Are you telling me that Billy Bob Thornton is lying to me?

I started watching this new cable series, Landman, mainly because it has Billy Bob Thornton in it. I think he’s a good actor, even if he has fallen into the rut of playing bad, cynical characters…which is what he does in this show. It’s about rough, tough, oilmen doing the difficult, dangerous, and lucrative job of drilling for oil in Texas, and it really plays up the idea that manly men are all obnoxious and arrogant because they need to be in order to keep the oil flowing.

I was not particularly enjoying it. It’s a kind of self-serving genre, the whole assholes being assholes because it makes them great at getting shit done thing. I kept at it just because Billy Bob is so entertaining at doing that thing. But then I got to the third episode, where Billy Bob is entertainingly raging at a liberal lawyer woman (of course — no man in this show would be so wimpy) about the futility of wind turbines.

Do you have any idea how much diesel they had to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel and haul this sh¡t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fսck¡ng thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that, if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It’d take 30 years if we started tomorrow. And, unfortunately, for your grandkids, we have a 120-year, petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. And, hell, it’s in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels on every car ever made, including yours. It’s in tennis rackets and lipstick and refrigerators and antihistamines. Pretty much anything plastic. Your cell phone case, artificial heart valves. Any kind of clothing that’s not made with animal or plant fibers. Soap, fսck¡ng hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats. You name it. Every fսck¡ng thing. And you know what the kicker is? We’re gonna run out of it before we find its replacement. It’s the thing that’s gonna kill us all… as a species. No, the thing that’s gonna kill us all is running out before we find an alternative. And believe me, if Exxon thought them fսck¡ng things right there were the future, they’d be putting them all over the goddamn place.

Wait a minute…I’m at a green university that has been putting up turbines. We’ve got a pair of them pumping out 10 million kWh of electricity. We’ve got photovoltaic panels all over campus. We’ve got a biomass gasification facility. We’re officially carbon neutral right now — how could that be, if the installation of these features was so expensive that we’d never be able to offset their carbon footprint?

That stopped me cold. If Billy Bob delivered that rant to my face, I wouldn’t be able to answer it. I don’t have the details to counter any of his points, because I don’t have the background. I have been told that each of our wind turbines is an expensive capital investment, but that they pay for themselves in about a year of operation, which kind of undercuts Billy Bob’s claim. I also live in a region where people are putting them fucking things all over the goddamn place. Who am I going to believe, the scientists and engineers who are providing the energy to run my workplace, or a fictional character in a fictional television show that valorizes the oil industry?

So I stopped watching and went looking for verifiable information, because, you know, university administrators and bureaucrats do have a history of lying to us. Maybe Billy Bob is right. He sure does have a lot of passion on this point, and we all know that angry ranting is correlated with truth. Then I found this video.

It includes references! It turns out that data defeats ranting, no matter how well acted.

(Sorry, I just copy-pasted from the video description, and YouTube butchers URLs.)

[1] Life cycle analysis of the embodied carbon emissions from 14 wind turbines with rated powers between 50Kw and 3.4Mw (2016)
https://pure.sruc.ac.uk/ws/portalfile…

[2] Life cycle energy and carbon footprint of offshore wind energy. Comparison with onshore counterpart (2019)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…

[3] Life-cycle green-house gas emissions of onshore and offshore wind turbines (2019)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…

[4] Life Cycle Analysis of Wind Turbine (2012) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/…

[5] Orders of Magnitude – Energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_…)

[6] The Keystone XL Pipeline and America’s History of Indigenous Suppression
The Keystone XL Pipeline and America’s History of Indigenous Suppression – UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog

[7] ExxonMobil lobbyists filmed saying oil giant’s support for carbon tax a PR ploy
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2…

[8]Bonou, A., Laurent, A., & Olsen, S. I. (2016). Life cycle assessment of onshore and offshore wind energy-from theory to application. Applied Energy, 180, 327–337.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.apenergy…

[9] Weinzettel, J., Reenaas, M., Solli, C., & Hertwich, E. G. (2009). Life cycle assessment of a floating offshore wind turbine. Renewable Energy, 34(3), 742–747.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.renene.2…

[10] GCC – Potential Climate Change report
https://s3.documentcloud.org/document…

[11] Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air – How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/…

Basically, scientists have done life-cycle analysis of wind turbines, measure all the energy and CO2 produced to build one of those damned things, and weighed it against the total energy produced over their lifetime, and also compared CO2 produced by a wind turbine against the CO2 produced for an equivalent amount of energy produced by burning coal and oil, and guess what? Billy Bob lied to us all. Wind turbines pay for themselves in less than a year, and oil-burning plants produce 60 times more CO2 than an equivalent bank of wind turbines.

