The genie ain’t goin’ back in

My wife and I have been watching a show on Apple TV+ called “The Studio.” It’s pretty often dryly funny series, starring Seth Rogen and some other great folks including Catherine O’Hara, about a recently-promoted head of a big movie studio with Rogen as the new guy and O’Hara as his recently-deposed boss.

It’s hilarious and also pretty regularly uncomfortable to watch because Rogen’s character is a complete putz who makes most everything worse because of his deep lack of confidence and its parallel need for recognition and approval. The discomfort comes because I see myself in the character way too often.

A recent episode revolved around the efforts by Rogen and his fellow executives to ensure that they not appear racist due to casting decisions made on a movie that revolves around the Kool-Aid Man. Really. After a couple of younger, key and very woke writers decide that their involvement might be seen a cultural appropriation and quit, the director told Rogen that he either needed a few million more dollars to replace them quickly or would need to use AI on some of the animated aspects of the movie.

And that decision, not the racial profile of the cast, is what ends up casting Rogen as the villain in the public eye.

I’ve been thinking a lot about AI. For those of you who have not been thinking about it, you better get started. We are about to undergo what will probably be the most profoundly disruptive decade in the history of mankind.

That is not hyperbole. I have long been an advocate of the ideas put forward by folks like Ray Kurzweil about the exponential nature of how much knowledge the species has about the world and universe. The idea is not just that we learn more over time, it’s that the rate of change is accelerating and will continue to do so until the curve on the graph becomes a straight line shooting upward.

I first started to follow this probably a decade ago when what has become ChatGPT was still a an experimental, non-public piece of software that was shown to very few people. When I read the newspaper story about a city council meeting that the AI spit out in just a couple of minutes and saw zero red flags in terms of what I would look for when editing this type of story, it scared the poop out of me. And that was a decade ago.

It’s being used for things both profound and silly and people who know about such things are saying that the next generation, due to be released in the coming months, will not only be smarter than the smartest person in most rooms, it will be “smarter” and capable of more than the smartest person in any room.

I don’t use it for generating any kind of written content. And maybe that is because I know that the machine is coming for my job probably sooner than I would really like. But my wife uses it for help crafting emails and marketing presentations all the time. She’ll write something and then ask Bard or Grok or whichever one she is using to punch it up and make it clearer and more impactful. And she ends up going with the new version most of the time.

I used it recently for help creating a produced version of a song I wrote. I gave the AI a “bedroom demo” that I had recorded and asked it to create a cover version. I was basically asking the machine to create an interpretation of something I wrote. Which is really not that much different from how my wife uses it.

The AI used everything that I had created and modernized the guitar tone a little and created a new vocal. But the melody and the lyrics and the chords were all mine. It even played all of the guitar parts the same way I did. But then…

It got to the bridge, which I wrote as a sung section. And it turned it into a spoken word piece with minimal music and no beat under it. And, as much as I hated to admit it at first, it was a great idea. And it was an idea I would never have come up with on my own. I actually released it as a single.

This kind of use probably feels more on the silly side. Not as silly as the literally millions of people who have AI “friends” and even girlfriends and boyfriends that are just a picture of a person on a screen that they converse with. But soon, these are going to be generated video and then 3D representations to feel “real” to most people.

People are using AI as their therapist. And, honestly, it often does as least as good as a human in the same position.

On the more profound side, it is creating new computer code that is going to make the march of digital technology even faster by many orders of magnitude than it already is. The rapid advance of biotechnology likely means that people in their 20s now will see their life expectancy increase by 20% and way more than that if they are wealthy.

But it is also gonna throw huge numbers of people out of work. In some ways, it is gonna be the revenge of the forgotten class of people who work with their hands and who have been marginalized as we have watched a multi-decade transfer of wealth and influence to —almost exclusively —“knowledge workers”.

Until they figure out how to make cheap robots (sooner than you think) to do jobs like carpentry and HVAC work and miners, these largely forgotten folks are gonna see a bit of their traditional pull returned. But only for a little while.

It’s not just me and a TV show that only 10% of people with streaming services can even watch. Nor is it just the super smart and already rich set like Elon Musk. The dude who was just elected as the new pope, talked about AI in his first public address. And he reportedly picked the name Leo because the last Leo was pope during — and a big critic of — the Industrial Revolution.

And we are in a revolution at least that big, but that is going to take place in a matter of a few years and not the better part of a century. We all need to not just try to ignore it. It is not gonna go away.

I see a lot of people who spend the second half of their life railing against change. Lots of them in Boulder City. And I have to wonder just how much of the “never change anything ever” impulse is less about getting back to some old ideal than it is about running away from change. But this is a change you are not gonna be able to run from.

Learn to use the tools. Figure out how they can supplement what you are good at. Teach your kids and grandkids how to be resilient. Look at it this way. The days of knowing, when they are children or teenagers, what they want to be when they grow up are gone. What they want to do may not even exist as an option before they can grow up. You may send your kids to college to prepare for a career that may not even exist after they graduate in four or five years. It may not exist in the next six months.

None of us got a choice in whether or not we wanted to let this genie out of the bottle. But he or she or it or they or whatever pronoun is appropriate is now a reality of our existence. And the bottle has been shattered. We are gonna have to learn to live together.