AI is going to spark a new dawn of human understanding and the valuation of knowledge. It will do this by making everything you read online almost certainly complete bullshit, leading to a renaissance of people engaging verified experts on a commercial basis.
That thing where your grandma used to say "you can't believe anything you read on that Google I'll go to the shop and speak to the expert there" is totally coming true. Just 25 years late.
LBT: Apple very deliberately went with “your next computer isn’t a computer” as a strategy and now they sell a computer and a “not a computer” and everyone is scratching their heads.
@elzbethmrgn Millennials also feel embarrassed when they are on their laptop on Mastodon and they take their phone out of their pocket absent-mindedly to check what the little Mastodon is doing.
So we used to have a nanny. When the kid first went to school we had a new parent's information evening where they told us all sorts of boring stuff, some interesting stuff, and concluded with "and after school care is extremely limited so good luck with that goodbye" except said as one word over the space of about a second, the principal then decamped. When we rushed to book afterschool care they could accommodate him Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but not Tuesday or Thursday, so we paid a woman we'll call Jo (because that's her name) to pick him up from school two days a week, and look after him at our place until 6pm. As the years went on, he'd come to get public transport to her house, she'd look after him there while he did homework etc. and bring him home at 6pm. We no longer needed her as of this year, kid is old enough to look after himself.
Last night I get a phone call from Jo, I answer with a quizzical "hello?" and she asks hurriedly if I'm at home. I say yes. She asks if I can help her and I of course tell her to name it, anything. She says to go downstairs and she'll call me back, so I do.
There's a woman downstairs, she's roughly three hundred years old, in a brightly patterned and coloured jump suit. I have bought bottles of milk that weigh more than she looks like she weighs, and height-wise she comes up to roughly my stomach. Jo, who when not looking after kids works for a service that provides in-home care for folks who aren't quite bad enough to be in an old folks' home, got a call at work that one of their clients is locked out. Jo realised she lives in my building and there's a lock box hidden on the ground floor with a code that contains a spare building swipe and front door key.
Jo gives me instructions on how to access the lock box, I retrieve the key and tell the woman "let's get you up to your home" She chatters the whole time, and she's the MOST INTERESTING PERSON EVER. She used to be a ballerina, but a severely curved spine put her out of that. She tells me she weighs 30 kilos (my twelve year old son is 32 kilos I think), and she explains how she smuggled her cat here from France. The cat is called Chatte, which is French for pussy, and she locked herself out looking for an Amazon parcel that had been delivered somewhere she couldn't find.
I get her settled, make sure she knows where her actual key is and she asks, feebly, "would you mind awfully if I had your number?" Absolutely no problem at all, I wrote it down for her. Absolute dame.
Addendum: it turns out this is the woman whose door was bashed down by the fire brigade last week. She rolled on an emergency button in her sleep and didn’t answer when the folks monitoring the button called. She woke up to the fire brigade at the end of her bed and her front door in several pieces. Well she’s got another set of eyes looking out for her now. I wonder if we should set up a phone tree or something.