Some New Bullshit We're Being Fed On AI

"Authentic people."

Hey: My name is Ted. I write about four times/week here these days. I use my Substack monies basically for YouTubeTV, Hulu, dog food, twice/month stops at a local brewery (Martin House), and some penny stock stuff on eTrade. If you like my writing or some of these ideas and want to help me out with that to the tune of $3.45/month, cool. If not, also cool. You can also add me on LinkedIn, if that feels like a thing you do.

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There are a million and one hot takes on what AI means, another 2.4M on the “future of work” (always a bullshit-y topic), another several million people just trying to make ends meet with their service/retail job and not paying attention to any of this shit, and a dozen more buckets. AI is some form of a moral panic, but in reality it’s the same shit we consistently go through, but in slightly-different packaging: basically, there’s new technology that no one asked for explicitly, and it will change aspects of our lives and mental health, and in the process about 400 very specific guys globally will get an extra insane layer of rich, and the rest of us will have to deal with the pieces that shatter. You can say the same thing about iPhones, honestly. It’s different, but it’s not that much different.

Well, recently there’s been some type of “techno-optimist” idea — usually pitched by consultants on podcasts, oftentimes the same consultants who consult for guys who will approach trillionaire status via AI — that the rise of AI will return us all to authentic and communicative roots, and we will all run outside, grab our neighbors by the hand, and skip down our street, discussing our most vulnerable and deep places.

Simon Sinek, who I have embedded a troubling amount of times since I began writing weekly, made this point several times across this video:

Let’s unpack this a little bit.

Wouldn’t this have happened with “the phones?”