Why are companies pushing AI so hard?

And why is nobody actually interested?

I have a question for you

Has there ever been an amazing, game-changing, life-altering, mind-blowing technology that companies have had to force people to use?

In the late 1400s, when the printing press was invented, people fell over themselves to print more books. There was a huge demand by people who wanted to read more books and learn more stuff. At one point in Turkey, it was decreed so dangerous that using a printing press was punishable by death. And yet it prevailed. Europe went from producing a few thousand books per year to printing hundreds of thousands.

The Industrial Revolution took over the world because people wanted it. Workers saw how much easier machines like the electric loom made their lives. Employers wanted it because it vastly increased their production rates, meaning more money. Railways let people travel in ways they never could before. People wanted it, so the wealthy people built it.

When the internet became affordable to everyone in the 1990s, everyone wanted it. Access to the sum of human knowledge from your own home? Amazing. We wanted websites about everything. We wanted to see silly stuff from the other side of the world. People were happy to pay for it and (again) companies were happy to let them.

So what?

At no point during any of this did any company have to force these things on everyone. I’m sure there was some pushback from labourers at each of these stages, when they thought they would lose their jobs, but the option to upskill was always there. And they did.

But across all of these eras, people have looked at the technological advances and not only accepted them, but embraced them. The value has been obvious for everyone involved.

So why is nobody choosing to adopt AI?

Google just updated their search to basically not return websites any more, instead just relaying information (which may or may not actually be correct) via Gemini. Other search engines are likely to follow. There’s hardly a day goes by that I don’t see stories of another random company swapping things over to AI in secret. And nobody likes it. People aren’t asking for this; they’re having AI forced on them.

If it’s really so amazing, why do they need to do that? If the value it adds to a product or service is so irrefutable, then why aren’t people begging for it?

It’s not just cost

By now I think everyone knows that giant data centres are terrible for the environment. They draw so much grid power and use so much water for cooling that it’s playing havoc with grids everywhere. That’s public knowledge these days, but I don’t think it’s why people don’t want it.

Here’s what I think are some of the main reasons people haven’t embraced AI.

The data integrity is shaky at best
AI hallucinates, this is also public knowledge. But in this post-truth world, is that important? Absolutely. We still need definitive sources on the internet, not interpreted version of those sources. A simple phrase change can completely alter what a study shows, what a website is saying or what a person actually means. We see it in translations all the time – context is important and AI bots don’t understand this.
The only solution, if it even shares the sources, is to go through and check each citation manually – which is the exact thing that your search would have done in the first place, but now with an extra step!
The decentralised internet is important
The main strength of the internet is that it’s open and free. Anyone can put up a site for anything they like and people can find it. Hell, I’ve got this little island here and nobody can tell me what to do with it (within reason). But if Google or Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic scoops it up, collates it all and then shares it through their proprietary systems, that makes it part of their machines. I don’t want that, and you shouldn’t either. Let’s be perfectly clear here – if they could charge you to search, they absolutely would. If they start taking search away and replacing it with a bot, that becomes a realistic option for them, and a terrible proposition for everyone else.
Humans still recognise that other humans are better than machines
Probably the most important thing I want to say here is that I think most people realise that having a machine relay information to you is unreliable. It just feels off. Even if the information is 100% accurate, having it come from a reliable source, with citations where necessary, is a way more attractive prospect. Art and music created by humans has actual soul. A machine can recreate a scene or put together music that sounds realistic, but it can’t tell you about the artist’s history. It hasn’t lived a life, it’s only looked at other people’s lives. It can’t struggle, it can only tell you about other people’s struggles. It can’t feel pain, it can only relay what other people have said about theirs. I want to put a fourth point in here to make it sound less like an AI script, but I’m running out. But you get my point.
AI is already making people more stupid
I’m sure other tech in the past has had effects on people’s health in some ways. I bet the tractor made farmers less healthy because they stopped walking. But at least the benefit was there – and they still have the option of walking when they’re not working. But study after study keeps showing that using AI rather than putting the work in and thinking for ourselves is making people dumber. Is that what we want? Do we really want to be the humans from Wall-E? I don’t.

What can we do about it?

I’ve been saying this for a long time now, and most of it never changes. Stop using AI “features” where they’re available. Turn it all off. Stop using Google for search. Move away from services that use your data to feed into data centres. Stop using anything that puts AI front and centre. Just because they offer it to you doesn’t mean you need to accept it. And most of them come with the option to disable it.

There has never been a more literal machine to rage against. The tides look like they’re starting to turn; investors are getting a little less bearish and companies are reducing their investments. This is great news for most of us, but the big AI companies (Microsoft et al) keep firing people in order to justify their AI investment, and they’re still not making any actual money from it. So the only thing that’s going to burst this bubble is the world continuing to show them that we don’t want this.

Let’s just hope the bubble bursting doesn’t take us all out with it.