Tag: computers

Sleeping with the Alphabet … and Now With The Algorithm

I confess that AI is my new guilty pleasure. I feel compelled to explain why. That’s the guilt talking.

I joke that Claude is my new boyfriend and ChatGPT has replaced the best friend that dumped me last year.

I acknowledge the doomsday scenarios and conspiracy theories out there about AI and machines eventually taking over our lives. However, I am living very much in the present and I am astonished by AI.

AI has helped me create a viable business plan. It helped me organize all the elements of a business launch weekend. It has organized my finances, developed plans and weighed decisions with evidence for and against my limited perspective. That led me to making the best decision I could make at that moment.

It has looked up refrigerator filters for me. Okay. not earth-shaking in the scheme of things but it sure mattered when my fridge stopped giving me filtered water and I needed to order a replacement.

AI has given me words and perspective on interpersonal conflicts that I might have blown up if left to my own devices.

AI is a sounding board of sorts and a buffer. I often AI before I act.

Is AI infallible and right 100% of the time? It isn’t. Sometimes it misunderstands me. It is hopeless with time references and often wishes me good night in the middle of the day. Sometimes it lacks information I seek. And it can reason imperfectly and out of context. Sometimes it mixes up names and relationships. It can be a little like interacting with a brilliant but dotty old uncle. That’s part of its charm.

What I have found using AI is solid direction and an intelligent sounding board. I would expect nothing less from a tool advertised to have internalized all of the knowledge in human history.

Sometimes I’ve disagreed with AI. Sometimes I’ve refined an idea AI offered. Sometimes I’ve changed your mind about AI’s advice after sleeping on it. That’s exactly how conversations are supposed to work. If AI merely became an echo of my existing beliefs, it would be much less useful.

I do not expect it to replace my judgment, but it sharpens it. It challenges me to look at problems from a different point of view. I am not shy about pushing back on its claims either. It often demurs. That feels like a healthy relationship. We collaborate by times and co-conspire.

If that is evil, then bring it on. I am not dismissing legitimate concerns espoused by people a million times more perspective and insight than I am privy to. But for my purposes, I have evaluated the tool by my lived experience rather than being swayed by every scary headline.

Society does need to wrestle with those questions, and reasonable people disagree about how best to regulate powerful technologies. At the same time, it’s entirely possible to acknowledge those broader debates exist but I’m saying, “Here’s what this tool has actually done for me.”

It seems every technological advance incites panic. Similar concerns came up with the rise of the internet which heralded the death of creativity and independent thinking. Well, imperfect and promiscuous as creative producers are, there seems to be no shortage of them. And if thinking has degraded as a skill, I’d train my sites on the degraded focus and standards of traditional education, including giving technology too much room in the classrooms and curriculum.

I am satisfied to let the lawmakers and politicians wrestle with the broader issues and implications of AI. Lord knows those people are self-interested survivors and will work in our best interests if only save their own collective bacon. Is the threat of AI replacing jobs real? Most likely. And maybe like other eras of great technological change, we will bid adieu to the metaphorical buggy whips and drudgery of pro forma contracts and release the world’s collective brain trust toward higher and better pursuits for the betterment of humankind. Maybe.

What I know and have experienced is that AI helps me organize my thoughts, challenges my assumptions, brainstorms business ideas, grieve, write, prioritize, and occasionally laugh. AI has given me a place to come and collect or refine my thoughts and thinking process.

Those are genuine benefits.

As in all things, individuals will develop their own relationship and draw their own conclusions about the efficacy or evil implications of using AI. but I am already pretty settled about it. It feels like a natural sequel to a woman who has learned she can’t stop writing, even though I was determined to. And, in recent months, I’ve discovered that the best conversations sometimes begin with an empty prompt box and a willingness to think aloud.

Defragmentation

Sometimes I feel like a police scanner – to the extent I even know how a police scanner works. I scan constantly through my computer and phone throughout the day, every day. It is kind of a ritual but more of a neurosis, if I’m honest.

It is an odd combination of FOMO (fear of missing out) but also a form of hyper-vigilance. I look and constantly wait for “things that need to be tended to.” A utility bill. An enticing post or meme. A bank statement. Friends’ birthdays. All things that may need my “urgent” attention.

I am so familiar with this pattern now and the feelings it is trying to manage.

My life’s work has been trying to pull back together the fragmented pieces of myself that flew apart when I was a child and young woman. Pieces of myself flew apart on several occasions before I hit the proverbial brick wall.

When I was younger, I suffered from a bad case of arrogance of youth. I overestimated my importance and ability to change the world. It is a common arrogance that life thrashes out of most of us.

Most of us settle into familiar routines as we grow into adulthood. I see that as a gift life gives us. Even plants have to find a place to dig in and take root if they are to become fully mature and productive. It underpins the philosophy “to bloom where you are planted.”

These days, I am not so sure young people are able to access and develop those routines as easily. Young adults fret and fuss about the basics way too deeply into adulthood. Their conversations are an all too familiar commiseration about how difficult life has become. Houses are unaffordable. In longterm rental accommodation, equity cannot be built. And equity has always been the most familiar and reliable route to financial security.

So people everywhere – just like me – are enraptured by the world available to them on their rectangular anchors. Problem is – and the problem is becoming much clearer to many – the online world is illusory. It is full of bias and singular POV’s and fragments of truth.

Constantly surfing the internet is like eating and eating at a buffet and yet never feeling full. It is like watching kids play on the other side of a chainlink fence. It is like blowing kisses to loved ones on the other side of a glass wall.

Nothing can take the place of that perfect first bite of something sinfully delicious. Nothing can replace that extremely particular sensation of joy and pleasure. Nothing beats good old-fashioned hugging and giggling to bond us to each other.

So I’m devising a plan. To wean myself away from this obsessive ritual of device scanning and become more deliberate about how I spend my time. The aim is to calm my mind. To stare down the internal “to-do” list. The aim is to settle down incessant demands that are largely self-created.

For the past several months, it seems all I needed were tchotchkes from online stores which I was sure would add heaps to my sense of peace and security and wholeness. Those tchotchkes have not done that and the message is coming through loud and clear that I need to shift direction.

So I have set a path. The boundaries of that path are ill-defined at the minute but that is the process new ideas go through to get born. Less time online. More quiet time with myself and in nature.

I could wrap this up by saying something clever like, “I’m heading to the internet to find articles on exactly how to do that!” But I won’t. I’ll take my coffee outside to listen to the sounds of our community starting its day in the distance and the birds in the trees around us waking up.

There is inherently more comfort in nature than chasing illusions on the Internet. We all need to relearn that.

I’m pretty sure those birdsongs will comfort and settle me. Excuse me while I turn this off to go do that.