A variety of steep and very sinister job reports has just come out. It appears that the government was deluding itself for several months and when they got things in order, the job situation actually looks really bad. It's somewhat obvious what's happening: AI is taking jobs. Nobody's doing anything about it. It'll only get worse. It's a major crisis for society.
It's ok when the jobless population rises a little; the economy adjusts. When it rises a lot, people complain hard and crime goes up. But when it rises too much it can cause a real crisis. If people can't get jobs what are they supposed to do? There is no safety net anymore; it can only be trouble.
It's a much higher class of people that are getting kicked out in the street this time around. Usually it's a trickle down and the poorer wretches get tossed into the street while the better dressed ones manage by just moving down a level to more doable, poorly-paying jobs. This could happen to some degree to the vast number of middle-managers, bean-counters, analysts, stock nerds, etc., whose jobs require thinking but not creative genius. AI's got their jobs, if not today, tomorrow. Society has to find something for them to do. Nobody is at the helm; nothing is being done.
A universal income is an obvious solution, but would be politically almost impossible, like guaranteed health care. Anything that sounds like socialism, people don't want anything to do with it. Yet the result therefore is that it's rugged individualism for the 80% who have no jobs and no hope of getting them, and government handouts for the ultra-wealthy who mostly want to just put their party in there and keep the tax cuts coming. very quickly we'll have a tinderbox here. It's not sustainable.
Our system doesn't ask, "what changes will this cause and how are we prepared for them?" It asks, "how can I integrate this into my business before the other guy, and make a lot of money?" That's because the system is US. Nobody's at the helm. Nobody has figured out what all these unemployed people are going to do.
I have a plan, actually. I don't want to sound overly dark and cynical and pessimistic even though that's the true me, I think it's big trouble. But here's my plan. Anyone who can ride a bicycle, who is young, has working knees, is in any kind of shape at all, can carry around a portable generator. You stop on a street corner, or even in the woods somewhere, and set it up, and start pedaling and creating power. It would not be too hard to make this machine but more important, to make it portable, durable, and legal. You're unemployed? Go create power so that people can charge their phone, stay warm, or watch the telly when the power's off. If the data centers are going to eat up all the power, what can we do? Make it more democratic, so that even the kids can make money. It doesn't matter if the power you generate from a single workout is only say a buck or two or change. That will be enough for legions of starving people and will be a living for lots of poor people who live from one meal to another. And when the power goes off, there you are.
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/la-parents-kids-school-issued-ipad-chromebook-los-angeles-rcna245624
Kingkade, Tyler. (2025, Dec. 5). Parents say school-issued iPads are causing chaos with their kids. NBC News.
What happens when you give an entire district of students iPads? In this article, LA and its students are the guinea pigs. It turns out the district had no idea what would happen, and now they are scrambling to repair the damage.
To me one of the interesting sidelights is how easy it is for students to skirt the various controls they have to prevent them from spending too much time or doing the wrong things. They use proxy servers, set up dummy accounts, etc., and this makes it hard for the district to track what actually happens.
It seems that the majority of students will survive, if not get some advantages from having pretty much constant access to the web and the digital world. But remember, that book hasn't been written. What happens when you give an entire generation iPhones? We'll find out. This is among the first generations to try.
Kingkade, Tyler. (2025, Dec. 5). Parents say school-issued iPads are causing chaos with their kids. NBC News.
What happens when you give an entire district of students iPads? In this article, LA and its students are the guinea pigs. It turns out the district had no idea what would happen, and now they are scrambling to repair the damage.
To me one of the interesting sidelights is how easy it is for students to skirt the various controls they have to prevent them from spending too much time or doing the wrong things. They use proxy servers, set up dummy accounts, etc., and this makes it hard for the district to track what actually happens.
It seems that the majority of students will survive, if not get some advantages from having pretty much constant access to the web and the digital world. But remember, that book hasn't been written. What happens when you give an entire generation iPhones? We'll find out. This is among the first generations to try.
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
AI
A lot is being made of AI. Writers are terrified. All kinds of people will be out of work as soon as we figure out how to harness it correctly. It will be a lot like the calculator.
This blog is basically about how we rush into these things like you would a marriage when you haven't really thought through all the consequences. Some of the consequences are less desirable than others but doesn't matter, too late, we did it, we lost.
Back in the day, people used to memorize whole books, like the Iliad, but they lost that skill when the printing press was invented. We just didn't need the skill anymore. In my generation people forgot how to add, subtract, mulltiply and divide large numbers, because everyone had a calculator and it wasn't necessary. Nobody would argue with me that it was not a useful skill to have, to do these things, yet most people I knew didn't bother learning. The same with GPS. Why bother knowing which way is north, if your phone knows and you can ask it?
I have this one idea about using AI effectively. I could write 45 bioographies, one of each president, in the amount of time it takes to write out the request. If somebody reads this before I actually do it I'm screwed but oh well. Those who use AI well will be at a huge advantage.
