Why do we keep using AI even though we know it's going to kill us?
Don't beat yourself up too much. Yes it's weird, self-harming behaviour but it makes sense within the logic of capitalism. And there are things we can do.

Confession: I may, possibly, sometimes, use AI. Not in my creative expression. A friend once suggested I use it to help me write this Substack and I physically flinched. But in my day job as a fundraising and strategy consultant, I might occasionally dabble.
It’s squirmy, because I’m painfully aware that this is technology that is going to kill us, and that every time I write ‘hi chat’ (if we’re spawning this other life form, we can at least be polite to it), I’m feeding the machine.
We know that this technology requires more energy and water than is compatible with human life on Earth. We know that its owners themselves think there’s a good chance it poses an ‘extinction-level’ threat to humanity, for example by launching catastrophic cyber attacks or deploying biological weapons. And we know that, even if it doesn’t actually kill us, it will take our jobs, leaving us destitute serfs.
These might be doom-laden worst case scenarios, but the risks are real, and we can’t get around the environmental problem. Even if the warfare risks are overstated, even if we can somehow get around the jobs problem, the environmental harm alone should be enough for us to go running screaming in the opposite direction.
Can we just pause for a moment on this fact: we are knowingly feeding technology that is killing us.
We live with this brain-popping reality every day, and many, many other realities like it (not least the reality in which we are constantly trying to unsee images of starving Palestinian children while trying to get our kids to eat courgette, while our governments feed the genocide machine — which, btw, is being enabled by AI and raking in profits for Big Tech bosses).
No living organism is designed to tolerate this level of disconnect, yet for us it has become such a mundane part of our lives that we often don’t even bother talking about it. I’m in constant warfare with myself, berating myself for using AI but not being able to get off the hamster wheel of work and parenting for long enough to figure out how to stop using it without instantly losing my livelihood.
We blame ourselves, but the fact is that our self-harming behaviour is not due to some faulty wiring in our brains. It is due to the wiring of our economic system. Capitalism’s basic design contains irreconcilable contradictions that are catastrophically destructive.
Time and space, dude
There are two, interrelated, basic contradictions hotwired into capitalism that are causing general havoc and mayhem and are making my brain fry and steam shoot out of my ears. One is about time and the other is about scale.
The first is a tension between the short term and the long term. Under capitalism, the most important thing and its entire driving force is short-term profit. Companies will do whatever it takes to get the money, now. Often, their actions in the short term will come back to bite them in the long term, but they are driven to do them anyway, because they are viciously competing with each other for immediate gains in the here and now. Theorists like David Harvey and Fredric Jameson have written a lot about how capitalism messes with our whole experience of time.
The same is true when it comes to scale. What benefits individual companies on the micro level can be damaging on the macro level of the economy as a whole. Eventually, this might also come back to bite the individual companies that are collectively driving the macro-level dynamics, but their bosses can’t think about that right now because they need to put the blinkers on and just focus on what gives them the edge over their competitors. The ecological economist Tim Jackson has written well about this contradiction in his book Prosperity without Growth.
The two dynamics work together, and they are what capitalist economic crisis is made of. For example, company X might try to replace workers with AI because it will make immediate savings. Rabidly competing, all the companies do the same thing, leading to mass unemployment later down the line. Now nobody has any money, no-one can afford to buy company X’s products, so company X goes bust. This is why capitalism is an inherently unstable, ‘boom or bust’ economic form.
This same dynamic applies to us as workers. I feel compelled to use AI because it helps me do more work in the same time period. Everyone else in the field is using it and I need to compete otherwise I’ll lose work and won’t be able to support myself and my family. I know that me using AI makes it more likely that AI will end up replacing more workers later down the line (and not that much later!), and it’s only a matter of time before it ends up replacing me. But still I’m on the treadmill and have to keep using it anyway.
Now, so far we’ve only stayed on the level of the economy — talking about economic crisis and our economic behaviour as workers or companies. We haven’t even gotten to the wider ramifications for things like human survival on our home planet, or being incinerated in mass warfare.
This same double drive of capitalism — its short-termist individualism — leads it to chew up everything that we hold dear: our resplendent planet and our ability to relate peacefully with each other. Again, this dynamic will end up coming for capitalism itself, but not before it causes a lot more harm and, if we leave capitalism to gobble itself up, it seems unlikely that the waste product it will poop out will be a lovely new system based on peace and love.
So what the F do we do?
Well I guess there are certain things that we can do on an individual level, like keep our use of AI to a minimum and try not to mistake it as a friend or therapist as we desperately try to fill the gaping void of loneliness that capitalism has also gouged in our souls.
But focusing solely on what we can do as individuals somewhat misses the point. We’ve established that it’s not some kind of faulty wiring in us as individuals that is causing our self-harming behaviour, but the wiring of our economic system. And we’ve established that capitalism’s individualism is what is partly responsible for the problems in the first place. So perhaps the place to start is not with individual behaviour but how to get together to take collective action to tackle not only the threat of AI but the entire capitalist system that has produced the threat of AI.
Of course, in order to take collective action, we also have to actually do things as individuals. And, full disclosure, this is where I struggle — as those who regularly read my work might know, as well as beating myself up about AI, I also have a habit of berating myself about not taking enough political action because I feel so trapped and drained by the hamster wheel of work, parenting and chronic illness.
But still there things I can do — like do a bit of paperwork to join a union, go on one protest, join one community meeting. Carve out a bit of time to find out where and when the protests and meetings are happening. Take it from there.
It doesn’t specifically have to be action about AI. As we’ve seen, all of the shit going down is interconnected, it’s all structurally linked through our economic system.
in her podcast Heart Reacts draws the links between protests against ICE raids against immigrants in LA and direct action against self-driving cars in San Francisco. makes the point that whether we’re resisting the AI bros of the universe, genocide in Palestine or disability benefit cuts in the UK, they’re all nodes in the system that needs overturning.There’s no point in us beating ourselves up. It’s not us. Let’s use our energy where it counts.
Yes to all of this. I was talking about a similar point to a friend yesterday. About how I wish I (personally) was doing better on my climate impact. Basically. And then we kinda came to the point that if we put our energy instead towards protesting against huge oil companies or water firms polluting rivers, actually that’d be better use of time (and guilt/sadness etc). Everything you say. Beating ourselves up actually keeps the status quo. Collective action is required. Thanks for this article
Yes! This is incredibly insightful; I'm a software engineer and when I tell my peers that I have finally gotten to a point that I use absolutely zero A.I. they look at me like I'm committing career suicide, but I think I have been failing to communicate to them that it isn't about moral purity or intellectual superiority, but rather the importance of acknowledging the impact.
Of course none of us are individually responsible for the environmental disasters that A.I. is going to cause, but that doesn't mean we should ignore them nor obsess over them to the extreme. Freedom is not a destination, and we only have so much energy to spend; it's just about doing what we can, not doing everything all at once.