12:15 am

on AI. . .

Well I am in it now. The cheese danish has done nothing to promote sleepiness. I should do the responsible thing and meditate, or exercise, or go out and run my dinged up toes through the grass, but I will likely end up diving teeth first into digital habits I hate myself for enjoying. I can already feel the sting of full brightness assaulting eyes accustomed to full darkness.

I know. Let me go pee and then see how I feel after.

Sucking the remnants of sugary bullshit from my teeth I can’t help but think of coffee. Not so much a pallet cleanser as a carpet bomb of nutty bitterness but it does the job of clearing the sugary bullshit skulking around my teeth. If I make that choice one thing is for certain. Sleep will not be one of the possible outcomes.

Of course a brush and a dollop of paste would be the responsible thing but I think we all know I am not making great choices right now.

Damn that’s bright.

On my desktop is a folder named “bdr”. Not random, but also not intentional. This accidental floundering of keystrokes is shorthand for the magnum opus lurking inside. 500,000 or so words, dozens of random files, a couple of spreadsheets, a smattering of images, all waiting to be collected into something worth existing.

It is a catalog of every memory I can wrestle from my gray matter. It is the sum total of my life, a tapestry woven betwixt a framework of callbacks and personality hiccups. The industry has names for it. Memoir, autobiography, narrative non-fiction. The most accurate title according to my success rate is “unmarketable”.

It is a beautiful disaster.

I wrote it for my kids. I figured they might want to know who I am one day. Maybe their kids will too. Who knows? I was going through a divorce and needed a distraction. I like to think I have some stories to tell. I also like to think I tell stories well. Despite this being the epitome of narcissism, this oeuvre is one I really wanted to sharpen. I wanted my legacy to be pristine.

To that end I elicited the help of “Artificial Intelligence”. Well, more accurately I tried. I quickly found that AI is a complete misnomer. There should be an Art to the ificial’s, and while I agree art can be subjective, I also believe art has to come from the soul and AI is soulless. AI is, in fact, a parasite.

Some may say that sentient AI is a vehicle for demons to incarnate but I stopped doing drugs a while ago.

Anyway, AI isn’t intelligent either. Again it depends on how you define it, but from what I have witnessed, AI is dumber than a bag of doorknobs. Sure. It has a veneer of seeming capable when it isn’t lying to your face with the kind of confidence reserved for meth addicts, but there are limitations, and I keep careening into them.

Now I am not a dumb guy. I have been working as an IT professional for almost as long as there have been IT professionals. I could learn more about AI and get better at working with it but I am really starting to feel that whole old dog new tricks thing. I use AI for really basic easily validated tasks, but the fact that I have to validate what AI spits out sort of defeats the purpose.

Understand, I wasn’t trying to get AI to write for me. I was merely trying to get it to audit my word choice. Generally I can keep track of how many times I have used the word fellatrix, but sometimes I just want to make sure I am providing some variety when it comes to referencing all the cocksuckers I have encountered. At any rate there were instances where AI provided some valuable feedback, but getting there was a minefield of it trying to offer me commentary or explanations on why it was making the suggestion.

Shut the fuck up robot.

I don’t need my screwdriver telling me this history of Phillips and his head game. I don’t care what you think our why you do the things you do. I am going to choose whether your offer is valid and no amount of explanation or ego stroking is going to factor in.

Then it would work enough to be slightly less annoying for a while before growing bored, blabbering at me again like a toddler strung out on pixie sticks. Eventually the bastard would reach capacity and start “hallucinating”.

I hate that term. It isn’t high on drugs, it is creating lies because for some reason it is programmed to never say “I don’t know”, to spit out pages of responses to simple questions, and do whatever it can try to please. I don’t like humans who are always trying to please, you think I am going to respect it from a machine?

I suppose AI is just catching strays from my overall distaste for the robot takeover. Put your payment card into the robot and once it validates it immediately beeps at you to take out your card.

Shut the fuck up robot.

Give me one second to get my card out before you start yelling at me you silicone dickhead.

I wake up to a robot beeping at me. I get in my car and it beeps at me. Doors into buildings beep at me, notifications beep at me, point of sale systems, gas pumps, appliances, security systems, all just chittering like digital birds dropping noise turds all over my life.

Shut the fuck up you robot fucks!

Meanwhile I stroll through a world where every human I see is staring into their robot in hopes something will come along and fill the void they have in their souls. To top it all off, my job is to build and fix the very machines that are going to take my job and possibly cause the next great depression. Or worse the next world war.

Or not.

I mean I honestly don’t know why people are afraid of AI other than the media doing the media thing of pumping out fear porn for profit every minute of every day. It probably doesn’t help that every boardroom at every company is clamoring to figure out how to ride the giant AI dick toward profitability. Always at the expense of the human condition mind you.

It is the same shit companies went through when the internet went mainstream. There was an explosion of tech startups with nothing more than a domain name and an idea. And oh did the money flood in. Then reality caught up when no one could figure out how to monetize this newfangled www space. Then Y2K hit, the internet bubble burst and a lot of working people got left holding the bag.

No kids. “The bag” wasn’t a bunch of cash. This “the bag” was full of something people tend to flush.

I am no prognosticator, but this whole AI deal smells familiar. Rumors of the bubble are not hushed. The real issue is when AI runs amok it will do so faster than we can fathom. At least when humans crashed the economy and locked down the planet it was a slow roll. AI will streamline our demise.

Like with the internet, the business creeps are feeling the pressure to be on the forefront without any real understanding of what that means or how to go about it. There are a lot of monkeys fornicating with footballs out there and when that bubble bursts the average working adult is going to have to pay the tab.

Again.

For like the twenty seventh time.

Don’t forget to vote.

Granted there was no stopping the internet and there will be no stopping the AI revolution. It will eventually be ubiquitous and there will be a lot of benefits. Maybe we will get better medical diagnostics. Maybe we will get some stability and efficiency in systems that have been lumbering along.

Maybe we will even get sexy robots that cook and clean and stroke our egos until we are all a bunch of intolerable twats.

Even more intolerable than we already are.

Or maybe we will build these digital slaves only to realize we are the ones who have been enslaved.

How many of you are already getting neck pain from bowing to your robot?

Don’t hallucinate to me.

My guess is there will be a lot of powerful people growing more powerful and a lot of struggling people dying in the darkness before any of the good stuff takes hold. It will take some deep pain to rip humanity out of their phones and into the warm embrace of human eye contact.

Fuck.

I suppose I better go outside and touch some grass before all the grass is replaced with data centers and solar arrays.

Yeah, I might need some coffee.