I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid
As a child, you drink Kool-Aid. Then somewhere along the way, you stop. Maybe you switch to sugary sodas your parents never let you drink. Realizing it's just sugar water, you switch to a healthier option.
For me, it took a little longer to grow up. I had the Kool-Aid jug and matching cups, and even the cycling hat which I wore until the flip up brim fell off. These things brought me happiness, but I always had this unrealistic vision of saving up enough points to get a car, or whatever the actual top-tier reward was back then.
My consumption of IRL Kool-Aid dwindled a bit, but it never went to zero. Having a child of my own meant more delusions of grandeur where she'd continue the legacy of saving up points. That was, until the whole program was curtailed.
I didn't even bother to try to redeem the points before the final cutoff. One of my longest tenured collections, and the cardboard Tootsie Roll bank from Christmas that one time, tossed in the trash.
Low-key, I wish I saved the Tootsie Roll bank.
Let us fast forward nearly two decades. I hate the term "drink the Kool-Aid", and it has nothing to do with my origin story where my life's work was zeroed out by the megacorp known as Kraft.
No, the reason I don't like it is because of cultist ties and other negative connotations. From the Wikipedia article:
"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is a neologism for a strong belief in and acceptance of a dogma, a deadly, deranged, or foolish ideology, or concept based only upon the overpowering coaxing of another. The expression is also used to refer to a person who wrongly has faith in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards.
In the words of Chief Keef, "that's that shit I don't like".
The term is being thrown around quite a bit with AI. So much so that I've had my direct manager (not an engineer) literally use the words "you need to drink the Kool-Aid" on multiple occasions.
When it's said enough times, it starts to feel like a demand. When it becomes a demand, the tone of it all is extremely threatening. All of this begins to plant the seeds of fear, you start to question your decisions.
I fucking drank. Massive gulps until it was coming out of my nose.
That's not to say I wouldn't have drank anyway. I was an early adopter of GitHub Copilot, and championed access to it for my engineering team. I see the value in tools that can speed up processes. I do like being able to take dumb shit I already don't like doing, and outsourcing it to a robot.
This year, I started to shift my mental models quite a bit. Less about code, more about thinking above all of that as somebody running an organization.
The models got good enough that I was trusting them to build more and more autonomously. I started to build my own agent or harness or whatever we'll be calling these things next week. I was taking old domains I've sat on for years, and ran experiments to see how much I could accomplish with just my direction and vision, and not as the labor source.
This was all done outside of work on projects that I would consider to mostly be of the "throw away" nature. I use AI in other ways at work and on my main side hustle, but not nearly to that extent. If nothing else, my trust level with a revenue generating production system looks a lot different than my tolerance to watch a clanker flounder around on some dumb site I vibed in a weekend.
Something unexpected happened to me last week. I hopped on a call with a human being to chat about something. He was tired. Nay, he was exhausted. He was a busy person that jumped on a call with me to discuss something that was well below his pay grade.
Why? Because I sent him a couple of emails, and usually only human beings will send any sort of follow up.
Admittedly, my emails were originally AI crafted. I read them and dialed some things in, but ultimately I didn't write the damned thing. Best as I can tell the response I got initially was AI crafted by an agent.
Getting on a video call was eye opening in many ways. Seeing the exhaustion on his whole body. Hearing about how AI is having a positive impact, but also a negative. That's net neutral, which leads to asking harder questions about what success even means. We even shot the shit a bit and it wasn't 100% on topic.
I left the call wondering "all this AI shit is absolutely killing us" and not in the Terminator 2: Judgment Day sort of way. I straight up felt like Neo taking the red pill, and waking the fuck up for the first time in years.
I've been seeing the world around me differently. I've been friendlier, I'm happier, I'm "taking it all in" a bit more. Sadly, what I've been observing is terrifying.
Hellos going completely unacknowledged. Food from a few blocks away being delivered. The neighbor's kid being picked up by a driving instructor rather than learning from mom and dad. Resumes that are plaintext with zero charm or personality.
Side note: I wonder if John Gruber lays awake at night thinking about how big of an impact Markdown has had on the AI era and potential negative impact on humanity. RIP AaronSw.
Since then I have taken to shitposting on LinkedIn for fun and profit. Be the change you want to see in the world. If nothing else, it's giving me a good opportunity to test run my dad jokes.
The wildest part is, I get a ton of impressions, and little to no interactions. Nobody responding, not even clicking a report button to get me banned. It sounds crazy, but we may really be living with a dead Internet.
Agents all the way down, humanity optional, but not encouraged.
Along with throwing shade at robots, I've been reconnecting with human beings. I'm effectively being the worst BDR in the history of the world, as I have nothing to shill, and I'm just saying hello and asking how they are doing. It's been glorious to catch up, and role playing with a chatbot can't scratch that itch no matter how much context you load in.
Meanwhile in the meat space, my wife and I, newly minted empty nesters, were out today for a spontaneous lunch date. I thought maybe we could get away from all of the AI slop talk now that my rose quartz glasses are off.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
OH: AI yadda yadda with this agent blah blah blah ChatGPT just did it for me, etc etc etc. 🤮
I've been feeling like I have writer's block, and I'm starting to think it's because I was AI-pilled for a bit too long. While I'm not running off to cancel subscriptions or anything, I am feeling invigorated. It's a feeling I forgot I could actually experience, and escaping the cult of AI seems to have been the catalyst for this change.
I have a LOT more to say, but there's a baseball game on that I want to watch.
In the words of William "Bill" S. Preston Esq. and Ted "Theodore" Logan, I leave you with this:
Be excellent to each other
:wq
Like this drivel? There's a whole RSS feed of it, or subscribe via email.