My doom, as I have said countless times, is that I understand what every person means when they speak. I know the irreducible part. I can understand them without agreeing with them, which is good, because this process is more or less instantaneous. If the process of understanding were inextricable from the process of believing, I would be in an incredible amount of trouble. So I understand Mike when he makes the case that the endpoint of widely available generative frameworks is a less human world. It's some Philip K. Dick shit, honestly. In the PKD version, of course, Mike would be an AI, worried about a new generation of simulated intellects. You wouldn't know that until the end! But yeah.

"Well," I said. "I guess we found your politics."

We've discussed this before on the site; I have a lot of feelings about it, and I think these feelings are commensurate with the scale of the issue. Studying the ability of ChatGPT against the sort of writing I do, I think I'm probably gonna be okay for a bit. A very small bit. It's as I said before: dry, easily navigable slopes are the exception.

People really don't like it when you care about things. Because cognition has a caloric aspect, when you ask people to think about things you're demanding a resource, and it's a resource the body guards with profound jealousy. We are all using dogmas and memes and borrowed ideas to minimize these expenditures because the flesh is weak and we lack the purity of the machine. Ultimately, the technology is not my concern. It is that there's another Industrial Revolution happening, right now, you can play with it like a toy, and it will be very surprising to me if it results in a greater bargaining position for the worker. That's just not how it goes.

Some portion of the conversation always has the sting of betrayal in it. But you like computer stuff! Yeah, I like computer stuff. Except we aren't talking about computer stuff. We're talking about people stuff. People are messy. I work with a lot of creative people, and I have also had the pleasure - firmly installed in quotes - of working with the kind of people who call those people "creatives." We were at a meeting once where the person who will be advocating and using these technologies in your organization told us they hated creatives to our face. These technologies will displace workers and slash pay. That's… I mean, that's it. I don't think this is even a conversation. You can recognize that, and plan, or you can be stupid. How's that for a dogma?

(CW)TB out.