Cryosleep
On the last day of UX London this year, I was sitting and chatting with Rachel Coldicutt who was going to be giving the closing keynote. Inevitably the topic of converstation worked its way ’round to “AI”. I remember Rachel having a good laugh when I summarised my overall feeling:
I kind of wish I could go into suspended animation and be woken up when all this is over and things have settled down one way or another.
I still feel that way. Like Gina, I’d welcome a measured approach to this technology. As Anil puts it:
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.
I very much look forward to using language models (probably small and local) to automate genuinely tedious tasks. That’s a very different vision to what the slopagandists are pushing. Or, like Paul Ford says:
Make it boring. That’s what’s interesting.
Fortunately, my cryosleep-awakening probably isn’t be too far off. You can smell it in the air, that whiff of a bubble about to burst. And while it will almost certainly be messy, it’s long overdue.
I’ve felt so alienated from tech over the past couple of years. Part of it is the craven authoritarianism. It dampens the mood. But another part is the monolithic narrative—the fact that we live in a world where there seem to be only a few companies, only a few stories going at any time, and everything reduces to politics. God, please let it end.