While real people worry about AI job loss, Silicon Valley uses hucksterism to dump workers
PLUS FIVE QUESTIONS about recent technology stories, a follow up on drones over the eastern seaboard, Headline Head Scratchers, and Afters about cubits
It has been 3 months since I started writing on Substack and it has been enlightening for me. It was hard getting back to meeting a weekly deadline (which will improve in the new year) but I really enjoyed the researching and writing. Based on some feedback, I will be making changes to kick 2025 off with a revitalized direction. I will brand around TechTonic, Exploring the Societal Shifts caused by Technology. MMT will be shorter, completely focused on technology and will start to arrive actually in the morning. Though not until next week. I promise.
MAIN COURSE: One AI company goes all in coming after your job
With absolutely no sweet message about how AI will add more jobs than it supplants
Hard on the heels of last week’s article about Agentforce helping your business organization create AI collaborators (isn’t this what we called East German citizens who “helped” the Stasi?), we now have billboards appearing in San Francisco telling organizations to stop hiring humans. All compliments of a AI company called Artisan. Their positive name refers to the various AI agents who work lovingly with the care and vision of true craftspeople (but without the people obviously). But this is part of the long term trend of semantic manipulation, to use a word or phrase that is benign and charming sounding to misrepresent what it actually refers to. So these aren’t nasty AI secret agents taking your jobs (and probably surveilling others in the workplace in order to cross sell more agents) but enchanting artisans, collaborating for the good of your company.
So what does Artisan actually do? I reviewed their website but it had so many distracting moving parts it was obviously optimized for AI agents doing research. Their main product is an AI "sales agent" called Ava that supposedly automates the work of finding and messaging potential customers. The company claims it works with "no human input" and costs 96% less than hiring a human for the same role. They started with the sales function because - as we all know - sales people are unethical bullshitters so the erratic nature of AI to make things up through hallucinations brilliantly turns a systemic bug into a feature.
But let’s unmask the hard truth behind this stunt. It is obviously a desperate attempt at getting attention and hopefully revenues for a VC pushed AI start-up who must make their numbers quickly, in order to get another round of financing. Maybe the next generation Pavel, an AI financing agent, can help them close the deal.
Secondi: FIVE QUESTIONS about recent technology stories
It’s now known that the killer of the health insurer in New York used a 3-D printed gun. I am not comforted by PR assurances that this seldom happens and enthusiasts have previously printed silencers. Besides raising a question about why “enthusiasts” need a suppressor, isn’t this showing a way around gun regulations in every country?
Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI founder, said at a conference that "superintelligent AI" will be unpredictable. He also overused the hot new expression agentic. He also said, “they may want rights”. This is scary as we have never dealt well with other humans over rights, without killing each other. Whose agency will the superintelligent AI be following?
If you are experiencing behavioural and mental health issues caused by the isolation, polarization, and harassment of social media, comes a wellness game where you sing by yourself in Virtual Reality to help you out. Seriously, what pitchdeck got this idea funded by VCs? What’s wrong with the shower?
Perhaps you saw the still images - like the picture above - generated in videos created by Sora, OpenAI’s “innovative text-to-video” product. Evidently these type of mistakes were well known before its recent launch. Isn’t this taking release the product and let the users work through the bugs strategy a little too far?
In a directly related story, evidently Sora is going to democratize the film industry. This means now any dufus working in their basement somewhere can let their (limited) creative vision loose and create a video (guaranteed to emphasize fights and superheroes) at whim. It doesn’t have anything to do with the film industry workers of all types of competencies and skillsets who will be displaced from jobs. Is this what democracy really means?
AI Can Do It All! Oops
Extra Helping: Drones Now Seem to be Covering the East Coast
Your cub reporter broke…er, spotted this story a few tonics ago. Sounded concerning to me from a “protect the nation” standpoint but what do I know. Since then there have been more and more sightings, not all as disciplined in their observations as the first lot were. Now it is starting to appear more often everywhere because they have been spotted near NYC, the near literal home of every legacy media or independent journalist online. They are all responding jovially, as they are part of the copycat generation:
Politicians, however are taking it more seriously. "That's crazy," Gonzalez (Representative from Texas) said. Closely followed by, "That's madness" after finding out seemingly not one official protection agency knows what the devil they are. (Just to remind you that some of these are as big as trucks and collectively fly in very disciplined formations)
In a related story, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned flying drones over president-elect Donald Trump's golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It has nothing to do with the drones as Lil Donnie was just playing a round and he shanks like crazy.
HEADLINE HEADSCRATCHERS
The leadership provided by Silly Valley is enormous, guiding the world to a different sort of war. Drone vs. Drone sounds like something from Mad magazine circa 1960s. Maybe you New Yorkers need to be a bit more concerned about truck sized drones.
This headline is a bit old but obviously not referring to the X that was formerly known as Twitter, as it was never profitable or safe
Afters
From the redoubtable Nellie Bowles in last Friday’s TGIF (her humour is the source of inspiration for Monday Morning Tonic):
“The quantum chip also drastically reduces errors incurred as it uses more qubits, which is a unit of measurement I totally know about and am familiar with”
All this time I thought it was an ancient unit of measure, roughly 18 inches.
Thanks much for those of you who read this far. I certainly appreciate any comments that you have. Share it as widely as possible because I want to catch up to Nellie and TGIF who have….. Checks notes, 10 million subscribers.