I’m not resuming the series. I was already put off by the gross sexism of the show, but learning that it’s propaganda for Big Oil killed it for me.

I also learned that this show is made by the same people who made another popular series called Yellowstone that I’ve never watched and never will. What I saw of it is that it’s about heroic ranchers in the mountain west, and I’ve known ranchers — they tend to be horrible ignorant people with an extreme sense of entitlement — and I know that the regions full of ranchers tend to be regressive, bigoted, unpleasant strongholds of far-right political movements. Think Idaho. So I’ll pass on that one, too.

I bet it’s easy to get funding for those kinds of shows, though.

AI anatomy is weird

Ars Technica has a list of the worst features of the internet. It’s depressing how much of the stuff mentioned is just growing and taking over everything. Sadly, Google gets mentioned three times, for their voice assistant, search, and the incorporation of AI.

I encountered a terrible example of AI assistance. Here’s some AI advice on hygiene.

Does the AI not understand the words “front” and “back”, or is it very confused about the location of the urethra and anus?


Or try this one.

The US is going to ban TikTok?

I’m sorry, I’m just now learning that congress has passed legislation to force the sale of TikTok. This is just weird…our uber-capitalist nation is trying to control an independent Chinese corporation?

Wait, not sorry. I don’t use TikTok, so in a personal sense, I don’t care. I’ve glanced at it, and it’s the worst social media app out there — it’s nothing but blipverts for idiots and posers. I never saw the appeal, although it does seem to be extremely popular.

Oh wait, sorry again, Facebook is definitely the most atrocious, evil, terrible social media app. I abandoned that so long ago that I’d forgotten how awful it was. Instagram is bad, too, but I do have an account there, and for the same reason I clung to Facebook as long as I did — I’ve got family who use it, so it’s nice to keep up with them. Although that useful function is being diluted by the fact that I’m seeing family photos interspersed with mobile game ads that I don’t want to play and vapid photos of young women just standing there, smiling at me. I’m a crotchety old man, I just want to yell at them to do something, say something, tell a joke, do you think being pretty is sufficient reason to interfere with my interactions with people I care about? It’s not good.

The solution to my grumpiness is simple, though: don’t subscribe to TikTok, unsubscribe from services that don’t appeal, let people who do like them use them. That feels almost…libertarian to me, but OK, not meddling seems like a good approach.

But then I learn that Trump has an alternative solution. He wants Elon Musk to buy TikTok.

Can you imagine, after seeing the hash he’s made of Twitter, how much worse Musk would make TikTok?

These guys all make the worst possible decisions.

TCL rhymes with hell

This is a screenshot from an AI-generated movie titled “Sun Day”. I’m not going to show you the short movie itself which is freely available on YouTube, because I like you too much. It’s terrible. The plot is absurd, the acting is wooden and silly, the events in the plot are ridiculous and unbelievable, and everything is cobbled together with awkward and unlikely transitions. It’s bad. This is AI if AI is a smug little child with access to daddy’s high-tech video editing deck, but no background in literature or film or even Saturday morning cartoons.

It’s from an overly-generous but still critical review of a whole set of AI-generated movies. There is a company, TCL, that makes televisions, but plans to break into the streaming services market by creating a whole channel of nothing but AI-generated movies. They were premiering a set of films that were supposed to generate positive buzz for the whole idea, so you might assume they’d pick the very best representatives of the medium.

They’re all awful.

You don’t need to see them to realize that, though, because here’s the company spiel on why their service is so cool.

Before airing the short, AI-generated films, Haohong Wang, the general manager of TCL Research America, gave a presentation in which he explained that TCL’s AI movie and TV strategy would be informed and funded by targeted advertising, and that its content will “create a flywheel effect funded by two forces, advertising and AI.” He then pulled up a slide that suggested AI-generated “free premium originals” would be a “new era” of filmmaking alongside the Silent Film era, the Golden Age of Hollywood, etc.

Catherine Zhang, TCL’s vice president of content services and partnerships, then explained to the audience that TCL’s streaming strategy is to “offer a lean-back binge-watching experience” in which content passively washes over the people watching it. “Data told us that our users don’t want to work that hard,” she said. “Half of them don’t even change the channel.”

“We believe that CTV [connected TV] is the new cable,” she said. “With premium original content, precise ad-targeting capability, and an AI-powered, innovative engaging viewing experience, TCL’s content service will continue its double-digit growth next year.”

