A Greased Thumb

I’m having a lot of fun writing this newsletter every week. I can see (yeah I got stats) that you’re willing to read it. The synchronicity of those two realities makes me happy.

I’m going back to Mississippi for the weekend (I’m writing this on Thursday), so you’re getting this from the technical past. I hope you enjoy some thoughts/loafes from my week.

Oh: if you ever want to reply to this email and let me know what you’re thinking, I’d seriously love to hear that.

On to it.

I’m trying to locate my thinking in all of this talk about AI.

ChatGPT, Bard, Copilot, GPT-4. Multimodal models. Text to video generation. They’re all in the cultural zeitgeist.

Apparently these are just the pop-culture version of what AI is morphing into, and rather quickly. Generative AI seems to be the big leagues.

A lot of this is fun to observe and think about. Like this 3-minute video about how to make apple pie using AI to generate it (thanks, Austin Ashcraft).

It’s quite spectacular and you can let your mind wander down the 0s and 1s to imagine what this does to the careers of, I don’t know, producers and actors.

But, a lot of it is also settling in my head as bewildering. Even discouraging. Here are some examples:

• Twitter’s full of “99% of people don’t know how to use Chat GPT and it’ll replace your job” kind of threads. This 99th percentile is not the good kind.

• Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, and a bunch of other people working on AI, have called for a 6-month pause on its development.

• The CEO of Zip Recruiter has estimated that ^3/4 (75%!!) of resumes submitted are first sifted by an AI. That means all 3,000 people that applied to that job you’re looking at on LinkedIn in the first 3 hours of posting are all wondering if they can be the algorithm.

I can wrap my head around the sense that all of these things feel consequential. What I can’t wrap my head around is what it means for my life, and when.

Instead of being curious, I feel my tendencies going towards a belief that it’s just inevitable that everything from personal technology to work/career will be absolutely ordered by artificial intelligence.

I don’t think that’s true, but this is how it’s landing right now.

I think I have an anchor bias. I’m relying heavily on the first piece of information I’m given about this topic which tends to be something like: ‘Knowledge work will be replaced by AI.’ ‘Goodbye, high school English.’

I still lean towards being a techno-optimist. The possibility to innovate our way out of problems and challenges seems a good frame of mind for tackling them.

And, of course, there are scales to my optimism.

That’s my thought this week. Seriously, I appreciate you reading. I’m grateful.

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

Two things this week:

• Marty Cheese wants ICE T to use Impact Font (NSFW, depending on your W)

• I wrote a short piece mid-week about lawn mower technology. It’s amazing - the technology. You decide on the piece.

Music

Doing

I followed through. I fixed the car radio. Enjoy the sounds.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew