Notes from the
AI Underground.

I have been a tech person for a long time and I am, for the first time in maybe fifteen years, genuinely uncertain about what the next decade looks like. Not in a doom way. In a "I don't know where this is really going" way. If that's how I feel ( even though I have all the access and I know all the jargon) I cannot imagine how it feels for the people I love who don't have any of that.

So this is for them. And, honestly, for me. We're going to learn out loud. Mistakes included. No hype. Kevin will keep us honest.

I say thank you to the AI when it helps me…. there are people that say that’s stupid and a waste of AI credits. I say if we really are training the AI on our data, then I want it to learn to be kind.

Got asked at dinner if AI is going to take everyone's job. I said: it's already taken parts of mine, but it’s the hard parts…the repetitive parts… the parts where you need to check a bunch of stuff and hunt for one tiny mistake (and sweat if you don’t find it). Those were parts I didn’t love, so it means what’s left gives me more freedom to do the human parts, the creativity and ideas. The parts left over are the ones I actually like. We'll see if that holds.

The future is not evenly distributed and it is also not evenly explained. We are mostly in the second problem.

Short answer: because every AI app I've built or used assumes you already know what you want. And almost nobody does, yet. Including me.