We 'have' to do AI. Because it's the 'future'.
There is a perspective AI enthusiasts espouse that AI is inevitable. Unstoppable, even.
This framing paints the companies and people that build AI as almost being under the control of the process itself. Unwilling victims of circumstance who never chose to engage the ignition, push down on the acceleration mechanism, or even gleefully scream about how fast the ship called AI is hurtling.
They sometimes speak as though they would slow down if they could, but they can't because it's the future. As though if they just go fast enough they'll be able to drive through the concrete barrier ahead of them and out the other side, Roko's Basilisk in the tailwind and ever gaining.
Whenever they try to force you to see this viewpoint, it is both shiboleth and excuse. A summoning ritual that somehow rationalises itself by its very performance. A machine that cannot be stopped because of the very nature of it being started in the first place.
This forced perspective is an unholy phrase, chanted by its cultists attempting to summon forth their dark being to create the future. Doomsday cultists breathlessly uttering about the coming Yog-Sothoth as though being the summoners will spare them and their faithful alone.
It is justification for inexcusable actions as they careen forward, dollars burning like dirty enriched fuel in a rocket held together only by tape and momentum as the screams of their unwilling passengers ring in their ears as everyone tears toward a canyon that they swear they can bridge with momentum alone.
"We have to develop these huge data centers that no one wants to live by, that sucks up ungodly quantities of water, that diverts electricity away from human beings only to be guzzled by the machine. Because it's happening whether we like it or not."
"It's going to "destroy huge swathes of jobs", but it has to be done! If we don't do it, someone else will! So we have to! We can't not do it or the wrong people will do it! By which I mean people who are not us! We're sorry, but it's happening! The box is open! We cannot put this cat back in the bag!"
In some ways they are right. There is no putting LLMs back in the proverbial bottle. We have invented the technology and things rarely gets uninvented unless something replaces it.
But with twice as many people hating AI (46%) as liking it (26%) (NBC poll via The Verge), the entire ordeal is like being dragged into a forest, dry as tinder, by someone holding a burning torch as they wonder why you struggle.
And every step they scream "You're being hysterical! We have to do this!"