Oh my god. The company is driven by advertising and AI; they’re thrilled with their ad-targeting capability; they think double-digit growth is a good thing. This is a nightmare fueled by the bloviations of MBAs, without a hint of art or creativity anywhere.

Die, TCL, die.

Overthrow the technocrats!

Way back in the 1990s, I was writing lab software in my spare time, and I was working with a company in California for a while. I was coding exclusively on a Mac, but they mainly did PC stuff, so they bought me a cheap PC just so I could see the software they were developing. I think it was a Dell or something like that, and I set it up at my house. First thing that horrified me was that the computer was covered with stickers. Why? What are you advertising?

Then I tried running the thing, and had to wade through all the crudware that came pre-installed on the computer. Ads popped up. There were all these off-brand applications installed, and they didn’t want me to remove them — just cleaning up all the garbage took me several days before it was functional to run the tech software I had obtained the machine for.

That was 30 years ago. I guess the situation has gotten even worse, if you’re buying the inexpensive mass-market computers. Ed Zitron got one just to see what the average users experience was like. Now we’ve got the internet layered on top of everything.

The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad.

As their clunky, shuddering laptop hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com, and the laptop slows to a crawl. Everything slows to a crawl. “God damnit, why is everything so fucking slow? I’ll just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesn’t crash half the time or trick me.”

Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta — and now that every single website is so desperate for our email and to show us as many ads as possible, it’s either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online.

This is our world now — the wealthy have control, and they’ve engineered everything to grow and make more money for themselves, and they’ve wrecked everything they’ve touched. I remember the early 2000s when Google was just a barebones text box that you typed things into and it bounced back with a list. It was clean and easy. But not any more!

The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn’t any one algorithm, but the convenience of a “clean” digital experience — or, at least as clean as they feel it needs to be. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they’re engineered to manipulate you, even if the experience gets worse seemingly every year, because at least it isn’t as bad as the rest of the internet. We use Gmail because, well, at least it’s not Outlook. We use YouTube to view videos from other websites because other websites are far more prone to crash, have quality issues, or simply don’t work on mobile. We use Google Search, despite the fact that it barely works anymore, to find things because actually browsing the web fucking sucks.

The algorithm was never for you, the user. It didn’t make your interactions with the internet easier or better, it made it easier for companies, both legitimate and criminal, to sell you stuff. That has become the primary purpose of computers and the internet. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to even imagine using a computer for anything beyond convenient shopping…although it is becoming increasingly inconvenient as all the garbage piles up. One of the best examples of a growing obstacle to using the internet is all the “AI” trash being inserted.

The onslaught of AI-generated content — facilitated, in no small part, by Google and Microsoft — has polluted our information ecosystems. AI-generated images and machine-generated text is everywhere, and it’s impossible to avoid, as there is no reliable way to determine the provenance of a piece of content — with one exception, namely the considered scrutiny of a human. This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand. This stuff — websites that state falsehoods because an AI hallucinated, or fake pictures of mushrooms and dogs that now dominate Google Images — is not going away. Like microplastics or PFAS chemicals, they’re with us forever, constantly chipping away at our understanding of reality.

These companies unleashed generative AI on the world — or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency — without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem. Their concerns were purely short-term. Fiscal. The result? Over-leverage in an industry that has no real path to profitability, burning billions of dollars and the environment – both digital and otherwise – along with it.

Do you need AI? Do we really want some weird capitalist-created interface in front of everything that babbles and confabulates and tells us even more lies? Again, this isn’t something added for our benefit — we have to ask who profits from these layers of new crap tossed unto our computers. I don’t think it’s the users. We really don’t need ChatGPT for anything, and it literally makes everything worse.

Ed Zitron names names.

  • Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft.
  • Tim Cook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, slowly allowing the rot to seep into Apple’s products, slowly adding bothersome subscription products and useless AI features to chip away at the user experience. Apple’s app store and its repeated support of exploitative microtransaction-laden mobile games built to create gambling-like addiction in adults and children alike, making it billions of dollars a year. Because Apple’s products are less shitty, it gets a much easier time.
  • Sundar Pichai is the Henry Kissinger of technology — a glossy executive that escapes blame despite having caused harm on a global scale. The destruction of Google Search at the hands of Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan should be written about like a war crime, and those responsible treated as such.
  • Satya Nadella has aggressively expanded Microsoft’s various monopolies, the most egregious of which is the Microsoft 365 suite — a monopoly over business software that everybody kind of hates that Microsoft prices to undercut the competition, effectively setting the conditions of most business software as either “cheaper than Microsoft” or “slightly better than Microsoft.” Nadella has overseen layoffs of tens of thousands of people in the last three years alone, and despite his bullshit “growth mindset” culture treats his employees and customers as equally disposable.
  • Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul that has overseen the growth and proliferation of some of the single-most abusive and manipulative software in the world. Meta has grown to a market cap of $1.5 trillion dollars by intentionally making the experience on Instagram and Facebook worse, intentionally frustrating and harming billions of people.

