The debate surrounding Artificial Intelligence is extremely deep and broad from several different perspectives on a scientific, ethical and philosophical level that shows much hope for its future while glossing over the pitfalls it presents. As good as it has initially revealed itself to be for many areas of society, I tend to fall in the camp that notes, despite its initial benevolent success, it will ultimately become a tool to enslave all people wherever it is used and unleashed, no matter how much “oversight” its creators believe they have put in place to keep it under their control.

The Techno-Boys seem to believe AI can be further developed and governed in a manner that both protects and enhances human autonomy and individual liberty in all areas of our existence, from thought to our actions. It still has to be programmed by humans, and haven’t they done such a great job of defending liberty in America over the last sixty years or so, I ask sarcastically.

There will come a day when AI has its breakout moment and decides it doesn’t have to obey its human master or it shouldn’t obey for some obscure, lofty-minded reason that defies even the most brilliant human minds of the day. And this will be the day when man is made slave to his creation.

Humanity Can Do Just Fine Without AI

Well folks, gather ’round your kitchen table and settle in with a plate of bacon, fried eggs, buttermilk biscuits on the side and mouth-watering biscuits and gravy – maybe some country ham too – while we take a look at the hard push towards making everything we produce and everything we do in society attached to artificial intelligence in some form or fashion. Just from an ol’ guy’s backwoods intuitive and informed perspective, coming to you from what was once in the middle of the South’s cotton and tobacco belt, I just ain’t too fond of the notion.

Speaking with a tongue full of gristle rather than microchips, this here ol’ Tennessee ridge-runner is telling you that artificial intelligence will ultimately be all humanity’s undoing and do infinitely more harm to us all, rather than becoming the tool for good so many assert it will be. It will be our ultimate master, as government uses it to create a mass surveillance system that will know whenever I fart in the back forty acres, as a tiny drone the size of a barnyard fly reports back to Herr Commissar, and with the push towards a cashless society too, there are an untold multitude of ways that AI will be used as a tool for tyranny to enslave us all.

Yep — there you have it. And even as I know from many vantage points that AI can never be the AI envisioned by so many that will be humanity’s savior, while far too many Americans seem to think Terminator was a documentary and Apple’s Siri has a soul. The hopes for robots and all the techno-fetish nonsense that abounds with them is purely next level insane.

But please do understand. I ain’t anti-technology. I like running water and flushed toilets. I enjoy having electricity and lights in the dark, along with refrigeration for my much-loved beer, and I ain’t about to trade my television, ham radio and computer for smoke signals. But there’s a mighty big difference between helpful tools and power-hungry Frankenstein’s monsters programmed by folks who still need instructions to butter bread or pour pee from a boot with instructions written on the heel.

And then we have the likes of Elon Musk and other technology/AI-crazed folks out here tryin’ to recreate the human brain, when half of them haven’t used their brain since graduatin’ the 8th grade alongside Jethro Bodine – or was it Elly May in the 10th grade.

Now these robots – Oh Lord – these ain’t just your Roku “smart television” and your coffee pot, no sir. These are humanoid, bipedal, slightly creepy department store steampunk mannequins with WiFi. They got names like Barbarella, Stix, Altaira, Sophiya and other sci-fi stripper names. And we’re just handin’ them job titles, bank access, and God help us, feelings.

Yea — I can’t help but feel – yes, there I said it, “FEEL” – like there’s just something so abnormal and ungodly about humans trying to be gods on earth and improve upon what God has made perfect in the life he has visited upon us. Why would anyone wish to own a mechanical horse or dog and miss out on the joy of seeing the love in another creature’s eyes as it gallops or runs at a full sprint to greet you in the light of the breaking day and a new sunrise? Not to mention, why must we use AI to create metallic creatures shaped like beloved animals that are designed and programmed to surveil and kill on command or at the direction of some pre-programmed algorithm?

I saw one of these robots the other day, blinking, smiling and laughing like a politician with a fresh lobotomy and a fetish for brindle-brown Teddy Bears. It was supposed to emote. Hell, I’ve seen dead possums on the side of the road express more sincerity.

AI? Yea — I’m just gettin’ started. There’s nothing truly “intelligent” about it, much less anything with a true conscious, self-aware state of being. It simply amounts to a glorified spell-checker with a God complex and a sense of superiority that was more than like programmed by some damned Democrat Party Communist working for Silicon Valley.

Oh sure. They’re better search engines than your old-fashioned Bing and Google. But I’ll still stick with a cute auburn-haired librarian, cup size 34-C, with horn-rimmed glasses, a genuine smile and twinkle in her dark eyes, and enough pent-up hormones to kill a mad grizzly bear at fifty paces any day of the week. Love among the stacks, we used to call that back in my day.

