Of gods and monsters

The tech industry is telling the most terrible story right now ... and they don't seem to realize it.

Currently challenging myself to write about the push-and-pull of creativity and entrepreneurship; art vs capitalism; artistry vs product for 30 days.

If this is something you’re thinking about, then I want to hear from you!!

Remember how in this last post I said, if you can’t communicate effectively to someone why they should do something then well … you’ve sunk your own battleship?

Photo by Hayato Shin on Unsplash

That is what I what to discuss today—one of the biggest story flops that is happening right now is in the tech industry. And depending on how deep you are in the story, your perspective is:

OR

OR

Now here’s where I want to start

Several months ago, I listened to a very very popular tech podcast in which the host interviewed a smart and lovely person who’s worked across several big AI companies. (Think: Anthropic, Grok, ChatGPT, etc.)

This person spends their entire day working with LLMs (large language models). They are paid to solve how to make LLMs better than humans at everything. So each day, this person wakes up and thinks about how to teach ChatGPT or Grok or Gemini or Anastasia how to think, communicate, strategize, and interact with people. And it’s not just their working life! It’s their entire life! They are living in a world filled to the brim with people exactly like them—working, thinking, loving, and looking forward to falling closer toward the current end goal: AGI (artificial general intelligence.)

Throughout the interview, the podcaster got more and more enthusiastic. Throughout the interview, I became more and more disgusted. These people are locked in a bubble, I thought. And research supports this:

Image Pew Center for Research

And recently from AI enthusaist Ben Tossell of Ben’s Bites fame on his recent San Francisco visit just this month:

no one has it figured out. everything is still so new and everyone’s building on the models that change a lot

The tech world is a very small and insular world in many ways, and Silicon Valley is its Mt Olympus.

Photo by Nils on Unsplash

Often these gods are more concerned with their interpersonal petty squabbles than the mere mortals who wander around beneath its slopes. And yet when they disrupt, the shockwaves ripples throughout the land—heedless of the destruction they wreck.

Now let’s go back to the story flop; it’s a big one.

Story we must remember are the answers to these two questions:

1. What do you want to say: AI will be better at humans at everything. YAY!

2. Who are you saying it to? Everyone in the world—not just the denizens of Mt Olympus.

So what does that story sound like to the mortals on the ground? It’s exactly the story that people are hearing:

• AI will replace me.

• Try to get in front of AI before AI eats you.

• It’s a brave new world whether you like it or not.

• No one important is thinking about your individual, insignificant future; you are on your own.

• For the glory of that future, sacrifice your heart!

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash

Siiiiiigh

The podcaster and AI expert didn’t seem to realize that while they thought of themselves as:

Doc Brown from Back to the Future is awed by his time travel machine.

They are actually come off like this to the global population:

Astrophysicist Eric Selving unwittingly helps villain Loki to open a tesseract over NYC in The Avengers movies.

So what should the story be?

I honestly don’t know? But I’ve been in the tech world for almost 15 years, and I can tell you that the closer you get to the top of Mt Olympus, the blinder the blinders are. Even for myself, I need constant reminders that the conversations happening across my LinkedIn feeds are not the same concerns or priorities for a very large percentage of the Earth’s population.

And I have concerns about all this—as an artist and as a tech person who is not LLM-ing every minute of the day.

I just hope that there will still be choices—that I will always have a choice in how I choose to participate with the disruption as it continues to reshape the landscape. That technology multiples my options as opposed to creating narrower and narrower definitions of what it means to be human.

And the final thought I want to leave you with?

At the end the podcast and after the AI expert acknowledged that they were in a rather good position to make choices after the AI apocalypse completed it’s destruction, the podcaster asked them: “What would you do after it all?”

And what did they say?

“I’d like to write short stories.”

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