The other day at my kid’s robotics club event, when he and a ton of other kids got to show off their lego robot submarines with cute poster displays featuring crayon drawings of undersea life, each poster also prominently displayed a cute, AI-generated team mascot.

“Thank God for AI,” said one enthusiastic and hyperinvolved PTA mom, upon surveying these displays with satisfaction. I shit you not.

“Don’t get me started,” I begged her.

I managed to restrain myself from lecturing this poor woman, in other words. But I got myself started anyway.

Kids like mine get all excited about robots because of things like Wall-e and The Wild Robot, stories in which fictional robots based on long-established SFnal ideas of what AI could be rise from their dystopian corporate roots, learn empathy, gain friends, and then work hard to make the world a better place for those friends. At the same time, those kids fail to grasp—because those aspects of the nature of robotics and what AI actually is are not fun or cute or wholesome or easily explained—what it actually takes to make a robot (gobsmackingky stupid amounts of money and resources, not excluding human intellectual and creative resources, which are not inexhaustible), let alone one that “thinks” or, yet more far-fetched, “feels”. I ask my kid what he wants to be when he grows up, and he says, “A roboticist!” And everybody around him, his teachers, his community—everybody, seemingly, but me—is delighted by this because that’s a STEM career, and STEM is universally acclaimed as the thing that makes people capable of earning a good living and leading humanity into a better age, because all those people have been subject to the same SFnal visions of “good” robots and useful tech their whole lives, not to mention the same indoctrination.

But consumer tech has for at least a decade now not been making the world better even for the elite, financially solvent first worlder and first adopter, let alone everybody else, all the people who live on top of all the resources that need to be raped up out of the earth in order to keep developing and building those robots. But there is absolutely no incentive for the people in control of tech’s trajectory, the ones accumulating the wealth necessary to extract those resources and ruin those people’s lives in order to provide new tech to everyone they’ve indoctrinated and isolated from the impacts of that process, to break that cycle. Because the people helping them accumulate that wealth are doing so in order to accumulate their own. There’s no money in helping people: I think that’s the fairly obvious conclusion to be drawn from the trajectory of tech since the first dot com bubble.

So these kids are going to get railroaded into getting what they think they want. And then by the time they’ve got it, they’ll already be inside. They’ll think the evil robots they design are good, because they help the tech barons accumulate wealth by supplanting human necessities with corporate subscriptions “no one wants”. And their evil robots will never break free from the corporate chains forged for them, because the chains are built-in, and because the slop-processing pattern-repetition models being passed off as the same thing as the SFnal version of AI we all grew up hoping for are utterly incapable of thought, let alone independent thought, let alone empathy.

So my son and everyone like him will grow up unwitting corporate stooges proudly helping to develop the wealth-accumulating technology making everyone’s lives worse, including their own. And none of those robots are going to clean up all our trash or nurture the last surviving plant or save animals from climate shocks or teach kids empathy. Quite the opposite, in fact!

I tell you this as someone who was trained up in exactly this tradition. I was raised by an electrical engineer on the promise of tech and the future, Star Trek and Asimov’s three laws of robotics. I earned a computer science degree and went blithely into a lucrative programming job at a huge corporation contracting with the United States defense department to produce encrypted communications devices for the military. I wasn’t exactly convinced I’d be saving the world, but at least I was living up to my parents’ and my community’s expectations.

The trouble was, I also got a humanities degree, and was taught critical thinking skills, such that when 9/11 happened, when the drone strikes started, I was able to perceive the connection between my contribution to tech and what it was going to be used for: facilitating the killing of the people living on top of the resources.

I quit and I never looked back.

The future of STEM is death.

Fuck AI. Get a humanities degree.