One thing I can tell by keeping my eye on the book marketing situation is that there are thousands more books now, probably a thousand new ones per day. A HUGE number of books is just being piled into a crowded market. If I could write 45 books in ten minutes, why not? Or at least set them up, collect the facts, organize. AI can do all that. I just need to be good at setting it up.
I'm all for the married life, for better or for worse. At least I'm reflecting on the morality of it.
This blog is basically about how we rush into these things like you would a marriage when you haven't really thought through all the consequences. Some of the consequences are less desirable than others but doesn't matter, too late, we did it, we lost.
Back in the day, people used to memorize whole books, like the Iliad, but they lost that skill when the printing press was invented. We just didn't need the skill anymore. In my generation people forgot how to add, subtract, mulltiply and divide large numbers, because everyone had a calculator and it wasn't necessary. Nobody would argue with me that it was not a useful skill to have, to do these things, yet most people I knew didn't bother learning. The same with GPS. Why bother knowing which way is north, if your phone knows and you can ask it?
I have this one idea about using AI effectively. I could write 45 bioographies, one of each president, in the amount of time it takes to write out the request. If somebody reads this before I actually do it I'm screwed but oh well. Those who use AI well will be at a huge advantage.
One thing I can tell by keeping my eye on the book marketing situation is that there are thousands more books now, probably a thousand new ones per day. A HUGE number of books is just being piled into a crowded market. If I could write 45 books in ten minutes, why not? Or at least set them up, collect the facts, organize. AI can do all that. I just need to be good at setting it up.
I'm all for the married life, for better or for worse. At least I'm reflecting on the morality of it.
Monday, July 29, 2024
Newton-Rex, Ed. (2024, July 27). Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/27/harm-ai-artificial-intelligence-backlash-human-labour.
This article is good because it lists carefully the best reasons people are opposed to AI, and it lists carefully the different places the new Luddite movement is taking hold. When they put cones on the driverless taxis, that's a pretty clear protest, isn't it?
The one thing I'll say about the new Luddite movement is that it's got wide support. I say this as a writer, a retired professional ESL teacher most of whose friends are very similar - the people I know are almost universally hostile toward AI. And it doesn't get any more generous as people know less about it. We can all sense that it's taking jobs away, and taking the soul out of the world we live in.
What has saved us so far is the law(?) that one must disclose when one is using AI. I'm not sure it's even a law, but it seems to be a standard expectation. The people who do use it, and disclose it, find themselves the target of hostility and open rejection. People don't want it.
One other thing I liked about the article was the recognition that modern Luddites, as well as the original ones, don't want elimination of the new technology so much as they simply want to be included in the discussion of how and when it's used. Is that too much to ask? We know coming into this that the new tech will railroad all the existing systems if left unchecked; we'll be doomed. I'm already feeling like half of what I read is soulless; on the other end it doesn't care who I am. I heartily prefer a writer who is talking to me. Is that so unusual?
I consider myself a new Luddite, if that's how it's defined. I'm just in favor of our at least trying to find out what we will lose in the process. If you really know what you'll lose, and do it anyway, then it's like marriage, in my opinion. For better or worse.
This article is good because it lists carefully the best reasons people are opposed to AI, and it lists carefully the different places the new Luddite movement is taking hold. When they put cones on the driverless taxis, that's a pretty clear protest, isn't it?
The one thing I'll say about the new Luddite movement is that it's got wide support. I say this as a writer, a retired professional ESL teacher most of whose friends are very similar - the people I know are almost universally hostile toward AI. And it doesn't get any more generous as people know less about it. We can all sense that it's taking jobs away, and taking the soul out of the world we live in.
What has saved us so far is the law(?) that one must disclose when one is using AI. I'm not sure it's even a law, but it seems to be a standard expectation. The people who do use it, and disclose it, find themselves the target of hostility and open rejection. People don't want it.
One other thing I liked about the article was the recognition that modern Luddites, as well as the original ones, don't want elimination of the new technology so much as they simply want to be included in the discussion of how and when it's used. Is that too much to ask? We know coming into this that the new tech will railroad all the existing systems if left unchecked; we'll be doomed. I'm already feeling like half of what I read is soulless; on the other end it doesn't care who I am. I heartily prefer a writer who is talking to me. Is that so unusual?
I consider myself a new Luddite, if that's how it's defined. I'm just in favor of our at least trying to find out what we will lose in the process. If you really know what you'll lose, and do it anyway, then it's like marriage, in my opinion. For better or worse.
Friday, February 23, 2024
AI takes over
A few writer friends of mine are upset that AI is taking over literally everything. They point out that whenever a grocery store puts in self-checkout, someone loses their job. Writers then are endangered too, because so many things are just being written by AI these days.
