Where in the world are we going?

There is a cognitive disconnect sometimes in my mind with the way the world is now, and the way the world was in the 80’s when I grew up. I understand now why older people end up saying the dreaded phrase, “back in my day.”

It’s surprising how different the world is, how much it‘s changed in the last forty to fifty years. Especially when I think back to the media that I consumed, which talked about all kinds of alternative futures. I remember the dystopian warnings that seemed so far-fetched at the time and were something everyone wanted to avoid.

The first time that I got to interact with a computer was when my grandmother bought one. She used it to do work from home as a teacher, or whatever it was she did with the boxy IBM. I used it to mess around in Paint and play Carmen Sandiego on floppy disk.

It would be years before we had another computer in my life, and this time it was one of the first iMac desktops. Those colorful and chunky CRT all-in-ones. I remember the learning curve was pretty steep for me, but I figured it out. Once I did, boy oh boy, I burned through those AOL disks in order to get on AIM and Yahoo chat.

Eventually, I would manage to have my own high-powered laptop, paid for by the bonus I had from joining the military just before 9/11. Fitting that I'm writing it on the anniversary, I guess.

Yet again I entered the wild west that was the net, and played around on AIM, coded the theme of MySpace to look more Matrix-like. Which, thinking back on it, I really did have edgelord vibes. No wonder some people thought I might be another Ted Kaczynski.

In reality, I was just an angsty queer kid stuck in the military, reaching out into the void to find some kind of connection or identity. Now, many years later, after a stint of civilian IT work, I've figured out a lot when it comes to technology.

As someone who is a writer and avid explorer of informational rabbit holes, the rise in our reliance on tech has become massively alarming. Especially the use of AI in every facet of life online and even our offline experience.

I forged a career in digital design and creative writing in the years before now, and the rise of the machine learning hellscape has started hammering nails in the coffin of my freelance work. So much so that I feel like I’m treading water.

Why would people pay money they don't have or don't want to spend, when they can pay a computer AI puppet to do it for less? Hell, you don't even have to pay them; so many of the models will let you play around for free.

In my lifetime, I‘ve watched our relationship with technology grow so quickly, and we still are discovering just how much of an impact it’s having. So when it comes to AI and the rate at which it is growing, I feel like I'm locked inside a dystopian nightmare, or if nothing else, intellectual purgatory.

At least when everyone was saying, "just google it." That was forcing people to try and do their own research. Now it's just, "why don't you ask [insert random LLM model here]." Which just takes that shortcut to information and passes it through mathematical calculations, only to regurgitate what might be the right answer.

Just like in those early days, when algorithms helped Google spider around and collect useful information, we have to give feedback to correct the machines when they’re wrong.

Except now, the level of data and input feeding these models is incomprehensible to most people. And even worse, it’s the snake eating its own tail, and that's further degrading the quality of the internet as a whole. Not that it was all that spotless and pristine.

AI holds up a mirror to the human race, and compiles all of that information into distilled, homogenized representations it thinks we want. To get these new beasts of burden to behave, people have to get good at giving the LLM a prompt that will supply the correct output, or something close if you’re lucky.

There are places where algorithmic computation is an asset, particularly within tools that aren't ‘generative’ but quantitative. Sifting through information that would otherwise take forever and being able to understand patterns in that data is helpful.

We still need humans at the helm of this ship to keep navigating the machines. How they learn, what they learn, and how to try to fend off AI hallucinations.

If you don't know what those are, you really need to Google it, and don't just read that AI overview. I dare you to fall down that rabbit hole and see how you feel about using an LLM afterward.

The goods that these companies are selling us are broken, and they are struggling to salvage the wreckage of what AI was promised to be. It is still being packaged up with the claims that it can solve all your problems, when we are just now learning how many new ones it is causing.

I never in my life thought that technology that we only dreamed of before would exist, or that, just like a lot of the media these concepts live within, our world and the people in it would be suffering because of it. We should’ve known better.

Some of us do, but none of that matters when the AI is baked into every bit of our digital reality.

As a parent of a preteen, it has been a battle to figure out how to navigate this landscape of virtual quicksand. Which has been making me feel nostalgic for when the internet was new. Somehow it felt less dangerous, even though I know that isn't true.

At least we didn't have algorithmic echo chambers, controlled by big corporations, feeding the greed of the 1% who don't give a fuck about the rest of us.