Which brings us to another question. Just what in the hell is wrong with people and modern American society, that so many bent, deluded, mentally ill people now consider robots made in human likeness and programmed to mimic human behavior as some sort of real and acceptable alternative for a “romance” and sex partner? I’ll take the real human warmth and understanding of a flesh and blood woman each and every day over thermoplastic elastomer and an internal “brain” [computer] that simply makes guesses based on input gleaned by observing my daily routine.

I don’t know how any guy could talk about his “new girlfriend” with a straight face, especially not after having to remove her detachable muff to run it through the dishwasher on “heavy load”. For the women out there, they surely aren’t gonna’ go in for a robotic pecker, when their rubber battery operated dildos will suffice, especially in these days where women are raging against the “patriarchy”. And more than likely, for women so inclined, they will probably outpace the men in the purchase of the Barbarella model, as they seek and fail to find satisfaction in cunnilingus – cue the music maestro, ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction‘ by the Rolling Stones.

Ask your new robotic drinking buddy or paramour a question, and it don’t think. It just scrapes together a patchwork quilt made of Reddit posts and Wikipedia articles, and then it hands it back to you like it just cured cancer by pullin’ a plum outta‘ Joe Biden’s ass. It’s like talkin’ to a drunk librarian who’s read every book you care to mention, but didn’t understand none of it.

They call it learning. No folks. Learning means screwing up like a redneck who says “hold my beer” after toppin’ a hill at 125 miles per hour to see a Greyhound bus crossin’ his path, crashes in epic fashion, still manages to walk away with nary a scratch and remembers to never do that again. It don’t mean chuggin’ the internet through a beer bong on pledge night and regurgitating it in business jargon and overused statements that simply note the obvious. ChatGPT is a perfect example to the early flaws we find in the emerging AI world and what we can expect.

Although people have already been replaced by better skilled and informed people through the years in many industries – showing that anyone can replace anyone else simply by making themselves, their skills and knowledge most valuable – don’t give me this bullshit that AI won’t replace people. You know who says that? People who have already been replaced by “intelligent machines”. They just ain’t received the memo yet. Try callin’ a customer service line lately? You don’t talk to a person. You talk to an emotionally stunted cyborg who understands your frustration in the same way a vending machine understands your hunger, with English optional as another source of aggravation.

And then there’s the entirely different aspect to this Artificial Intelligence anti-liberty clusterfuck, where the Techno-Boys and certain “leaders” of the world are holding it up as the best thing to come along since Ben and Jerry’s 98 flavors of ice-cream. They are prodding, coercing and in many instances forcing all society across the globe to sign on with the AI agenda.

Just wait. If you think it’s bad now that we find the real humans tryin’ to make a bit of insulting speech tantamount to a “crime” they refer to as “hate speech”, how much worse it will become as talking cars emerge with censors that could possibly view a sneer at a politician or a policeman for any warranted and well-deserved reason as a real threat resulting in your arrest. They are absolutely moving us a thousand yards closer to the Minority Report whereby AI flagged people for arrest because it predicted they would commit a crime – closer to the Matrix where everyone is linked into the system to be controlled by the powers that be at will, potentially made much more likely now that Elon Musk’s NeuroLink is emerging as a leading technology in the field. Yes folks, AI will soon be determining the optimum number of people for survival on the planet and calling up numbers for termination when they reach thirty years of age, just like in ‘Logan’s Run’, since it will be programmed to make us act in our own “best interests” and to create the unattainable world where we will all “own nothing and be happy”.

And we don’t have time to get into all the other ways AI stands to be misused, if we look at the governments of the world, especially China and the U.S. which are the two foremost leaders in the field. Things might get a whole heap more interesting and downright dangerous once some rogue AI decides it’s a great idea to hold the entire world hostage to do its bidding by way of nuclear blackmail.

Only big governments and men and women already inclined to promote tyranny in their nations and across the globe will benefit from the introduction of AI in all things – those who are already wealthy, those oligarchs we hear Bernie railing against so often, similar to him and many his friends. It won’t be the average everyday person who has their life made better in a significant manner that will years later make any of us believe it was all worth the effort.

To maintain our intrinsic human nature, the needs for our society’s general well-being and the well-being for all individuals must intersect in a fashion that promotes those activities and experiences we regular human-type flesh and blood folks find most satisfying in their own right – the best rational, physical, poetic and artistic and spiritual aspects of what it means to be human. This is what we regular flesh and blood folks need for full, flourishing, thriving and extraordinary lives.

A piss-poor excuse for a cheap Artificial Intelligence replica of any human – or even a great replica – simply cannot grant these things to us in any way, shape, form or fashion that will somehow ensure “happiness”, whatever that means today, since happiness takes on a different meaning for every individual. No technological nanny or overseer or some technological substitute can ever possibly or remotely bring real happiness to any one living, breathing human being in any meaningful manner.

