Rural America doesn't need more LLM BS
I work in tech and recently changed jobs, so for a few months I was going on LinkedIn a lot. The vast majority of the posts in my feed were AI-related, and one topic that came up a surprising amount was the need to increase LLM usage among rural populations.
I've used LLMs for work everyday for the past few years, both in the sense of using them for coding and in the sense of constructing agentic systems that use LLMs to do stuff I won't get into here to maintain a thin veneer of anonymity. Thanks to the magic of satellite internet[1], despite working for a tech company, I also live in a rural area[2], so the needs of rural populations are something I know a fair bit more about than most of the people yammering on about it from SF or NYC.
What are the sorts of things that I and the folks near me need help with? If we're talking about acute problems, here are the things that I can think of from the last year:
- Back in January we had a severe ice storm that left a lot of driveways impassable (and unshovelable due to there being several inches of snowcrete) for weeks, making travel hazardous.
- Even after that, the weather this year has been extreme. A hard frost hit in late April and was followed in the spring/summer by a drought, so both cultivated crop and native plant yields are way down. As a result, both the human economy and the wild game population are suffering.
- Due to the immigration enforcement situation, the farms have had trouble hiring workers, making an already hard year even worse.
- The increase in both gas and electricity prices have had an outsized impact here, as most people need to drive significantly further to get to stores and schools and workplaces, and there isn't any public transportation.
If we're talking more about general day-to-day stuff, here's what takes up my time outside of work:
- Family time, cooking, cleaning, etc.
- Playing with pets.
- Outdoor work (tree clearing, gardening, landscaping, etc.)
- Various crafts ranging from knitting and weaving to metalwork and stonecarving.
- Writing.
- Photography (analog and digital).
- Tinkering on vehicles.
- Marksmanship training at the firing range.
These are all things that at best aren't helped by LLMs[3][4]. Some of them are things that are actively made worse[5].
I get that there may be people who have things in their lives that can be improved by LLMs. I'm not saying there aren't. However, I certainly haven't met any of them in my local community. The problems we face are more direct, more real-world, more personal. The digital problems that we face are more likely to be caused by LLMs than helped - political polarization, general misinformation, those sorts of things.
We don't need more LLMs. We need a world that remembers that people exist and that people's lives are the thing we should be investing in, not warehouses of silicon and lies.
[1] I dream of the day when I don't need to give Elon Musk money. Whether that's by building my own ISP like these guys or a cabin in Montana like this guy remains to be seen.
[2] I live in the middle of a forest that's grown up around a farm that was abandoned a century ago. My nearest neighbor is nearly a quarter-mile away, which isn't that far for the rural midwest but is quite sparse for the mid-Atlantic I-95 corridor where I am.
[3] I saw a presentation earlier this year from a VP at a company who talked about how useful it was that his product helped him not have to spend as much time helping his daughter with schoolwork or caring for his dog. I very much question many of his life choices if he thinks spending time with your human and animal family is a thing technology should be helping you avoid instead of something that it should be helping you do more of.
[4] Before anyone says that LLMs can help with writing and photography, no. Just stop talking and sit quietly for a minute. ... Okay, now you can resume reading. Re: photography, the results of LLMs generating images are sometimes okay (I'm not one of those people who thinks literally everything AI-created is the devil), but a) a big part of photography is capturing the world around you, which AI can't do, and b) another big part is the fun of acquiring the skills needed to take photographs. Creeping through the woods to be able to get a wildlife shot without spooking a flock of turkeys is an experience you can't get by asking Midjourney, "Flock of turkeys in the middle of the woods, photorealistic." Re: writing, using an LLM just bypasses all of the parts that are the reason I like writing, instead skipping right to the part that I don't care about. I write because I enjoy the mental work of coming up with ideas. I write because having to put my thoughts in a coherent enough structure to express them with the written word helps me improve my ideas and think more deeply about them. I write because it's useful to consider how a reader's mind is going to parse and interpret a phrase and whether it needs to be tweaked to evoke the right imagery or emotion. I don't write to have a specific piece of written content; although that is obviously an occasional result, it isn't the reason, just a happy side effect. It's similar to my running and hiking: I run because I enjoy it, it lets me see places that'd otherwise be inaccessible, it gives me time to think, and it lets me experience the wonders of nature up-close. The fact that I'm in better shape than I'd be if I didn't run is an added bonus, but not a major reason in why I run.
[5] I'm mainly thinking the impact that fossil fuel electricity generation has on overall climatic variability, given the rush to build on-site power generation stations for data centers, but the spike in prices for anything that contains a microchip is also an issue.