I don’t get AI (as it is being pedaled and pushed today).
Granted, I know that if one has a presence (of any form) on the internet, or uses a smartphone or a computer…We are all using AI (and possibly somewhat unwillingly or unknowingly).
I miss the MS Word paperclip. I miss when I could open a document and not have a bunch of bars pop up – keeping the document from loading. Every one of those bars tells me “This is a long document, do you want me to summarize it for you?” No. I want to read it. I opened it so I could read it. It’s like the creepy salesman that trails you in the store. “I’m here to help!” And bother me. And keep me from doing what I want to do which is walk around peacefully.
In this situation, you can’t just leave the store. Unless you do want to go live as a recluse under a rock, which is something I’ve always been tempted to do anyway.
The “selling point” of AI is all that it can do for you. Make your PowerPoint slides and write emails. I’ve heard that people are building personal assistants out of AI to make appointments and reservations.
Band aid on a gaping chest wound. (It’s a metaphor I use a for a lot of things.)
Do we really need to make Power Point Decks? Really, really, really, really? Are we sure? Couldn’t we just get away with just, I don’t know, NOT presenting with decks if we don’t want to? Personally, I think we should all go back to the elementary school science fairs where you had the tri-fold poster board and pasted images and wrote in your own handwriting. Way more interesting to look at.
Those emails that you don’t want to write…do they really need to be written? Is there a way to maybe – just not? Maybe you stop using email (I know, I know, hear me out) or just let that email response go. Maybe you make it a phone call, a face to face interaction or maybe you do nothing. Maybe you don’t have to ask AI to write an email for you. Maybe you just let yourself be in all your realness and stop worrying about saying or doing the wrong thing. Or don’t do it at all.
As for personal assistants, well, I understand that a bit more. I also hate calling people and figuring stuff out. Still, you can’t spend 2 minutes going to the online reservation system or to their severely overworked and underpaid support staff (who usually need that job to literally survive their day to day)? But you’ll spend hours on building a bot that may or may not work, depending on the moment? Instead of helping out that person working that job just trying to get by and trying to feel more human in a world trying to rid ourselves of all humanness?
Let me be clear: AI is NOT solving problems. It’s keeping us from solving the ones we already have. It’s creating more.
It is promising to automate stuff that we really shouldn’t be doing in the first place. And/or making it easier to ignore what are very real problems to the human beings around us. And then when it doesn’t work (or destroys a community) there are more problems to add on top of the ones already there.
There’s a simple solution to a lot of this. Stop doing things no one wants to do anyway is the first. The second is actually paying the amazing support people who keep the company running. A beyond living wage, not the pennies we pay support staff. I would know. That’s what I used to do. And now everyone is running AI so they don’t have to pay people all – as if it’s the solution. It’s not.
Most admins (again, I am one) love what they do, are amazing at it and keep dealing with crappy pay because they care. Then one day they wake up and realize they have been abused and underpaid and go elsewhere. Soon everyone scrambling to fill thousands of holes that they never realized this person did because it was so flawless and unseen that they never had to say a word. And for some reason, that work is worth nothing while someone gets on a social media app and says a few words and gets millions.
Admin and support staff should be the second highest paid position at a company. Want to know everything? Where the bodies are buried? How things keep running so you feel like you are constantly catered to and taken care of? The company always runs fine on a day to day without a CEO, but when an admin takes a week off – chaos abounds. So really, who is in charge and running that company?
AI isn’t selling anything that actually supports people or business. It keeps us trapped in tasks and systems that we all know are stupid, a waste of time, energy and money. Most importantly, it keeps us trapped in a system that we all know is unfair and doesn’t support or give credit to those doing all the emotional and emotional labor and heavy lifting (Not surprisingly this all falls mostly on women and minorities.)
I don’t use any voice recognition technology. I’ve locked down my current phone as much as I can. When my mother took a picture since she said it could identify the plants, it gave us a wild answer – “Plant” Thanks AI. I really needed you for that. I’m not wasting time asking the drunk guy who stole all his “knowledge” from others without understanding what he was doing. You can have knowledge but only humans, humans who cares and know other humans have wisdom.
No wonder it’s all chaos. And I want no part of it as much as I possibly can.
