Drug peddlers

Drug peddlers

Suspicion is always high when someone is trying to sell you something… repeatedly. Especially as it’s a well known public good.

That is how I currently feel about Large Language Models. LLM currently being called generative Artificial Intelligence. Or generative AI.

I didn’t realise my rugged libertarianism until it’s existence. It has given me something to rebel against in order to make myself happier.

I like an analog life

Alarm clocks, journaling, owning music, sewing, writing etc…

These all make me happier than video games, TV and live streaming.

But that is technology in general. I am specifically talking about generative AI.

Generative AI presents us with an extinction level threat. What happens when mass unemployment happens? AI threatens the jobs of everyone who works on a computer, which is a large swathe of us. If we can be replaced or at least have 50-70% of our team removed to do the same work what are you planning on doing with all those young men who are having their purpose in life extinguished? What if your purpose in life was to deliver training to people that is in an industry AI made redundant? Or if the training you would have delivered has been replaced by AI.

How are you feeding the people who are near retirement or retired who need to work a low mentally taxing job at the end of their careers in order to pay for retirement? We assume everyone needs a high pressure job. For some people, it’s good enough to make the tea and answer the phone.

When people don’t call because they’re being “helped” by an AI chat bot it removes the need for the job and the social interaction and income that would have provided. Tell the grandkids that Christmas is going to be tight this year because grandma doesn’t have any money.

Then people will say “oh but there will always be room for social interaction” Wrong. I am far more isolated than my parents, who are more isolated than my grandparents and great grandparents. Modern life has absolutely destroyed third spaces. As the saying goes “they came for the churches and the mosques. I said nothing as I was not Christian or Muslim. They came for the pubs, I said nothing as I don’t drink, they came for the town centres, I said nothing as I am not a shopaholic, they came for the youth centres and clubs, I said nothing because I was not a youth, then they came for me, my right to ask questions from my colleagues. Who will defend me?”

I don’t go to work to socialise, but I do. We spend time together bouncing ideas off each other, asking for help and to learn from one another.

A non cohesive team is a dysfunctional team and I have worked in some and they’re awful. If you feel you can’t talk to someone about your problems at work, feel ignored or frustrated, haven’t built trusting relationships then both your personal and professional life suffer. And it is through interaction do we learn cohesion. It’s by talking to John Smith at 8:45am you learn not to call him before his 3rd coffee or after a meeting with Jane Smith for at least 1 hour so he can go for a run and detox.

Learning how and when to communicate with people is a key skill.

I remember being an intern. I was given an “impossible task” I needed 100 signatures from an executive director back when you need to sign them by hand for an audit trail.

The reason it was impossible was others had tried and failed. So they gave it to me so I too could fail and there’s no downside because i wasn’t expected to succeed anyway.

But I did succeed. One morning I got it into my head to wake up early, take the first train into London and sit outside his office with the paperwork… what had taken others weeks and months had taken me 3 days. I learnt how to communicate with him, because I had no leverage, no name for myself. Nothing.

I succeeded via good old fashioned audacity, and the ability to read people.

Generative AI robs us of the opportunity to study people, because we’re not asking them to pass the stapler, or “how do I fix this?” We will be asking AI.

This will lead to less social interaction, fewer office romances which might mean less work for HR to do by way of office scandals, but may also mean less births like mine. My parents were initially colleagues. My parents marriage is a 36 year old scandal with wondrous consequences.

I am scared because I have spent so long creating an intentional life,  a beautiful life filled with candles, good books, personal interaction, whimsy, and excitement

I have just come back from an event on Britain and the maritime industry and how that affected the First World War. And I did it again, book recommendations. Amazon would tell me to read something different.

But real historians read from Warwick university where they have all the trade unions journals. Would AI hand me such a rich source? I could read those journals for a year straight and have a decent handle on the 1890’s to the 1950’s concerns in the labour unions. Which one day I’ll need.

I got book recommendations, and because I was eavesdropping (I prefer the word piggybacking) on someone’s conversation I was able to learn even more than the original talk I.e early in the war that Britain had to massively expand its rail network in order to facilitate the maritime one. So they needed coal for ships right? So they got that coal from Wales, and used the rails to transport it to Northern Scotland so they could have use shorter maritime routes for wherever it was going in the world because they used the North Atlantic shipping lanes. Wouldn’t have learnt that even just going to that talk on zoom. It quite literally had to come from someone else’s far superior knowledge than mine, interrogating the speaker on the subject.

My questions surrounded when did they decide to build that infrastructure considering they thought the war would last 4 months or be “done by Christmas”

Plus book recommendations.

Which I got. And I need to make books part of my monthly expenses.

It gave me so much motivation to be excited about learning again. Which AI can’t give me. It was a free event that enriched my life. AI gives me terror.

Life is a beautiful thing and those who want progress for progress sake at the expense of interaction, value creation, positive externalities that come from meeting people who are enthusiastic as you, using more of your brain by understanding context, facial cues, body language etc… to them I say, the wages of sin is death. Do it if you want to. But at your own peril.

Right now I feel very claustrophobic. It feels like it’s being forced down my throat rather than being gently encouraged. It’s been 3 team meetings, a section in the finance meeting, 4 months of training sessions. It’s being treated like a major event in the finance calendar and it assumes both consent and enthusiasm that I simply don’t have. And this isn’t the first time it’s been mentioned. This is just because the CFO is “allowing” people to use the paid version for 4 months. It makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t want to talk to a void. I want to be either energised or deflated by conversing with someone because that gives me information.

Why have I faced more peer pressure to use AI than to do both drugs and alcohol combined for the entire of my adolescence?

If life is a destination (the grave) then by all means, use the AI, it’s definitely the fastest way there. If life is about the journey, self discovery, and leaving the world better than you found it, maybe put the damn screen away and go and touch grass a little.

Life is the wild goose chases that people send you on.

The world is about to cleave into those who use AI and those who don’t

I’ll see you all in 40 years for the 40 years studies.

Grace and Courage

Annetta Mother Smith.