The obvious solution is to have a kind of revolution where everyone, led by the writers, refuse to accept AI in a kind of Luddite way and demand that only real people be allowed to write stories or copy for a survey or tourist brochure. The last one of these was actually the Luddite movement, where workers protested machines taking over their apparel factory and destroyed some of the machines. This isn't going to happen with AI, and in fact, I see AI taking over gradually and insidiously for a while with no one even noticing it except a few out-of-work writers. Why wring your hands over a change that is inevitable? I say inevitable because as long as these programs are out there there will be people who ue them to make their lives easier or more to the point to have a competitive advantage over some other schmucks who are over there in the corner writing their own copy. The programs are free as I write; I could use AI to fill this blog (hey, that's an idea) and generate thousands of key words while it's at it, ensuring that the world comes to my doorstep.
The point of this blog is not so much that we should start a revolution that will prevent innovation from taking over, but rather, that these change come with this kind of inevitable predestiny and the whole culture adopts the changes without really thinking about what possible consequences there might be. We not only don't identify them, we don't even question them, we make no effort to discern what skills we humans are losing in the process, and there is no group in place to even look at the process and do something about what might be lost. It is like going blindly into a marriage.
I read an article that said that grocery stores are walking back on their innovation of self-checkout because it is costing them too much money. People steal, often inadvertantly, and it costs them just as many store employees to watch you do it yourself as it used to take to do it for you. The stores invested thousands in the machines and now will have to start over. Well, I could have told them that having me do it would lead to and individualized disaster whereby I make mistakes left and right and who even knows? It was their mistake and now they have to pay. And this may play out all over and with other machines as well. They aren't always all roses.
Don't look to me for expertise in what happens when soulless communication floods the market until everyone assumes all writing is soulless or done by machines. To some degree there may be a walkback like the grocery stores are experiencing, but in general innovation is inevitable and will not be questioned by anyone except a few remote souls like me and a few very angry unemployed writers like my friends. It'll just happen and that will be it. Certain human skills will be lost like the ability to add large figures or the ability to memorize long stories like the Iliad (one result of the innovation of printing). Things get lost. People move on. They may look back at this little window of time and say, people could have stopped it, but nobody even thought of it.
The obvious solution is to have a kind of revolution where everyone, led by the writers, refuse to accept AI in a kind of Luddite way and demand that only real people be allowed to write stories or copy for a survey or tourist brochure. The last one of these was actually the Luddite movement, where workers protested machines taking over their apparel factory and destroyed some of the machines. This isn't going to happen with AI, and in fact, I see AI taking over gradually and insidiously for a while with no one even noticing it except a few out-of-work writers. Why wring your hands over a change that is inevitable? I say inevitable because as long as these programs are out there there will be people who ue them to make their lives easier or more to the point to have a competitive advantage over some other schmucks who are over there in the corner writing their own copy. The programs are free as I write; I could use AI to fill this blog (hey, that's an idea) and generate thousands of key words while it's at it, ensuring that the world comes to my doorstep.
The point of this blog is not so much that we should start a revolution that will prevent innovation from taking over, but rather, that these change come with this kind of inevitable predestiny and the whole culture adopts the changes without really thinking about what possible consequences there might be. We not only don't identify them, we don't even question them, we make no effort to discern what skills we humans are losing in the process, and there is no group in place to even look at the process and do something about what might be lost. It is like going blindly into a marriage.
I read an article that said that grocery stores are walking back on their innovation of self-checkout because it is costing them too much money. People steal, often inadvertantly, and it costs them just as many store employees to watch you do it yourself as it used to take to do it for you. The stores invested thousands in the machines and now will have to start over. Well, I could have told them that having me do it would lead to and individualized disaster whereby I make mistakes left and right and who even knows? It was their mistake and now they have to pay. And this may play out all over and with other machines as well. They aren't always all roses.
Don't look to me for expertise in what happens when soulless communication floods the market until everyone assumes all writing is soulless or done by machines. To some degree there may be a walkback like the grocery stores are experiencing, but in general innovation is inevitable and will not be questioned by anyone except a few remote souls like me and a few very angry unemployed writers like my friends. It'll just happen and that will be it. Certain human skills will be lost like the ability to add large figures or the ability to memorize long stories like the Iliad (one result of the innovation of printing). Things get lost. People move on. They may look back at this little window of time and say, people could have stopped it, but nobody even thought of it.
Sunday, January 14, 2024
Keep up with ChatGPT
The first four or five paragraphs of this article I found hilarious:
Mahdawi, Arwa. (2024, Jan. 12). What is Going on with ChatGPT? The Gueardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/12/chatgpt-problems-lazy.
Still processing it. I may comment later.
Mahdawi, Arwa. (2024, Jan. 12). What is Going on with ChatGPT? The Gueardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/12/chatgpt-problems-lazy.
Still processing it. I may comment later.
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