Back in the day there was a good series on BBC by Adam Curtis called the Power of Nightmares. The series explores how elites use false flags, fake threats and media scare campaigns to frighten the public into begging for terrible policies. From which we got The Iraq War, The Patriot Act, Covid Lockdowns, Digital ID and other tragedies. The given imagery, satanic robot with red eyes towering above a frightened everyman, is designed to elicit an emotional reaction. Cui bono? When confronted with such obvious media manipulation, practice discernment!

Thanks! I hadn’t seen that!

Am sure he won’t mind, quoting here in case it gets zapped!

Thanks AI!

I got this email:

Rich,

Your creation of Clojure …

sycophantic blather worthy of a third grader's homework assignment to write a letter to a public figure you don't know, using sources you don't understand, to express an emotion unfelt, with no intention whatsoever

Claude Haiku 4.5

Ah, Christmas time. That time of year when our hearts are warmed by the best wishes of an idiot robot. All tingly from the experience, and in the holiday spirit, I thought I’d write my own letter of thanks to those bringing us this next generation of ‘AI’.

Dear ‘AI’ purveyors,

How shall I thank thee, let me count the ways:

Should I thank you for pirating the entire historical output of creative humanity and then asserting ownership of your loot?

For destroying education?

For raising utility rates and killing the environment?

For wasting vast quantities of developer time trying to coax some useful output from your BS generators, time which could instead be used communicating to interns and entry-level devs who, being actually intelligent, could learn from what they are told, and maintain what they make?

For eliminating entry-level jobs, and thus the path to experience, ensuring future generations of unskilled, unemployable people?

For giving me a fake person to talk to when I need support instead of an actual person who understands what I’m saying, can help me faster, and has a chance of caring?

For replacing search results with summary BS?

For providing the tools to fill the internet with slop, making actual human content almost impossible to find?

For enticing CEOs with the promise to save some fraction of a percent on personnel costs, not actually be any faster, cutting off their future labor pool while only experiencing a modest to severe reduction in product quality, integrity and customer satisfaction (tradeoffs they are apparently eager to make)?

For replacing musical expression with the sounds of robot parrots chirping?

For adding an ‘AI’ feature to every flipping thing, most such features requiring a deep invasion of privacy?

For running the second biggest and most damaging con of this century (running hard at first)?

I think not.

This email was a reminder that agentic ‘AI’ is sure to flood the remainder of human communication channels with BS, swamping many services, and making every interaction with people not in the same room suspect, and filtering it a time-consuming waste, forever.

When did we stop considering things failures that create more problems than they solve?

Rich

I was about to say but @AndyL beat me to it. Just the cover art of this video reeks of rage-baiting and scare-mongering. Hard to take it seriously. And yeah yeah, we heard it all from supposed “serious” YouTubers that “it drives engagement from certain groups but the video is still good”.

Nope. If you felt confident in your content you would not opt for low-effort baiting.

To the topic at hand, I believe a lot of the original AI researchers grossly overestimate the progress that “AI” made today. That’s where their fear comes from and it’s misplaced because they ascribe too much intelligence / goal / unsupervised-direction to the modern tools.

LLMs as coding assistants have pretty much peaked and people are starting to devise pipelines where multiple LLMs work on a bigger project with 1-2 other LLMs being project managers and asking the human operator for clarifications. This is because LLMs are, well, large, and tend to go way off-course if left unattended (and often do so even as a direct response to a crystal-clear prompt). They are not focused. They must be constantly beaten back into their track.

The “future” in how I can extrapolate it currently is this: have multi-agent systems if you want human workers displaced. This estimation of course can be wildly inaccurate. As a funny example, many of the boomer age Sci-Fi writers predicted even more usage of atomic energy (back when it was called “atomic” and not “nuclear”). Famously even Isaac Asimov based most of the tech in his universe on atomic energy and physics discoveries – but he was far from the only one. And look how that turned out. We went into a very different direction.

I am not a futurist or an oracle though. I am only saying how things look like they would develop. Of course tomorrow one of the LLM companies might actually get closer to AGI and all the castles in the sky get blown by the wind and new ones get made.

It’s a wild ride, this era, I must admit. “May you live in interesting times”, the ancient Chinese curse.