“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
– The Sun Also Rises (1926)
I think what’s currently lazily described as ‘AI’ is the inevitable converging of decades of advancements in quantum computing, computer vision, generative art, web scrapping, natural language search and the semantic web. When you mix in the ‘raw material’ of user generated content (wikis, open source software, blog posts, self published books, book scanning and open access publications), you get crappy chatbots, ChatGPT generated cover letters and nudification apps. Fair enough, we get the future we deserve some might say.
But as I wrote about in Smarter Homes every technological trend is built in response to the accumulation of particular social problems, not only a tech stack. You need a use case, a user experience to set technology in motion in people’s lives.
So I think the current wave of AI is thriving in response to:
- high employee churn due to a complete absence of management training for Gen X folks (the lack of institutional knowledge that results makes people turn to AI to regurgitate content someone wrote 3 years ago)
- digital jobs being turned into Spicer’s definition of ‘bullshit jobs‘ (post-covid jobs which are largely about using a stack of American-owned software products all day long are easier to replace)
- an education system under pressure ( which reduced the quality of digital design education to teaching people how to use said stack of American-owned software products)
- the content demands of a 24 hour news cycle and infinite scroll economy (sorry, i mean influencers)
- the disappearance of well structured government-led digital literacy projects
Adding to this general post-covid malaise at work is also a cost of living crisis. So of course people take shortcuts, stop editing, stop wanting to write properly, stop wanting to read, and largely want to adopt what is known as the corpse pose in yoga. I think we’ve been here before so we are going to have to respond because remember, doing nothing is not an option.
So how do you fight back? You adopt a repair or maintenance mindset. If you witness sloppy internet work you have to point out the bugs, make sure the references are right, report the content, send complaints, join a union, sign a petition, go to events. And yes it’s work, but as our politics get more extreme, we can’t afford to give up on the promise of a global village. We’re just making sure the village’s foundations are not made of grey goo.
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