The Genie that won’t go back in the bottle!
Its a nightmare with my clients, they’ve stopped what little thinking they used to struggle with and outsourced that to AI. Consequently I spend most of my week unpicking their nice looking but dog shit pieces of work in front of their disappointed faces. They won’t put up wit that for long…
And that’s an example of a good tool used well.
Well, up to a point.
The tool will get ever-more capable, and before too long you won’t be needed any more, then your boss, then his boss.
And this is going to be true of most things humans can do.
‘Desk jobs’ will go first, and then as autonomous machines (~robots) become sufficiently capable, most manual labour will go too.
Everyone from whores to MPs will find themselves easily be replaced by a 'borg. Probably a qualitative improvement, too…
We can’t retreat into (e.g.) art - most of humanity doesn’t give a shit about it, and their limited needs will be fulfilled by machine-generated slop. Already are TBH.
What, then, will we do with all the humanity? 8 billion and rising, fast.
I grew-up in the “White heat of technology”. Technology was definitely going to make ALL our lives better. Flying cars and free money…
It didn’t. It made some lives better, for the rest: unemployment.
We’ve never dealt with unemployment - we just victim-blame and shame.
As Wayne says, the genie’s long-since out of the bottle, at least now we’re acknowledging it.
What happens when we’re all unemployed? When all the money and all the power is in the hands of a few hundred money-hoarding psychopaths with genuine evil-supervillain levels of megalomania and control?
We won’t find out, but our kids might, and their kids certainly will.
I’m currently rewatching the two 28 Years Later films and its frighteningly analagous - the tatty remnants of humans scratching out a fragile existence, whilst being relentlessly hunted down and assimilated by a viral disease…
We do seem to live in a world where the moneyed and powerful seem to have taken the last 60 years worth of dystopian movies as their personal playbook…
Be funny though if AI looked at all the money hoarder’s accounts and figured that ain’t right. And decided to redistribute it 
You can be sure that there will be few effective behaviour-limiting protocols in place to control AI - but that one will be there from day 1! 
Do the oligarch tech bros allow their AIs to read Marx etc.?
Sometimes tools really do make our lives easier (I once spent a couple of days bent double in the hot sun picking tulip bulbs by hand). But sometimes they take away what we found easy (but slow) and make us spend our time on harder things instead.
You have nothing to lose but your blockchains ?
“The human race’s final words will be a man desperately shouting his safe-word into the cold dead eyes of a sex bot.”
Frankie Boyle.
Read ‘Player Piano’
Kurt Vonnegut had a handle on this in 1952,
H was looking at a society where everything is mechanised and you have an elite of top managers and engineers and the rest of society are unemployed and receive a very basic universal income.
Being Vonnegut it is a dark satire that explores the price humanity pays for putting technological efficiency above human purpose.
Crazy to think I read this 50 years ago!
Kind of interesting watching kids sneer at AI, ohh that’s so AI, people getting hammered for posting AI responses etc etc.
I believe fundamentally what humans want is what is real. Real relationships, real emotive experience, real Art, real food, real creativeity.
Looking at the name 'Artificial intelligence" Who the fuck wants ‘artificial anything’ unless it’s a prosthetic leg or a pacemaker?
I don’t want artificial music, food, sex, generic intelligence or art.
Fuck you - Artificial.
Don’t tell Stu that.
I thought he was proud of his lawn?
Beer tho’.
Honestly it’s better than the rotten fermented fruit that the wild things very occasionally get pissed with.
In the case of most lager, would disagree.
My gut instinct here, having spent far more time than I ever wanted to evaluating AI stuff, is that AI is a very powerful tool in certain circumstances. For things like code generation, it can be particularly effective, in the hands of someone that already has a pretty good idea what they are doing. An aspect of that is they can be way more precise in what they want Claude to do, how they want it done, and what the potential pitfalls are to look out for. Another element is that most code-based projects also have fairly comprehensive unit and integration tests built up with them, which means you can do a deterministic check of the AI’s output way more efficiently than you can in a lot of other areas.
And in a lot of what you are describing there, what you’re doing is getting Claude to do what sounds like more of the admin tasks associated with the work you do. In the case of the slide deck, for example, you’ve already done a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting, I suspect, that it is then building on, and it’s also not remotely capable of actually giving that presentation for you, and all the nuance that goes into that.
Unfortunately, areas where it’s really caught on in more casual use, such as image/video/music generation, are both terrible wastes of resources, and also ripe for horrific degrees of abuse (see pornographic deep fakes as a prime example, but also fake news generation, etc)
I got this e-mail this morning. Surely it has to be AI-generated ? If this is the future then honestly we are doomed.
For the sake of clarity I should say I put my street name and full postcode in the subject line but I’ve blanked them out for internet reasons. I’ve also blanked the responder’s name and phone number to save his embarrassment, just in case he actually is human
The only other explanations I can come up with are
a) this is a Friday and also the last day of the month and this guy’s line management have made his final payment conditional on him responding to his outstanding e-mails before he’s dismissed or
b) he’s taking the piss.
I have a third explanation - they use software that’s not a dedicated email client to handle client communications (I’ve used similar things previously when doing support work) and the Email Subject field is either not visible or just not clearly presented such that they considered looking there.
But I’m going with idiot reasons over anything else.
I did ask about that in my reply to him. I suppose it’s just possible that their system could be that failure-prone.
The whole thing’s moot though as they collect every 14 days, so they emptied my brown bins a week ago, without previously emptying the missed waste of course.
