I recently had similar confounding thoughts about where we're at on the: discovery of wheel ----> self-imposed human annihilation continuum. For a similar reason.
I was assigned a task by our local cycling advocacy group to create some template "letters of support" that people could adopt and use to write a letter of support to send to politicians, etc. for a certain project we were advocating for. I'm pretty good with the pen/keyboard so I was given the task. And then - I had the thought: **I can get an AI to do this for me!** And after a 'chat' with a popular bot, it took me about 2 minutes of prompts and it had output three pretty darn good sample letters for our specific project. I was genuinely impressed at the semi-decent quality. First drafts were garbage, but after some back and forth - not too shabby. And so I gathered those templates and sent them off to the group, forever proud of my new lifehack to advocacy productivity.
I then quickly realized - these AI-generated letters of support are just that easy to create. I could create thousands, if not millions with a really low amount of effort. And it struck me - these letters are absolutely worthless. In a world of supply and demand, these things are in infinite supply. So, that means their 'worth' will always hover around zero.
These three letters I created might fool their intended government targets this time. And they will be sent by real people as we're just offering templates for people to use to create their own. But politicians will come to learn - future correspondence from "constituents" likely won't be from actual constituents...
Mike's article, and my AI experience drives at the same conclusion: in a land of great abundance, the value of things gets heavily distorted very quickly. Bike reviews in general - in great abundance. A bike review I can trust - super scarce. Those Amazon reviews - I've ignored those for quite some time. Hell - I've quit Amazon for a while now. Nothing good comes from shopping on Amazon.
Latest online scam I've uncovered - if you go on Google Maps, and search for hotels in a given area, many of the listings on there for smaller hotels have been claimed by 3rd party websites that resell reservations to these hotels (think Booking.com, etc). So - you can't actually find the hotel you are trying to book's website. At least not easily or at the top of the listings. You do get offered a room, and you can book it (I think) but you are doing so with a 3rd party that takes a cut and will surely offer no help when you reservation isn't found by the real front desk due to a computer glitch...
The future looks pretty gross on many fronts. But what I do look forward to (if we ever get there): due to the scarcity, we restore our value for quality writing like NSMB and others publications. And we'll restore our valuing of time spent in person, with real humans, doing real things. The online life is awfully cheap and in many ways so very worthless.
March 11, 2024, 3:39 p.m. - rockford
I recently had similar confounding thoughts about where we're at on the: discovery of wheel ----> self-imposed human annihilation continuum. For a similar reason. I was assigned a task by our local cycling advocacy group to create some template "letters of support" that people could adopt and use to write a letter of support to send to politicians, etc. for a certain project we were advocating for. I'm pretty good with the pen/keyboard so I was given the task. And then - I had the thought: **I can get an AI to do this for me!** And after a 'chat' with a popular bot, it took me about 2 minutes of prompts and it had output three pretty darn good sample letters for our specific project. I was genuinely impressed at the semi-decent quality. First drafts were garbage, but after some back and forth - not too shabby. And so I gathered those templates and sent them off to the group, forever proud of my new lifehack to advocacy productivity. I then quickly realized - these AI-generated letters of support are just that easy to create. I could create thousands, if not millions with a really low amount of effort. And it struck me - these letters are absolutely worthless. In a world of supply and demand, these things are in infinite supply. So, that means their 'worth' will always hover around zero. These three letters I created might fool their intended government targets this time. And they will be sent by real people as we're just offering templates for people to use to create their own. But politicians will come to learn - future correspondence from "constituents" likely won't be from actual constituents... Mike's article, and my AI experience drives at the same conclusion: in a land of great abundance, the value of things gets heavily distorted very quickly. Bike reviews in general - in great abundance. A bike review I can trust - super scarce. Those Amazon reviews - I've ignored those for quite some time. Hell - I've quit Amazon for a while now. Nothing good comes from shopping on Amazon. Latest online scam I've uncovered - if you go on Google Maps, and search for hotels in a given area, many of the listings on there for smaller hotels have been claimed by 3rd party websites that resell reservations to these hotels (think Booking.com, etc). So - you can't actually find the hotel you are trying to book's website. At least not easily or at the top of the listings. You do get offered a room, and you can book it (I think) but you are doing so with a 3rd party that takes a cut and will surely offer no help when you reservation isn't found by the real front desk due to a computer glitch... The future looks pretty gross on many fronts. But what I do look forward to (if we ever get there): due to the scarcity, we restore our value for quality writing like NSMB and others publications. And we'll restore our valuing of time spent in person, with real humans, doing real things. The online life is awfully cheap and in many ways so very worthless.