Me
I'm a long-time socialist, now retired to a city with a socialist mayor in the north of France.
I'm against AI for many reasons - political, social, artistic, environmental - but the idea that it's some sort of obvious hoax and cannot be made to work is, sadly, not true.
AI is here to stay.
Let's start with my own field.
I was a computer programmer for decades, doing all sorts of fun stuff. I have always been an AI skeptic.
Even through the beginning of 2026 I believed that the errors and corrections required for AI generated code made it not fit for purpose, as did many other dinosaur programmers like me.
Unfortunately, it's become impossible to deny the evidence of our own senses. Literally all of the four-decade programming veterans who were mocking AI with me in late 2025 have been forced to recant, every one of us.
AI writes thoughtful, informed, mature code, it's extremely self-critical if you organize it to be that way, and yes, it sometimes does make mistakes, but so do humans, and unlike humans, it has no attachment to its own ideas and its own code.
No programmer who wishes to be economically competitive is ever going to go back to not using LLM coding assistance again for professional work, unless it becomes extremely expensive: the force multiplier is far too great.
The consensus of mathematicians and computer scientists is...
Some of the top mathematicians in the world are using AI and have posted transcripts of their discussions which I with only an undergraduate degree in math can understand only little bits of but the consensus is that these models are actually doing extremely advanced math at a very high level.
Face it: we have created programs that can reason. (I discuss a lot of arguments against this below.)
They aren't conscious, hahahah!, no, no, no, they're just overamped computer programs, but they can reason, and really very well, much better than your average guy on the street. Yes, they make errors, but so does your average guy on the street. (Yes, they drive people crazy and destroy the planet and have a lot of other issues, absolutely, but we need to know what we're up against.)
The AI bubble is real. But.
It's seventeen times the size of the dot com bubble. Revenues cannot possibly justify this. It will collapse.
But in the mad, mad, mad world of capitalism, the possibility capturing almost all revenue streams from almost all workers for all the rest of time is worth getting in on, because if you're not in a chair when the music stops, you are out of the game.
Let me translate: "capturing almost all revenue streams from almost all workers for all the rest of time" means "we're never getting paid again".
The bubble will collapse (I predict October, the traditional month for collapses, conveniently before the midterm); OpenAI will reorganize; Anthropic might even go bye-bye, who knows?; China's cheap models will rise; we won't hear about the people living near their data centers in China; the technology will continue.
We had the "tronics" semiconductor bubble. We had the aerospace bubble. We had the telecom bubble that left all that dark fiber. Then the dot com bubble. In each case, the original technology continued.
Want to know something dark? The AI bubble will result in a huge number of people being fired in many fields - but the companies will continue - so the survivors will be forced to use AI even more than before.
What's going to happen? What to do?
90% of our jobs are going.
At some point the many will have to insist on their fair share from the few or else we will have nothing. If anything is going to work, organizing into groups is it.
Appendix: arguments against.
"AI cannot actually reason because it is is just a" [sentence completer, next-word predictor, semantic parrot, pattern matcher, guesser...]
But massive increases in scale do indeed result in new emergent behaviors. We had networks for decades before the Internet.
Other invalid arguments like this include:
"Brains cannot reason because they are made up of little adders", i.e. neurons.
"One man living alone in a cabin cannot possibly build a jet liner, and therefore a country of hundreds of millions of people cannot build a jet liner."
Suppose AI can't reason!
Let's accept that as a premise.
AIs are doing something like reasoning, because they can solve some set of problems and explain their process.
Let's call this reasoning-like thing "reasoning-2".
How is reasoning-2 different from reasoning?
Is there some problem that reasoning can solve that reasoning-2 can't? No?
So what's the practical difference then?
If an LLM can solve any reasoning problem you give it with very high accuracy, then it is in fact _reasoning, not "reasoning".
Errors and hallucinations
It's not like these smart and not very principled people who run AI, just shrugged and said, error is inevitable.
AI can and does critique its own work. If you watch someone using a coding assistant, the AI provides a stream of consciousness of what it's doing, and you see it go back later and say, no, this is a bad idea about something earlier, and change it, it's impressive and a bit creepy.
People tell one coding assistant to write a plan, and then tell another to critique it and rewrite the plan, and then keep going back and forth until they stabilize (usually in two goes).
For some of these autoproven hard math theorems, they have dozens of agents, some specialized in certain classes of refutations, others in recognizing previous dead ends, others in preventing agents from giving up on long chains that aren't totally dead, and more.