As I mentioned back in February, I’ve been musing about a longer piece about AI, the catch-all if imprecise term lobbed at the current crop of large language models (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, Co-Pilot, Grok, Gemini, etc.). I get more examples of videos and articles motivating me to write that longer piece on AI every week.
The current hucksterism selling AI strikes me as the same overconfident idiocy that led some to believe microwaves would replace conventional ovens in the early 80s or that we’d all be trading stocks solely on pre-smart cellphones in the late 90s. And the various legal, moral, and ethical considerations of the use of AI can’t be hand-waved away by some claim of inevitability (and definitely not certain companies sunk costs). Indeed, the vast majority of my posts about AI have been to call “Bullshit” on what I believe is still fully fecal matter.
Look, Powers-That-Would-Be-King, you come in with automation to supplant artists and creators rather than focusing on how to better help medicine… or even laundry? I’m not only going to call that objectively stupid, I’m going to push back. You’re coming for the jobs of people I love. And me. You’re making it personal.
And yet, I’m being asked to use AI more and more at the dayjob and weigh in on AI use in some instances. And it’s not just the medicine example above. At my job and others, I see how this current crop of AI tools and probable successors are helpful and will be helpful. How do I thread that needle, a needle that, even now, AI is offering to make into a printable 3D model? How do I balance the utility of AI I see in parts of workflows against the thoughtless rush to insert AI into every aspect of workflows before value is proven?
In other words, I think I’m going to have a lot more posts about AI, in part because some of you might be in the same boat, a boat you do not want AI to design and build, even if it might help in some ways.
So with that said, I wanted to kick off what might be a regular series with a video from Sandeep Swadia, the self-described MIT Monk.
This felt right because I found myself nodding along to his 12-minute video multiple times. Plus, it delves into hobbies, something I’ve posted several times about, including the fact that hobbies should be respites from the grind, not another nascent side-hustle.
“The more machines become like humans, the less we’ll have to be like machines.”
– Sandeep Swadia
You can actually get a lot out of this just focusing on how to revive old hobbies or start new ones. I like the “VIBE” framework he mentions for assessing what might help you get more engaged and find your flow. But he also points out problems with how you might be relating to AI throughout… and how it’s intertwined with the bad things we’ve known about being obsessively online these days anyway.
So give it a try and, in line with the video, don’t post about it.