Artificial intelligence: who owns the future? - ethical.net

Critical questions for design leaders working with artificial intelligence, New York 2025 | Leading Design

AI presents design leaders with a quandary, requiring us to tread a fine line between what is acceptable and useful, and what is problematic and harmful.

This document is not a manifesto or an agenda. It is a series of prompts written by design leaders for design leaders, conceived to help us navigate these tricky waters.

The Recurring Cycle of ‘Developer Replacement’ Hype

Here’s what the “AI will replace developers” crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it’s a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.

If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it’s really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable.

This is particularly true because AI excels at local optimization but fails at global design. It can optimize individual functions but can’t determine whether a service should exist in the first place, or how it should interact with the broader system. When implementation speed increases dramatically, architectural mistakes get baked in before you realize they’re mistakes.

Toolmen | A Working Library

Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.

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I Hate Wasting Time on Identifying AI Slop • Buttondown

It’s an annoying cognitive task: detecting weird photo artifacts, bizarre movement in videos, impossible animals and body horror, and reading through reams of anodyne text to determine if the person who prompted the synthetic media machine cared enough to dedicate time and energy to the task of communicating to their audience.

I hate that this is the bleak future which venture capitalists and AI boosters have gleefully laid out for us, that they consider this to be a “democratizing” technology in any real sense of the word. Far from strengthening democracy, these are technologies more apt at propping up scam capitalism and multi-level marketing schemes. I would like my time and mental space back.

‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers - Aftermath

Grim reading from the games industry, especially if you work at Shopify where the CEbrO has just mandated that you have to use this shite.