My right hand gets colder faster than my left hand, for some reason. It happened yesterday, and it happened again today. I can think of reasons — other than there being something wrong with me — for this to be happening, but it’s still upsetting.

Now, to the title.

I’m not a proponent of AI, necessarily; I think AI art is weird — both morally and aesthetically — and I don’t think AI can be trusted to make huge decisions yet — think medical diagnosis, legal analysis, research. Moreover, I find the idea of a general artificial intelligence utterly terrifying. As a scientist (and I do consider myself a man of science), I can’t help but marvel at the possibilities, but as a person? It’s horrifying. Just because something is scary, doesn’t mean it’s bad; still, this kind of thing is extremely dangerous and unpredictable, so I think it’s best to be sceptical and increasingly cautious.

What I’d like to talk about, though, are AI search engines; or rather, AI as a search engine.

I use ChatGPT (and Perplexity) extensively when I’m looking for specific information or for something to bounce ideas off of. I think they’re great tools for that. It’s still important to be careful, to double check what it says (it’s often wrong or inaccurate), but these tools provide great jumping off points.

More and more, browsers are adding AI features. At first, I was sceptical, but more and more I welcome this kind of change, as long as it’s optional. A big problem I have (chronic) is that I hate bloat. I hate when my browser has or does things that I don’t want or need it to do. Here’s a screenshot of my Firefox as I write this:

Rather minimal, right?

This is what I’m talking about. I want my stuff to be what I want, and nothing more. Very GNU of me, I know.

Do I want an AI assistant? No.

Do I want an easy way to reach an AI? Yes, actually. I do want a button or a shortcut or something like that that I can use to just ask Perplexity or something. Is AI integration the best way to do this? I don’t know, I’m not a software engineer (not that software engineers know, either, but I digress).

I’m looking forward to seeing how technology changes.