I’m willing to call these people crooks and corrupters, profiteers and parasites. They are getting rich off of our growing inconveniences. We really need to fight back somehow, and tell these people we don’t want ChatGPT or whatever pointless energy-sucking leech they want to attach to us. Unfortunately they’ve got all the money and power and have monopolized everything.

On Meta, nobody knows you don’t have a personality

It’s hard to believe they can actually do this, but Meta plans to make the Internet objectively worse.

Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform, as part of its broader rollout of AI products, the Financial Times reports. The AI characters will be created by users through Meta’s AI studio, with the idea being that you can interact with them almost like you would with a real human on the website.

“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Meta vice-president of product for generative AI Connor Hayes told the FT.

“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform… that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.

Meta has already started dumping this crap online, allowing their bots to spawn on Facebook and Instagram. Isn’t Facebook already bad enough? Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been good enough yet to explain why we need to give every yahoo who uses their services the ability to create more fake personas.

The AI characters aren’t a new feature. Meta has long invested in AI and has spent the past year stuffing all kinds of generative AI tech into its existing products. That included the release of its AI Studio in the summer, which quickly became a hotbed of virtual boyfriends and girlfriends.

Oh. You need a fake boyfriend or girlfriend? Zuckerberg prefers mindless bots to real human beings, I guess.

I like this Neil deGrasse Tyson fellow

Neil deGrasse Tyson went on Bill Maher’s terrible show (that’s not good, I wish everyone would just starve that guy of air) and dismissed him quickly when he brought up Elon Musk’s plan to go to Mars. It makes no sense.

I have strong views on that. My read of the history of space exploration is such that we do big, expensive things only when it’s geopolitically expedient, such as we feel threatened by an enemy. And so for him to just say, let’s go to Mars because it’s the next thing to do. What is that venture capitalist meeting look like? ‘So, ELon, what do you want to do?’ ‘I want to go to Mars?’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘$1 trillion.’ ‘Is it safe?’ ‘No. People will probably die.’ ‘What’s the return on the investment?’ ‘Nothing.’ That’s a five minute meeting. And it doesn’t happen.

Tyson has offended Elon Musk! We need more of that. Musk fired back on Shitter.

Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. Also, I’m not going to ask any venture capitalists for money. I realize that it makes no sense as an investment. That’s why I’m gathering resources.

By “gathering resources,” of course, he means “plundering our investment in space research”. Sure, he doesn’t need venture capital money now, because he’s got his hooks into the federal government.

I am most aghast at that claim that Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. The arrogance of the man! He sees himself as vital to humanity when he’s actually a selfish, weird parasite with an ego that leads him to think all he has to do is build a bigger rocket and people will love him as a savior.

That was enough to entice another very stupid man, Piers Morgan, to bring Tyson on to his show. If there’s anything Morgan likes, it’s being able to pit high profile people against one another in a spectacle. His second favorite thing is to ladle out smarm for rich people, so he says I’ve got massive respect for you [Tyson], I also have a lot of respect for Musk. I also like the fact that he dares to dream very big. Morgan sucks up painfully, talking about vacationing in the south of France with Musk and how he wants to protect humanity from total ecological collapse and the heat death of the sun. So Tyson launches an even longer discourse on how the whole Mars dream is impractical and wrong.

Tyson is laughing throughout, which baffles Morgan, who thinks he’s chuckling about the eventual destruction of humanity. No. He’s laughing at how ridiculous and how ignorant Morgan and Musk are. They don’t discuss Musk’s follow-up accusation.

The real problem is that Neil decided to grovel to the woke far left when he got hit with a #MeToo. You can avoid being canceled if you beg for forgiveness and push their nonsense ideology. The truth hurts.

It’s an all-purpose excuse: any criticism is met with an accusation of wokeness. He is not a clever or rational man. Also, you should realize that being in favor of equal rights for women is not antithetical to being in favor of science and exploration.

They had this discussion and focused only on the possibility of getting a spaceship to Mars, which we know is possible — it’s been done. Getting a crewed spaceship there is much, much harder, but like Tyson says, is entirely within the realm of possibility if you throw enough money at it. What they don’t discuss is the whole absurd idea of colonizing Mars, which I think is not possible in this era, and if it were, the effort would be better dedicated to supporting our existence on this precious jewel of a planet, Earth.

