Multitasking today and I just threw money at one problem to make it go away. Someone will come and take away our old dishwasher and replace it with one that works, next week. We are all perfectly capable of washing up after ourselves but we are also all very busy and distracted a lot of the time and robots do make things easier. Like the one that eats our cat shit.
I’m sure that some investment is going that way, but… so much of the robot industry investment seems to be engaged in stealing and repurposing the work of creatives instead of cutting back on the drudgery of daily life – it makes no sense.
I backed a Kickstarter a while ago for a butter-bot, absolutely based on Rick and Morty with the blessing of the franchise. It is an AI driven desktop robot equipped with existential crisis and the power to pick small things up and carry them to you on demand.
It is the modern day equivalent of the eccentric grandfather’s train set for passing the salt around the table. I am looking forward to it coming just as it will be simultaneously dystopian and hilarious, and it will be using AI in a more creative and practical way than just stealing your voice. There are no tiny people who will be put out of a job by my butter bot. There’ll probably be at least one voice actor not employed, and it will have that flat and dead inflection that we are going to get so used to that maybe we will forget how lucky we were when Fiona was the living voice of Google rather than dead dead dead dead Fionalike.
But… Start with passing the butter. Rather than the hubris of thinking that this vast regurgitation we are encountering – like those images – is doing anything other than providing a footnote about the decline of this civilisation in a book written three thousand years from now about how we trapped ourselves forever on this planet by ignorantly putting all the precious metals and vital resources into things that would draw us a derivative picture of a goblin on a bicycle in thirty seconds.
There’s about to be a generation of people entering the workplace forty percent of which don’t really know how to write having got people from the internet to do all their work via the aggregators they are calling AI. Decline and fall. With all the nuke talk and with measurably moronic narcissists in positions of almost impossible international power it feels like civilization is pushing to the equivalent of the collapse of the Roman Empire. All the markers are in place. I can’t think there’s gonna be anything other than us getting stupider and stupider as a species. I think it has already happened. Who reads books anymore growing up? Now it’s too often just summaries of books, online articles after articles. Generations pass knowledge down through literature.
Yes there are large language models that have been trained on that literature but if you aggregate the individual voices of these incredible teachers we have had, we lose the fact that every one of them had an edge, they all had their perspective, their boundaries. We learn from flaws too. Coleridge was a dope fiend. Wordsworth was a bore. Byron was an arsehole. But they were flawed people making money and pushing their agenda and they cannot be expected to be perfect, none of us can. But this aggregation and the resulting homogeneity – even of prose as we are encountering now. Look at advertising copy, look at social media posts about whatever, anything the algorithm has identified you’re interested in. The copy is all AI, and likely measurable in an exact amount of words. But you can taste AI copy when you start to get a feel for it. Like the voice stuff it lacks life. It just… Isn’t. All the words are in the right order, there are carefully placed deliberate errors. It’s everywhere. I am so bored of it. I’m not making any money out of this, but honestly that’s how this sort of noise is best.
Hopefully I’ll have my little weird programmable butterpassing robot before the collapse of civilisation. Meantime I’ll get off my soap box and go to sleep.
I am not Rick, but the whole adopting adapting and transcending tech thing is admirable in the writing of that show, Rick and Morty. I rarely persist with anything. It gets convoluted at times, it starts badly, it is almost unbearably dark in moments and didn’t the original creator fall into his own trap by turning out to be a baddie? But… God that show is a show for our times. Maybe I’m drawn to animation as I don’t get pissed off when there’s a bad actor. Bojack is another show I consumed utterly.
AlBarclay 