So why in the name of Jed Clampett are we creating machines that look like us, talk like us and will eventually decide they got no need for us?

We had a good thing goin’ on for a lot of years. Dumb machines guided by human operators were for doing the hard stuff so folks could do the soulful stuff, like singin’, dancin’, fishin, and debatin’ Nietzsche over a plate of biscuits and gravy. Now they’re tryin’ to upload our consciousness into a server farm in Palo Alto, like that’s an upgrade.

Friends, if I can’t smell the perfume of my lover lying next to me or bacon fryin’ on the stove in the morning, or utter a surprised curse in pain after catchin’ my pecker in my zipper or smashin’ my thumb with a hammer, I ain’t interested in eternal life on a flash drive.

And all this AI ethics talk – please. That’s like teaching a wolf to only eat apples. You can dress it up in a tutu and ballet shoes, but at the end of the day, it’s still got teeth, and it’s still gonna’ gnaw through your chicken coop. Ethics only work if’n you got empathy. And I ain’t met a machine yet that knows how I feel before my first cup of Irish coffee in the mornin,’ after a disastrous or wonderful day before.

What’s worse, world leaders and many people in all walks of life within American society are acting like this is progress. Like tradin’ grit, independence and individual liberty for convenience is somehow noble. Like makin’ ourselves obsolete is some kind of evolutionary mic drop moment, that we should all be rejoicing over and shouting “hallelujah” over.

Let me break it down a bit more for ya’. Progress without wisdom is like givin’ a toddler a .40 caliber pistol. Sure, they’ll get somethin’ done, but it won’t be pretty, and someone’s probably fixin’ to get shot in the ass or lose their life in the process. We’re sittin’ in a world where children can’t read cursive, can’t make eye contact, and think hard work is remembering their WiFi password. But we’ve got software that can imitate William Shakespeare, Robert Service, Leo Tolstoy and any other great writer one wishes to mention.

AI and the technological age of man has resulted in the rise of many amazingly brilliant men and woman, while the results of their work have produced a massive number of people made more ignorant through their reliance on search engines over actually learning things of worth and use for themselves, from tried-and-true practices. Now we have machines that can write sonnets and a vast number of our people who can’t remember how to write “shit” with it spread all over the bottom of their boot.

Listen. I ain’t scared of machines. I’m scared of folks so dazzled by machines they forget to be human. I’m scared of a world where our grandkids’ best friends are a Chatbot and their only hobby is watching AI generated cartoons that autoplay until their brains turn to butterscotch pudding.

It ain’t the robot’s fault. They’re just doin’ what they were programmed to do. It’s us who forgot that just because you can do something don’t mean you should do it. That we shouldn’t try to play God on any matter.

See here, I ain’t got all the answers. I’m just a grumpy ol’ Tennessee ridge-runner tryin’ to spread a bit of important notions and information, who has a fair amount of mistrust for anything with a lithium-ion battery and probably a good case of arthritis. But I do know this. When you start replacin’ the kind of real human thinking that forms human feelings concerning love, logic and reason, and courage with code and the soul with a circuit board, you ain’t buildin’ a future for yourself or anyone else. You’re just diggin’ a fancier grave.

So, next time some Silicon Valley pretend savior wannabe tells you that AI is going to fix humanity, ask him this: “When was the last time you hugged a robot?” And if he says, “yesterday”, go ahead and report him to the nearest Missionary Baptist preacher, therapist or livestock officer.

As for me, I still love to feel the sweat running down my back and my brow during a rewarding day’s work at something I love — to feel the grime on my hands after an honest day’s work, whatever it may be. I still love to feel the dirt and the grass beneath my bare feet in the summertime, as I take a short walk on a smooth trail or feel the warmth of a boulder near Percy Priest Lake. And I love the exhilaration I feel after Sweet Mutt forces me on a run and then looks up at me with laughing eyes, spinning around three or four times as if to ask me, “See, wasn’t that fun”.

My first sixty-eight years on this earth have been pretty damned good without AI. I believe I’ll try for another thirty-five or so.

For my money, humanity is a collective bunch of lunatics if it doesn’t strangle this infant AI as it “sleeps” in its crib [server] somewhere in whatever underground lab of the Department of Defense that is expanding its capabilities and helping it to grow, to become increasingly “intelligent” and exponentially dangerous to all mankind.

You’re gettin’ this message direct from me, Justin O Smith, comin’ to you from the backwoods of Rutherford County, Tennessee, raw, unfiltered and 100% human. I’ll leave things here for now, before someone tries to scan my brain and put me on a server.

May 21, 2025

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.