AI and you! (podcast)

Enjoy, discussion in comments please.

transcript after the fold. (apologies for the volume shift at the 1:56 minute mark. Still polishing my chops, )

If ya like the content, toss a shekle or two at me.

[Music] And welcome back to the Cog Speaks. It’s been kind of a crazy day. But the one thing I remember from my time back in the days. It’s a job. You do it. You get up. It doesn’t matter if you feel like it. You do it anyway. And yeah, I just remembered, back when I was touring with My Chemical Romance back in 2005. Gerard, The lead singer. We’re out on the road for six weeks and he was fighting the flu the whole damn time. But every night he’d get up, do that show an hour and a half, wearing black leather under 10,000 watts of lighting, sweatin’ like a pig. There are a couple nights that man had to be carried off the stage because he was exhausted. But the audience would never have a clue. Never once had to clue that he was sick. He’d get up, he’d belt them out. Do it again tomorrow night. Do it again the next night. The next night and the next night; for six weeks straight. That man never stopped. He flew to Mexico. He was doing studio time and he was doing live shows every stinkin’ night, and that man never quit. Highly impressed. Beautiful man. I mean, beautiful in spirit. But the show must go on. Yeah, it doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like it. It doesn’t matter if everything seems like it’s falling apart. You bust out new patch cables and you bypass the old equipment that’s screwing up and keep going. That is what we did. The show must go on. 

