2024 AI seems all about getting inside my head and exporting or exposing that to silicon valley and friends. So many gimmicks that end up being Trojan horses.

What isn't downright creepy ends up being an attention drain, another tech-baby that needs constant care through tweaking, tuning, reworking. Once again, we're the product, or rather the test subjects... we're training the models for free (or even paying instead of being paid), and we're also being trained/conditioned/dumbed down.

At first we try to bend the machine to our will, but eventually we seek convenience and the removal of friction, so conform and limit ourselves to the constraints of the machine instead. In this way we think we're winning, optimizing the process (by compromising and adapting ourselves), becoming productive (through the deception of new busy-work to replace the old), and joyful (by avoiding disappointment with our sunk costs, and getting something out of the effort). Our folly is validated and reinforced by a hundred open-mouthed infloooencoors and we believe we're at the cutting edge of a pivotal moment in history.

The benefits are still limited, the use cases advertised are the exceptions, the best of the best, difficult to replicate in our own contexts, but we settle for it, and praise the garments of the naked emperor as he passes by. Through the lens of ai we can discover where we ourselves have become robotic in our optimized thinking and practice. Perhaps after the novelty wears off, werealise that the thing we were doing, which ai now does slightly worse, is probably something that shouldn't be done at all.

Worst of all, ai is encroaching on things we do to sharpen our thinking... while claiming it only exists to relieve us from soul-numbing tedium. If we abdicate all these 'tasks' the opportunity cost is our neuroplasticity and growth.

We're being conned on a massive scale... again... and we mostly don't seem to mind. Part of the con is the promise of a better coexisting future, where we do human stuff and bots do bot stuff. And while our ego warms up to this vision and imagines itself as master, conductor, manager... the silent takeover continues.

I thought we were enjoying a period of respite on the road to 2030... my eyes on geopolitical information and economic wars... and the attempt to throttle bitcoin... feeling hopeful that the pandemic was in the rear view mirror. Until I became aware of the water getting a little warmer and wondering if it was too late to jump out.

Requiem for humanity