This is AI-maxing bleeding into everything. “Make me a great conference presentation”, and this is roughly what you get. AI-nshittification writ large. It’s sad to watch.
Herein lies the seeds of the Revolution that is being fomented by the very class of educators, speakers, and generationally privileged who exhibit casual, naive contempt for the audience they drone on their tone-deaf sermons, utterly oblivious to the toxic duplicity of the messages they shove down throats of those who bear the worst of the costs externalised by those spreading “the good word”. They can all burn.
Yours is a “God of the gaps” argument. You will remain technically correct (the best kind of correct!) long after the statistical machine has subsumed your practical argument, context limit and all.
You better mean “hiking” as in through the metaverse forest strapped into your corporate-sponsored VR headset, because outside time is for citizens only, friend.
It’s not the whimsy. It’s that the whimsy is laced with casual disdain, a touch too much “let me buy you a stick of gum and show you how to chew it”, a frustrated tenor never stated but dog whistled “you dumb fucks”. A soft sharp stink of someone very smart shoving that fact in your face as they evangelise “the obvious truth” you’re too stupid to see.
And maybe he’s even right. But the reaction is to the flavour of chip on the shoulder delivery mixed into an otherwise fun piece.
I have zero doubt Claude is going to do what AI does and plough forward. Emails will get sent, recommendations made, stuff done.
And it will be slop. Worse than what it does with code, the outcomes of which are highly correlated with the expertise of the user past a certain point.
Seth wins his point. AI can, via humans giving it permission to do things, affect the world. So can my chaos monkey random script.
Fred should have qualified: _usefully_ affect the world. Deliver a margin of Utility.
Don’t bother with this if you want to get promoted. Others have discussed this in thread and are right. If you build beautiful, simplified abstractions, your skill will be taken for granted as these interfaces appear obvious once discovered (by virtue of their proximity to truth, incredibly difficult to create, easy to verify). If you are in even a reasonably large org, go the other way. Be an Architecture astronaut. Build complex, clever stuff that is deliberately high cognitive load. Get your bus-factor as close to one as possible. Go the other way only if your comp is directly tied to company performance.