The other day I tapped the voice control button icon on my car steering wheel.
“Baba O’Riley The Who”
“Would you like to know some trivia about this song or play it from your music service?”
“PLAY IT”
A.I. is no longer slowly getting into our lives, its rapidly being deployed into every device we can possible use. The limited functionality of google assistant used to understand that if I said a song title, I was just looking to hear that song. Gemini thinks I want to have a conversation about it. Joe Pera is the only person I’d be willing to talk to about this song, if I’m in the car driving around I want to hear it.
I’m sure I’m in an online echo chamber of some kind, as we all are. Every day I see another post about A.I. making a mistake, costing time and money. Friends in the arts communities have started sharing the sentiment “If the flyer is made by A.I. I’m not going.” The news reports about data centers consuming fresh water, driving up energy costs. The costs for video game hardware and computers is going up because speculators have bought all the RAM to put into those data centers. Regular people are speaking up about these centers. They don’t want them in rural areas, they don’t want them in cities.
A few years ago these bots were novel. I actually didn’t mind using them to summarize long documents, use for search, or even generate silly images I’d nomally take 20 minutes to create in photoshop.
Make me look like a Simpson.
Make me look like Pixar.
Make me look like a toy.
That last one was really on the nose because I was using it as a toy.
I’d like to still use it as a toy. But the tide is turning to optimizing for business. Any business coach or influencer will tell you all these:
Write your emails with A.I.
Write your social media posts with A.I.
Use A.I. to summarize your emails and texts.
Why should I take more time to read a message than it took the person who made it?
I work in real estate, where theres a secondary industry of speakers and teachers who travel and provide zoom calls to groups on how to improve their businesses. A significant chunk of that has given way to classes and seminars on how to use A.I. and how to optimize for various parts of our business. I’m exhausted by it. I’m not getting anything new. The worst part is the condescending tone all of them take.
“A.I. isn’t going anywhere, so learn it”
“A.I. is your team mate”
“A.I. or DIE!”
Well…
Which is a shame because I’d love some nuance. Having A.I. read scanned condo documents so I can find out if they allow dogs is a time saver. I’m going to keep doing that. Compiling lists and spreadsheets, removing duplicates, thats good robot work. Also, theres something really comfortable about being able to use natural language in using a computer, after decades of mathematical precision on any command.
The social cost on A.I. has gotten too high. Friends, artists, people I respect… they’re rejecting it outright. I can’t be seen using the tool less I be rejected too. Business leaders expect me to using multiple bots and tools on a daily basis, and if I’m not I’m not serious about success. Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer. After doing some masterminds and podcasts and even posting A.I. ‘slop’ videos and images myself, I’ve found that nothing tangibly changes my business about it. I also don’t want to ostracize the people who do find value. Maybe their workflow really benefits from it. Creatives are against it, and people who are less creative or not great writers really benefit from a bot to punch up their ideas.
So I’m exhausted. I have been online for 30 years and always excited about new technology. I’ve also been a fan of science fiction my entire life, watching Optimus Prime and Lt Commander Data redefine the idea of what a “robot” is. This should be right up my alley. Instead I feel more like I’m living through the world of more or less any other sci fi movie. The Matrix, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica. The robots are against us. They’re going to adopt all our mannerisms and language and eventually our appearance and then they’ll kill us all.
Thankfully that future is still a long way off because A.I. still wonders what to do when I ask it to play a song.