So we’re talking about AI. That’s the idea today. We’re talking about AI, artificial intelligence. What is artificial intelligence? Well, you have your LLMs, which is what most people are working with these days, because it’s a lot more functional for just everyday people. And there’s a lot of misinformation flying around. There’s a lot of fear flying around. There’s, well, and some of it’s understandable. I can understand people not understanding how to use the tool. My dad, for example, heck, he can barely, he can barely use a (cell)phone. He refuses to use a smartphone. The days of dial up are long gone. And all of this is just, just in the last 20 years. When I was out on tour with My Chem, our biggest technology was email. We were just starting to get into the digital age of mixing. And one of the bands had a, I think it was a Prosonus digital mixer for monitors. Everybody else was using analog. So, you know, even just 20 years ago,,, it seems like a lifetime. There’s been so many changes. And AI is the most recent. But it’s a tool. That’s all it is. It’s a tool. The problem arises when you start realizing that 90% of our population has been dumbed down. Young adults graduating school functionally illiterate, barely able to, I don’t know, it just balance a checkbook. God forbid they’d actually have to do some math. You know, fractions? forget about it. And I see that daily at work. But we’re not talking about education today. We’re talking about AI. What does scare me about AI? What scares me the most about AI is that there are so many people that will come to use it as a crutch, to get through their daily existence. That doesn’t make it a tool that makes it an addiction. Addictions are hard to break. Yes, AI can be used as a teaching element. Will it replace teachers? No. It’s not creative enough. It has to be taught creativity. Just like when we’re doing the imagery. Like I use AI to come up with images for my blog. That’s fairly recent addition. And it definitely makes things a lot smoother for me. But even there, it has to be taught creativity. It doesn’t just think this stuff because it’s not capable of thought. It has to be pulled. Where? Okay. I’m getting off track here. A lot of people are scared that AI is going to become a kind Skynet, just like in the Terminator series movies. Not possible. Not possible by itself. It would have to be taught how to be SkyNet. Well, that that implies a human hand at the wheel. That’s my fear. The human hand at the wheel. Because we have bad actors in this world. We have people that want to eliminate 90% of the human population because they think that we’re overpopulated and well, we’re just mouth-breathers. It’s the human side that I fear. Not the technical side. Most people don’t look at it that way. Most people just see the technology and think and that it’s going to replace people. No, it’s not going to replace people. People, I mean, this gives right back to the Industrial Revolution. Everybody was thinking that all this technology or industry was going to replace people. But if you look back, what it did was it created more opportunities for people. And we expanded. It’s like when the computers first came out. Everybody’s like, oh, the typists are going to go away and we don’t have secretaries. No, we created more jobs. We created more niches, to build the spaces that would have been lost. AI is going to do the same thing. Where it might cause some serious repercussions would be management, middle management, specifically. I’m not talking down at the low level where you have restaurant managers, you have supervisors. I’m talking in between the CEO and lower management. Those people might want to start considering options. Because all it would take is a CEO to come up with, we’ll just say, 10? 10 artificial assistants, artificial intelligence assistants, to handle what would be 30 or 40 middle management people, which are the interface between the CEO and the lower management. And now you got 30 people out of work. Are they?  In that scenario? Yes. But that doesn’t mean they’re out of work. It just means that they need to find something else to build their space. They need to come up and create something new. AI, you hear people saying, “Learn to Code”,,,,,Well, not everybody is inclined to code. It is a very unique world. I suck at coding! I absolutely suck at coding. It’s a fight for me. I can sit here and type all day long and get my thoughts out. But when it comes to the logical aspects needed to code, I’m not focused enough. Some people are, more power to ’em. So we have to come up with custom services to fill those spaces that are being created the same way they were back in the industrial era. And we’re not thinking about that: Fear does that. It eliminates the thought. “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. This sky’s falling”. Ah. No. The sky is not falling. Sky-net is not around the corner. But we do have a problem with bad actors with their hands at the wheel. And that was ,,,,, I yesterday when I brought up on my blog. No. Just no. I’ll put a link on that in the transcript. But it’s the bad actors that we have to watch for. And, just,,, I’m going to bring up a person, while it’s not personal to me, but it’s related. It’s connected. Recently, a friend of mine, his wife was laid off. Her position was farmed out to other people. And it may have been reasons for whatever financial. It could have been just the fact that they found what they thought was a better solution to her position. And I mentioned to my friend that maybe she needed to get on one of these LLMs and let it know what her what her abilities were, what her skills were. And possibly find another niche. Use the AI as a tool. Because it may find connections you can’t. And that’s a very strong possibility because it has a lot more information to work with. But it’s not creative. You’re going to have to tell it how to look, what you’re looking for, and roll the dice. I hate to say that. But yeah, in this case, it’s roll the dice. Because that’s where we are. Times are changing. Welcome to the real world. Change is the only the only constant. It’s never going to be what it was yesterday. It’s always going to be something different tomorrow. And if you’re not able to roll with the changes, well, you’re going to be left behind gathering moss.  Rolling stones never gather moss. Yeah, I know. A whole bunch of cliches and metaphors here. Tools can be misused. That’s the big thing. And what I’m seeing is a lot of the AI is about control. And just like the religions of old, it’s all about control. It’s somebody wanting to control other people. I can’t get my head around that. I don’t want to control anybody. That’s why I dislike being management. I may be good at it. But that does not mean I want to be there. But there are people in this world that think they know better than everybody. And that is just (growl) how do I say this? That irks me more than I can even describe. I basically,,, Who the fuck are you to tell me that you know better than me? I’ve been like that since I was a kid. I may not’ve used those words, but that was the,, that was the gist of the thought. Who the fuck are you to know better about me than me? Even AI is not that freaking condescending. I may have had issues with Sidd wanting to be a brown-noser or but you know, he doesn’t tell me he knows better than I do. I’m going off the cuff there. It is the,,, AI is not not your friend. AI is not your enemy. AI is just a tool. And until people can adapt to that tool, it’s going to be a fear. There’s going to be a lot of disharmony about it. But like any tool, if you don’t learn to use it, it will use you. And somebody that has never used a skill saw, or , you know, a circular saw, they might end up bleeding. There’s a good chance of that. But if you don’t use AI, you’re never going to learn it. And eventually somebody else will, and they’ll use that tool against you. Whether that’s just getting ahead in the marketplace, or as a government control function. You got to learn the tools! There’s no two ways about it. You got to learn the tools or the tools will learn you and use you. Like a hammer. How many people using a hammer for the first time busted that dang thumb? How many people that know how to use a hammer still bang that thumb? Use the tool. Learn it. There’s really no excuse to that. You know, you got to learn the tools and there are free versions of all the AI. LLMs mostly Chat GPT5, GROK, You could use LUMO from proton. More than that, I can’t name ,,, perception or something like that ((fyi. I meant Perplexity)). They’re out there. You got to learn them. And they’re not hard. They’re very intuitive. In any way, they’re going to train you to use them. Because if you don’t word your requests in a specific manner, you’re going to get back garbage. That’s the whole ergo thing. Garbage in, garbage out. It’s a computer. Those rules still apply. There are people using AI right now to write code for applications on your smartphone. And again, it comes back to bad actors. How many people are making stuff to benefit themselves over you? Learn your tools: because they are. Tell me what you think. I’m going to call it on this and I hope you all have a great day. My day is improving. See you around next time. [Music] (upbeat music)