what are we even doing

posted on Aug 8, 2026

danny caballero

Artificial Intelligence can feel really scary. You might be worried about your job, or your kids’ learning, or the future of our society. Those feelings are valid and worth talking about. But the conversation has been dominated by the hype cycle of the tech industry, which is designed to make you feel like you need to use AI tools, else you are left behind.

Administrators, managers, and CEOs (i.e., folks with little understanding of the technology, but enormous power) are pushing AI as a solution to every problem under the sun, and our media amplifies that message. The result is disinformation, confusion, and fear as well as overpromised solutions and underwhelming results. In fact, employers that have been cutting jobs and stagnating wages for decades are attempting to replace human workers with AI tools, only to have to rehire those same workers when the tools fail to deliver.

I’m left asking the question: What are we even doing?

artificial intelligence is a suite of tools with a long history

We have had forms of artificial intelligence for decades. In fact, one of the principal users was postal systems. Recognizing patterns in human writing like addresses and names through image recognition made modern postal systems more efficient and accurate. The classic problem of digit recognition is a form of artificial intelligence that is so well established that we teach students to use this tool in introductory computational and data science courses. An excellent book on the history of artificial intelligence is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell.

Machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing are all forms of artificial intelligence that have been around for decades. In my own work, we have used machine learning to study students’ pathways through higher education, and we have used natural language processing to investigate how students answer laboratory questions in introductory physics labs.

For folks that work in these spaces, Generative AI is just another tool in the toolbox. But for the general public, it can be curious and even frightening technology. Entering a query into a chat interface and receiving a response that seems to be written by a human can feel like magic. But it’s not; it’s a statistical model of language that simply predicts that the next word in a sequence is likely to be based on the words that came before it. The model has no understanding of what it is saying, and it has no ability to reason about the world. It is simply a tool that can be used to generate text based on patterns in the enormous corpus of data that it was trained on.

but something is different now

The difference is that the barrier to using AI has been significantly lowered. You don’t need to be a specialist to use Generative AI tools; you simply need to be able to write a query or prompt and boom you have a response. These tools are now accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. And in fact, if you are a real nerd^TM, like me, you don’t even need an internet connection. Local models like LLaMA can be run on your own computer, and they are free to use. Models from huggingface are open source and can be downloaded and run locally on your own hardware. The barrier to entry is lower than ever before, and the tools are becoming more powerful than ever before.

And yet, the hype is there. This hype is fueled by an expression of capitalism that provides very little value to the public and an out of touch media that amplifies those messages. The result is a small number of companies attempting to make money off our data and attention and an even smaller group of billionaires invested in hyping the technology to acquire more wealth and power. All you need to do is look at any interview with Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or any other AI clown to see that these dudes (and they are almost always dudes) have no fucking clue what they are talking about. Remember the Metaverse?

They are not building technological solutions for us; they are building websites that aim to extract our data, attention, and energy to make themselves richer.

and yet, ai is here to stay

We are not putting this technology back in the box. And frankly, that is ok. In time, workers will learn to use these tools effectively and responsibly. We will learn how tools like Generative AI can be used in classrooms, in workplaces, and in our daily lives. If the history of technology has taught us anything, it is that we will adapt to new tools and learn to use them effectively. The question is not whether AI will be used, but how it will be used, and who will benefit from its use.

Here lies the danger. The rapidity and scale at which these corporate actors are attempting to deploy these tools are unprecedented. Generative AI is truly an arrival technology that will change the way we work, learn, and live. And the lack of any international, federal, or state guardrails leaves companies and tech oligarchs unconstrained to use us as the testing ground for their experiments. The result is a technology that is being deployed at scale with little consideration for the consequences, and without any consideration for the people who will be affected by it.

Look at the concerns about AI in education, the unprecedented pushback on the construction of data centers, and the use of these technologies to surveil us. These are our kids, our water and electricity, and our privacy. And yet, the power of these companies is allowed to grow unchecked, and the consequences of their actions are being borne by the public.

I think about Karl Marx here. Yes, that Marx. The guy that wrote about the exploitation of workers and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

I’m no commie (my politics range from libertarianism to socialism to anarcho-syndicalism), but Marx’s analysis includes a very clear warning about the dangers of this form of capitalism: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, and the exploitation of workers to generate that wealth. More importantly, Marx’s analysis includes “contradictions” that arise from this form of capitalism — tensions between the interests of the workers (think the general public) and the interests of the capitalists (think tech oligarchs and their enablers). When those interests come into conflict, that conflict is the source of social change.

what change is necessary

We need to have a conversation about the role of AI in our society, and it’s urgent to have that discussion now. That conversation must include people from all walks of life and every sector of our society. People need good information; they need to understand how this technology works, how it is used to exploit them and to support them, and how they can use it responsibly.

I’m an educator, so, of course, my solution is to teach people about AI. I think that’s an important place to start. We need to be critical and pragmatic, not alarmist or utopian. This coming year, I will be teaching a course on AI in society at Michigan State University. The course will cover the history of AI, how it works, how it is used, and how it is regulated. It will also cover the social, economic, and political implications of AI, and how we can use it responsibly.

I recognize that my solution is not the only one, nor am I the only person that could provide that kind of education. Thinking that I have the answers is a trap; one that I want to avoid. A college course is also limited to the privileged few that can afford to take it. We need to have a conversation that is accessible to everyone, and that conversation needs to be informed by good information and critical thinking.

My friend and colleague, Devin Silvia, and I have started a podcast called What Are We Even Doing? to have that conversation. We have no idea how to run or produce a podcast, and we are learning as we go. But we are deeply committed to having a conversation about AI that is accessible to everyone, and we are excited to share our thoughts and ideas with the world. We hope that you will join us on this journey, and that you will help us to have a conversation about AI that is informed, critical, and responsible.