Maybe Morgan should read A City on Mars and learn something. That’s not as profitable as sucking up to billionaires, though.

The numbers are almost magical

I aspire to be a good vegetarian — we simply don’t eat any meat at home, although we do consume some stuff like Impossible Burgers now and then, a plant-based meat alternative. I can believe that plant-based foodstuff have significantly lower environmental impact, but then I read this claim by the Good Food Institute, and my skeptical ganglion started sending alarms.

Plant-based meat has, on average, 89 percent less environmental impact than traditional meat across all impact categories. Furthermore, plant-based meat’s environmental impact is 91 percent lower than beef, 88 percent lower than pork, and 71 percent lower than chicken.

Overall, plant-based meat uses 79 percent less land, 95 percent less water, and produces 93 percent water pollution [I assume that’s an error…93% less maybe?]. Efficient, low-impact meat alternatives also produce 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 89 percent less air pollution.

That’s lovely. Amazing. Let’s quit killing cows, pigs, and chickens and start murdering soybeans. I can believe it’s better for the environment…but that much better? I tried tracking down how they calculated those numbers, and couldn’t find a detailed methodology, or even a peer-reviewed paper — it’s mostly corporate in-house stuff.

Unfortunately, I also found this on Wikipedia.

In 2018, GFI participated in the startup accelerator Y Combinator, receiving funding and strategic support. Y Combinator lists “cellular agriculture and clean meat” as one of its funding priorities, stating that “the world will massively benefit from a more sustainable, cheaper and more healthy production of meat”.

GFI has ties with the effective altruism movement, having received endorsements and financial support from several effective altruism-affiliated organizations. For instance, Open Philanthropy awarded GFI with several major grants in support of its general operations and international expansion, totalling $6.5 million as of August 2021.

Sam Harris’ Waking Up Foundation recommends GFI as one of its top charities.

Yikes. Suddenly, they have even less credibility.

I’m still going to consume plant-based meat, but now I have no idea how beneficial the stuff is, and I don’t trust the techbros touting it.

I do have one nagging question, though: if it uses so few resources, relatively speaking, how come processed soy protein and GMO yeast are so much more expensive than slaughtered cow? So it’s a new technology and is still working up economies of scale, but does silicon valley love it so much because somebody is profiting heavily from it?

I do love a good spleen

David Gerard’s spleen is quite nice.

Why these fucking bozos piss me the fuck off
1 was drafting stuff for this book and it kept turning into short historics where I kept adding “[TK add detail]” and it felt like giving myself homework. That makes for text that bores the reader ‘cos it bores the author.
So no. I’m writing from the spleen here. It’s the only way this can work and have power.
What I hate about AT hype is that it’s by the same shitty bozos who fuck up everything else. They have no approach to the world other than fucking stuff up with money and power via technology.
As a technologist myself (a Unix/Linux system administrator for a few decades), I’m even more pissed off because the technologies are actually interesting, They do things! You could do good things with them! Even the generative stuff, you could play with it and make interesting things!
But no — these bozos being who they are, all they can think of is how to turn it to abuses. Machine learning is for systemic bias. Generative Al is for reducing artists’ labour conditions.
And the power consumption, my God! These bozos were bad enough when they were pushing crypto, and in Al they’ve even managed to replace the ghastly power waste!
Al is not about technology — it’s about power over you.

That all rings true. The technology is interesting and potentially useful, the problem is the techbro cult that is monetizing it all.


Here’s an interesting point. AI used to be marketed as “Expert Systems” back in the 1980s which faded away in the 90s, according to Wikipedia.

In the 1990s and beyond, the term expert system and the idea of a standalone AI system mostly dropped from the IT lexicon. There are two interpretations of this. One is that “expert systems failed”: the IT world moved on because expert systems did not deliver on their over hyped promise.[38][39] The other is the mirror opposite, that expert systems were simply victims of their success: as IT professionals grasped concepts such as rule engines, such tools migrated from being standalone tools for developing special purpose expert systems, to being one of many standard tools.[40] Other researchers suggest that Expert Systems caused inter-company power struggles when the IT organization lost its exclusivity in software modifications to users or Knowledge Engineers.

There are reasons it became less popular as a marketing term.

  1. Expert systems have superficial knowledge, and a simple task can potentially become computationally expensive.
  2. Expert systems require knowledge engineers to input the data, data acquisition is very hard.
  3. The expert system may choose the most inappropriate method for solving a particular problem.
  4. Problems of ethics in the use of any form of AI are very relevant at present.
  5. It is a closed world with specific knowledge, in which there is no deep perception of concepts and their interrelationships until an expert provides them.

Sound familiar?