You can be forgiven if you have the impression that I hate AI. I do have profound concerns with the ways the technology is being rolled out, sure, but I’m still an enthusiast at heart and I love playing around with this stuff.
This week I wrote about a free transcription application that took a half-hour episode of a radio show and gave me a text transcription in a couple minutes. Even more staggering: the entire thing happens on my device, with no need for an internet connection. Tools like this are going to make my life a lot easier. As a journalist, I can record a conversation, feed it to the app, and browse the resulting text to find the quotes I’ll end up using. This has the potential to make me better at what I do. Often, when I’m crunched for time, I’ll be typing notes during a conversation so that I don’t have to transcribe them later, which makes me a worse interviewer. A tool like this can help me be more present in whatever conversation I’m having, which could result in me doing better work.
I wish the companies that make AI were talking more about tools in this framework—”this tool can help you do what you do best”. That would be a hopeful vision of the future. Instead the emphasis seems to be overwhelmingly on workers using the technology to really excel at busywork: attending meetings, designing presentations, and otherwise talking about doing work instead of actually doing work. This would be great if the ads suggested you’d have more time to do real work, but instead they seem to suggest you’ll have more time for more busywork. There’s no better example than this Microsoft ad that has been making the rounds:
Three meetings at once. It’s so funny that, when I saw people making fun of it, I assumed it was a meme or an Onion parody. Nope: Microsoft really did run this as an ad on Instagram. This is what they think we want from their supposedly world-changing technology: the ability to attend more meetings.
Now, Copilot’s ability to transcribe a meeting and highlight the key points is cool, and in theory it could make meetings more efficient. It’s easy to imagine, in a healthy work culture, where that gain in time allows people to spend more time doing the actually productive parts of their job.
Instead this ad assumes the opposite will happen. It imagines a future where we use our efficiency gains to attend more meetings. Economists sometimes talk about how the current crop of technology hasn’t lead to commensurate productivity gains—it’s a bit of a mystery in some circles. I would hold up this ad as the explanation: we are all, as a society, using the efficiency gains to attend more pointless meetings.
But what’s even funnier is that the ad doesn’t even deliver on its dystopian promise. If you do “swipe right” there is no clear demonstration of how you can “attend three meetings at once”—just screenshots of the meeting summary tools.
I do not know whether AI is going to transform the world for the better. I do know that, if it does, it won’t be by enabling middle mangers to add more meetings to the calendar of people who actually do things. Our work cultures aren’t weighed down with bullshit because the right technology to fix that hasn’t come around yet. They’re waded down with bullshit for cultural reasons. Tech can’t fix cultural problems—you need a cultural solution.
So I don’t hate AI, not really. I just think a lot of the current imagined use cases are moronic, and reveal a real failure of imagination among the people who work at tech companies. This ad demonstrates that clearly, which is why I love it.
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Back in 2022, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei chose not to release the super-powerful AI chatbot, Claude, that his company had just finished training, opting instead to focus on further internal safety testing. That move likely cost the company billions — three months later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT.
Having a reputation for credibility and caution in an industry that appears to have thrown a large chunk of it to the wind is not a bad thing though. Claude is now in its third iteration, but that caution remains, with the company pledging not to release AIs above certain capability levels until it can develop sufficiently robust safety measures.
TIME’s interview with Amodei gives an insight into what the AI industry might look like when safety is considered a core part of the strategy.
It’s #NewstodonFriday — such a shame it’s been a slow news week! Just to refresh your memories, this is a day to feature work from newsrooms with an active presence in the #Fediverse. If you like what you see in the (long!) thread below, follow the profiles and boost their stories. If you’re a journo or newsroom that we don’t know about or if there’s a newsroom you’d love to put on our radar, please let us know in the comments below.
@themarkup reports on how Chinese migrants are following step-by-step instructions on Douyin, the equivalent of TikTok, in order to immigrate to the United States via Central South America. These include tips on clearing your chat history, bribing law enforcement officers and more. On arrival in the US as asylum seekers, they find a reality they were unprepared for.
Over the last few years the practice portion of my #legal work has slowly transitioned to consulting for other attorneys on #tax or #tech matters and let me tell you, for all the stick our profession gets we don’t make terrible clients.*
*Results not typical, your mileage may vary, see stores for details.
In Abu Dhabi, the Autonomous Racing League has been testing driverless motor racing, and last month 10,000 people descended on the Yas Marina race track to watch the first four-car driverless race. Hazel Southwell was one of them, and she reports on it for @arstechnica.
From the cars to the tech to the competition, she got a front row seat for all the thrills and spills from the inaugural race. Is it the future of motorsport? Probably not, she writes, but is “strangely exciting” and an “interesting test lab” all the same. Here’s more.