NBC News reports on a Georgia Town Hall meeting with Congressman Rich McCormick (R-Ga) on February 20, 2025. Most of the commentary is about the raucousness of the crowd. Fair enough. But the Anti-Technopietist would like to direct his readers’ attention to McCormick’s words.
In one instance, an attendee referred to recent cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by asking, “Why is the supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this?”
McCormick responded that “a lot of the work they do is duplicitous with AI.”
What the hell is he talking about?
OK, we’re marking MAGA on the curve, so we’ll let Rep. McCormick get away with “duplicitous” which actually means “deceitful” since that makes no sense here. We’ll assume that he actually meant “duplicative” - tending to duplicate effort, i.e. wasting money.
This doesn’t actually make the quote any better however.
What McCormick seems to be saying here is that the work the CDC does
is already being done by an “artificial intelligence” and hence humans doing the same work is a waste of effort and money
the AI does it better than any high-priced medical researcher ever could
If an AI is doing all this, it must be be an almost brand-new technology. While AI technologies might possibly find some use in medical research led by researchers strictly defining the rules and methodologies of such research and competent in the use of AI, I have no knowledge that this has ever happened and highly doubt it has. You don’t get to be a medical researcher studying diseases without education.
Much of current AI is based on “large language models” - that is digesting information from human sources such as the Internet and gaining “intelligence” from it. In other words ingesting all the crap on the Internet and replacing trained human researchers with it. RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine rantings on the Internet, perhaps? We are talking about people’s lives here!
Okay, okay. Maybe I exaggerate. There probably are forms of AI other than the mess that is ChatGPT, that might possibly be of more use in medical research. But have we ever heard any reports of such things? I have not. When did these things come into existence? Wouldn’t it have been big news if they had? If these things exist, what testing has been done on such technologies? Who performed the tests? And even if they have been tested, have they been tested to the extent that they have made the humans who used to perform these tasks obsolete? When did the humans become the subordinates of the AI “workers” new on the job? Who promoted the AI over the human? Someone had to.
WHO SAID these “new boys on the block”, these johnny-come-latelies, are better at these tasks than the real people who have been doing them for years? "
And how does Rep. McCormick know about any of this, anyway? Is HE an expert in medical research?
Where the hell did he get it? Is it “rectal extrapolation”? Does he have any expertise in medical research … or, maybe, just maybe, has he been listening to some of Elon Musk’s boys telling him that their technologies really can do the work of human medical researchers cheaper, faster, and better?
This is techno-pietism in its purest form - the belief that technology is the new god down before whom all us inferior humans must now bow.
Opposition to this lunacy is the rock that the Anti-Technopietist chooses to die on if he must.
It’s interesting that MAGAs have an irrational fear that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans but it’s acceptable for Muskrat’s AI (even if true) to take their jobs.
I didn’t know you were here!