Unsettled
Wherein we find ourselves in the morass of our own making
If one were to look at my LinkedIn or Reddit feed (or really any of my social feeds these days), you’d be struck by the general tenor of things. This is what it looks like:
Today, it’s Anthropic phoning it in; tomorrow it’ll be OpenAI. People casually forget that Elon’s a fascist, but Grok? My God, it’s either the second coming of Agentic Jesus or it’s propagating CSAM. Chinese open-weight models still occupy the value/capability leaderboard, but how can we trust them?
Ledes are buried, opinions are writ large, “experts” disagree on almost every dimension, academia is off in a corner pretending they’re not interested in or funded by what big AI is doing, and the conflation of all the different sovereign AI companies/entities/consortia/whatever gather in the halls to determine the next turn of the wheel.
AGI is coming tomorrow, not today, and buckle up, buttercup, HuggingFace is getting invaded by agentic assassins let loose from the padded rooms of the AI Labs. Our overlords: Jensen, Altman, Musk, Zuck, and Dario continue to promise the untold wealth and deliver tin. Lawsuits, legislation, fines, and fuckery continue at a rapid pace.
It’s fascinating. And we’re caught in the middle of it all just attempting to “tokenmaxx” because someway, somehow, our 9–5 became an every-waking-moment operation.
We’re solving point-problems and claiming universal application. We’re creating code snippets and effluvia, exploiting dusty repos of yore and leaving the carcasses of applications lying about like we’re Frankenstein assembling his monster (with obvious apologies to Shelley, who would be aghast at how we’ve appropriated her story for more modern fitment).
It makes you wonder, really, as to what the hell we’re doing anymore. We’re walking dichotomies: raging against the encroachment of machines while simultaneously handing over the basic operations of our lives to the very thing we hate. The “purity” of the analog, the precursor to all of this modernity, is captured in maker movements, in the esoteric and unusual. We’re constantly wading against a current that threatens to sweep us into the maelstrom of *waving broadly* whatever this is. We argue and opine, legislate and regulate, and continue on, slightly crooked, towards this event horizon that we claim isn’t the Matrix. Life and Art, am I right?
Listen, I’m unsure when we lost our sense of agency. I’m unsure when we, as a collective society of individuals made up of a fascinating mosaic of the bent, broken, and blessed, lost our sense of selves. We’re content to cede our humanity to the next “thing” that ostensibly compresses hours to minutes. Our act of creation (pro or otherwise) is now clinical, or relegated to museums or webpages that act as neon lights beckoning us into the back alleys of society.
We create nonprofits to show our good social intentions while simultaneously ensuring our soft diplomacy is seen, burning bright for the moths that inevitably flock to it. It’d be bemusing if it weren’t terrifying how well we’ve learned to pantomime compassion and care.
Before you call me a “doomer” or some sort of Luddite, let me be clear: not everything is bad. The thin veneer of shit only extends so far. While the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, technology is being applied to solve real human problems. These aren’t just human optimization issues; they’re quality-of-life problems. AI for assistive technology, for example, can lead to positive outcomes. The promise of AI-assisted driving via ADAS to reduce or eliminate traffic fatalities continues to loom over the auto industry. We’ve never been more connected due to the prevalence of LEO satellites. We’re making strides toward some distant sociologically important technical evolution.
Pretty sure we’ve written this story before. Each anthropological age has been accompanied by a social, cultural, or material revolution. Bronze to Iron to Roman to Renaissance. Each has been accompanied by its own philosophical underpinnings, its own religion, its own self-determinism towards becoming greater than the sum of its parts. American idealism (or indeed any Western capitalist ideology) is a perfect embodiment of this, presuming that the “I” is greater than the “We.”
It’s all unsettled, ripe for shaking up and vetting. As much as we’re making strides towards something, we’re also staving off the inevitable conversation that we’re going to need to have with ourselves. To be courageous enough to even start requires voices made up of the fundamental elements of society willing to step into the aisles, the byways, the digital back alleys of our world, and challenge the status quo.
I suppose all of this unsettles me. It’s far removed from the idylls of farming in the Irish countryside. It’s easy enough to discount as I ponder these things from the paddock, horses underfoot. I can walk away at any moment, but I'm inextricably drawn to the conversation and caucus that will be built. I wonder, in light of yesterday’s post on Trusting the Process, if I’m fully engaged in that trust. Does my faith in humanity, in God, in our collective abilities to overcome, survive the test that trust requires?
I have questions, I have opinions, and I maybe even have answers. But I’m one, not all, of the voices you should hear from. I’m a veteran of industry, of experiences that are varied enough to form a wonderful tapestry of insight, but I’m just a single candle. I imagine the future where we are a bonfire together, changing the unsettled for the dependable, the pseudo-altruism for compassion, the world for all, not just the few. Can you?
May it ever be so.
