural environment. An incredible amount of resources are being devoted to creating hardware and infrastructure for these applications.

Putting things online is starting to feel a little like a sacrifice to the algorithms. Anything novel is at risk of being usurped by someones voracious guessing machine. And every company has their own. And they're all doing what they can to wall off their data to the detriment of regular users.

Many of the tasks accomplished by these statistical models have non-statistical (algorithmic), manual or hybrid solutions that are more beautiful and produce better quality results. Whether it’s creating a starting point for a project, searching for information, getting therapeutic advice or help.

What might concern many laypeople is that there is an effort to use these tools to turn knowledge workers into assembly line workers. Many corporations are pressuring knowledge workers to use these tools to churn work out more work faster. Such that these workers are having to endure reviewing an incredible amount of output. You have to keep in mind that the more these tools output, the more dazzling these tools appear, the more work they appear to be doing, and consequently the more the companies who own these tools can charge. And when these tools are sold they are often sold with the idea that "they will do X% of work for you!". Output is essentially equated to work according to these corporations, even when much of it is extraneous, unecessary or will need to be reverted.

While many knowledge workers are using these tools to improve their work the majority of products being produced right now do not appear to have the aim of enabling better work. Corporations appear to be betting a lot on these tools and moving in lock-step as they figure out how much risk to accept by moving faster and looser with fewer people. Having fewer knowlege workers who have the mundane and tedious task of keeping up with the output of these statistical machines seems to be the preference for these corporations. The money saved on fewer knowledge workers can be used on the consequences. Workers will struggle to keep up fully with what’s going on and have to trust these tools that fundamentally cannot be trusted, because they will only ever be guessing machines. There is a real risk that work will start to become fast, unenjoyable, and almost absurd. Plastic work.

A lot of the things we use these tools to do should arguably be simplified in the first place. If we need cheaper legal work we could also just make the law simpler as opposed to creating plastic lawyers. The risk now is that these processes will become even more complicated as these corporations try to leverage their positiona along with their black boxes to create moats. The same way Intuit made tax law more complicated as a way of creating a moat, it is conceivable that more things can be made more arbitrarily complicated in a way where we are basically forced to rely on these statistical models to accomplish that work.

Many of these tools seek to supplant real humans interactions and effectively become the man in the middle between you and actual people. The internet was a loose fabric of organic human consciousness but that doesn't help corporations. Right now, many laypeople are dazzled, curious, and even confused by what these tools are. Some of the tools are like plastic friends or plastic romantic partners, or they provide plastic services. They are interesting and they have certainly been useful but they pose a risk. If corporations are able to replace human beings as a bridge to information, as an aid, or as a trusted confidant they will only use that to more effectively pursue their interests to the detriment of our own. It may not be obvious right now but in time I believe many of these corporations will have to go to incredible lengths even just to turn a profit.