cosmetics go way back. like thousands of years. and maybe it’s gross to smear cake on your face, but nobody cares. because shocker — women look better with makeup!
makeup serves 2 purposes: hide blemishes, accentuate features. it comes in physical (mascara) and digital (photo filter) manifestations. what’s not to like?
well… how about when makeup crosses the chasm from aesthetics to neurons?
consider the following:
- GitHub’s Copilot
- Descript’s filler word removal
- Grammarly’s autocomplete
- Loom’s speaker notes
- … your new favorite tool
these products have 1 thing in common: they help you look and feel smarter. they hide your blemishes (knowledge gaps) and accentuate your features (status). but just like eyeliner, they don’t fix what’s underneath.
so if a woman’s true beauty is her appearance without makeup, a professional’s true ability is their performance without PEDs.
i don’t wear AI. makeup is not for men.
I have a slightly different take. Fundamentally, I agree: these things are far less revolutionary than they are made out to be in as much as everyone wants them to be the digital equivalent of an “Iron Man” suit. Truth is AI will cleave the world into two: those who can benefit from or at least aren’t threatened by it… and those who will be absolutely decimated by it. Can someone say UBI?
The latter think these tools make them “smarter” when in reality, yes, they only make them lazier. Those people will be remaindered. I choose to be in the former category: redlining the shit out the capability of these tools to scale gruntwork and, in my latest trick, understanding of complex topics. Ever try to solve tough math problems with a pencil and paper? It’s hard. And it’s SUPPOSED to be hard– but the learning curve collapses if you put it in ChatGPT first and parse the reasoning it provides. Better yet, just determining HOW to feed these AI bots proper “code” to get the answers is an art in itself, and will become a growth industry. Everyone else will just be doing what the robots tell them. Some people already are, unfortunately.
Watch the software industry collapse as a bunch of incompetent diversity hires copy/paste their way into 6 figures. Instead of going home and learning,they go home and watch Netflix and doom scroll Instagram. The amount of people who actually know what the code does will dwindle to nothing and every piece of software will be a buggy crashfest. Panicking, they will try to have layoffs but it will be illegal fire the “victims”. That plus terrible politics on the left resulting in the nationalizations. NY AND Cali state simply taking your business/property from you when they start going bankrupt.
By 2030 new coders won’t even be able to tell you what a string is. When you tell them to fix a bug, they will tell chatgpt to fix the bug. And when that doesn’t work, they will say the work space is toxic and they demand a paid mental health week.