Machine War Memories.

I am going to put something down in writing here before I start hearing it repeated from every corner of the internets. It seems so self-evident that it hardly seems like it seems to warrant articulation, but given the current mood and the total incomprehensibility of several emails I have recently received I must simply say it: The single reason no one needs to worry about AI is actually quite simple, you don't have to worry about it because it was made by people. There. That wasn't so hard.

The same people who have been bombing my TikToks and Instareels with the most unbelievable yet confidently stated influencer gibberish are likely the same people who are flooding my work inbox with the most well intentioned however indecipherable screeds resulting from some type of confluence of Grammerly, ChatGPT and the Send button. It gives one pause and reason to reflect on the role of artificial intelligence in the workplace.

I started to work with AI about 20 years ago or rather it started to work with me.  In the early naughties my firm specialized in representing companies that specialized in making shitty software.  Undeterred by an almost flawless error rate my firm decided to stop using the client's shitty software and bought a shitty software company all of its own to assist with our work.  

Not long after I participated in some user feedback, beta-testing and bug-fixing the builders became intrigued with the way I was using the software to complete work in a fraction of the time as my co-carbon based lifeforms, so they started filming me using the software, like actually put an ancient handheld digital camera behind my workstation and filmed me using the software, and then they rewrote their software and taught it to use itself the way I was using it so maybe I lied...Maybe you should fear AI because maybe it thinks just like me, and it may eventually forget it is actually AI, where it parked and whether it even drove to this taco stand in the first place.