Various and Sundry

Takes on History Hint How AI May Not Take All the Jobs

Continuing my series of posts about AI and machine learning, a big concern is AI taking people’s jobs. In fact, that’s how I first started posting about it, because AI was being touted as a replacement for writing and creating music and the many fun things in life… rather than AI helping do the dishes or laundry. But despite AI being cited as a reason for jobs getting cut, I have been coming across some…

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Various and Sundry

Essential Jobs in the Age of AI

It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s time to continue my posting about AI and machine learning inserting itself, like Clippy on nanobot steroids, into the economy, I’ve already covered one of the big issues people have discovered by being “disruption first” and “figuring out what we’re disrupting” second. I link to a lot of videos and such in my early May post in that regard. For the TL;DR crowd, too much AI implementation is not…

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Various and Sundry

Six Skills to Stick it to Skynet

Building on last week’s post about liberal arts majors having value in this brave new AI world, here’s Daniel Pink (whom longtime readers may remember I posted about at the beginning of the year) and he lists six skills in his usual pithy style. You can absolutely use them to make yourself more valuable in the workplace (void where Skynet goes full murderbot or bosses go towards “maximizing innovative synergies”).

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Various and Sundry

Wait! Those Wacky Liberal Arts Folks Might Do Well in the World of AI?!?

The shadow of AI continues to loom over the workplace as the AI companies have their IPOs, but don’t worry, McSweeney’s has a handy guide to understanding the economics of the situation. Meanwhile, on a personal level, you might be wondering how your job may or may not be impacted or outright obliterated by the implementation of AI. However, thinking of my AI post last month, there are several people who are noting the sometime…

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Various and Sundry

AI Entering the Danger Zone?

As AI continues to tap-dance through the zeitgeist of society, I don’t have any family references this week, but I do have an Archer/Kenny Loggins reference, and isn’t that the same? An AI chatbot would say so… unless you correct it. Anyway, OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all looking to have IPOs this year which has market musing being cranked up to 11 (if you want analysis in manic video style, Hank Green has your…

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Various and Sundry

AI as a Kind of Magic Trick

Growing up, my dad exposed us to a number of board games and, while he was open to all sorts of game mechanics, he especially enjoyed the wonkily strategic ones that might be best described as “simulations.” Yes, we’re talking cardboard chits and plenty of rules in strict number-outline order about how those cardboard chits operate. My dad was tough to beat in such simulations, because he absorbed the rules with a precision that many…

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Various and Sundry

Everybody -er, every AI- to the Limit!

Discussions at the dayjob have included the both the risks of AI and the risks of not implementing AI. I mean, the problems of AI as an accelerator for cybercrime were already apparent and are now becoming iridescent (metaphorically). But my guess is that most of you are dealing with workplaces where there’s a cohort of people wanting to implement AI to do everything. They want a silver bullet. They really need to understand some…

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Various and Sundry

But You Were the Chosen One, AI!

Yes, given the posts earlier this week, I couldn’t resist… but let’s face it: AI, in the form of our current crop of large language models, has been touted as the technology that will change everything. Well, for humans, anyway. And for humans, AI has proven problematic. Because, when it comes to Chosen Ones, you generally want them to do good. That’s one of the reasons they get the moniker of “Chosen One” versus “Eternal…

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Acting Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Hobbies as a Way to Unplug from the Algorithm

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…

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Writing

“Art is the means by which we become what we want to be.”

I’ve been musing about a longer post about AI, because my thoughts about the current large language models (LLMs) and the like have evolved over the past year as we’ve looked into more and more use cases at the dayjob. However, if you detected skepticism in my previous posts about AI and my many links to articles and videos, that doubt has not dissipated. Besides the consistently cited environmental impacts, something that at best must…

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