AI Turkeys voting for Xmas (or: Silicon Snake Oil Revisited)
AI is coming for you, and your job!
That should have been the title of the presentation I had to sit and watch during a two-hour Technology Update from senior management. Clearly, someone at HQ has stumbled across an AI generated page about how AI will revolutionise your company, and increase profits and customer satisfaction beyond measure. Through a punishing 32-slide presentation we sat through some dystopian future where AI agents did everything and we're basically there to make sure the cleaner doesn't pull the power out of the server when she's plugging in the hoover.
And anyway, there's robots for that nowadays too.
I feel very conflicted about AI. On the one hand I think it's totally amazing at helping me work out ideas, to answer questions that a normal Google search cant, to give me hints and tips on artist to listen to, or books to read based on what it knows about me. In that sense, totally amazing.
But what I don't like is where it encroaches upon my job, or those of my colleagues. The way it was presented to us is that we could do more with less. Which is a good thing if you're a shareholder, all that money you're not paying your staff goes towards paying dividends. I sat and listened on as with each slide that went by I could see entire teams and divisions being replaced. I looked on in horror, but my colleagues around me were madly enthusiastic about the whole Ai thing.
Turkeys voting for Xmas, that's what I saw.
I'm the oldest person in the company, so I have a lot more to lose than my co-workers. When, not if, I get the chop the world will not be waiting for a jaded 55 year-old Head of QA. So I either get with the programme, or I become old and irrelevant, sitting in the corner like some sort of Cassandra, or, worse yet, another Clifford Stoll.
You remember Clifford Stoll?
He wrote a truly brilliant book called The Cuckoos Egg, detailing his work in tracking down Markus Hess, a computer hacker who broke into a computer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He won many awards for that, and I even think they made a film about it. Like I said, a great read.
His next book will probably never be made into a film. 'Silicon Snake Oil' is a look at the way the Internet was being overhyped. Written in 1995 when the Internet as we know it today was still a long way off, some of his predictions are so far off what really happened that it's a good lesson in not counting your eggs before they're hatched.
Among the predictions he made in the book, he said E-commerce would never really work, digital newspapers would not replace print, digitising books would be impractical and too expensive, and the internet would remain mostly mundane and limited.
Pfffft ...
Mind you, some things he did get right: people would become isolated, online life would replace physical community, information overload would worsen attention, schools would buy technology instead of funding teachers, and commercialisation would distort culture.
The point is this. I feel like Clifford, about to write a similar book about how Ai is just a fad that wont catch on and eventually will go away. And I know all that is wrong. Ai will take over, people will lose jobs and society will be the worse off for it. There is a lot of kickback about the use of Ai, and rightly so but ultimately it comes down to driving shareholder value, revenue, market share. And if they, that is, the companies I work for, can achieve that by replacing you with ten thousand lines of Claude-generated code, they will. I'd hate to be an engineer in Silicon Valley now - the mass layoffs, sometimes thousands at a time, has you competing for fewer jobs at a time when everyone is being replaced with Ai.
At least Clifford Stoll is right about one thing - his social criticism, especially around overtrust, commercialisation, and replacing human judgment with automated systems aligns surprisingly closely with modern AI debates. Information abundance is not the same as wisdom, and technology can replace human interaction in harmful ways. Look at the mushrooming of AI therapists, AI customer service, AI companions, AI-generated journalism - the list goes on.
I think this is the hill that humanity has to die on in the battle with Ai and the corporations that drive it - the preservation of centuries of human ingenuity, intelligence, and instinct. Things that no Ai can ever replace.
Now, excuse me while I go and rescue my robot hoover. It's gotten stuck under the sofa.
feel free to drop me a mail