Antonym: Turkeys vote for Chrixit Edition
If you prefer an AI version of your author, one will be provided.
(You can literally listen to a fake me read this whole newsletter if you prefer.)
Dear Reader
Unfiltered, Elon Musk is utterly unpalatable and can lead to violent bouts of revulsion. What you need is a producer, journalist or some other intermediary.
Get some professionals involved and you can see the method and ignore the madness. For instance, his stance on super-intelligent machines:
“I’ve really struggled with this AGI thing for a long time and I’ve been somewhat resistant to making it happen. But it really seems that at this point it looks like AGI is going to happen so there’s two choices, either be a spectator or a participant. As a spectator, one can’t do much to influence the outcome.”
He’s right.
AI is happening. Being annoyed about it won’t stop it. It’s like disagreeing with climate change – you might find a bunch of fellow travellers and people who agree with you, but that won’t make the world cool down.
Writers Guild of America's industrial action stems from inadequate compensation but is also based on the inadequate residuals stemming from streaming services. Generative AI threatens how writers earn a living, and no governmental restrictions can stop it. This technology is present, and its use will continue. Here’s a poster by Paul Pateman that plays on a trope that reflected a sentiment I’d heard before among my colleagues and friends – that using AI is training a machine that will take your job…
Turkeys have never voted against Christmas in a referendum. But imagine if the turkeys could organize and talk like the toys in Toy Story. A visionary leader brings a campaign to prevent Christmas, despite the belief of many turkeys that it is the reason for their existence. Committees are created, and campaigns are launched, like "Voting for Christmas is like creatives voting for AI". The polls are tight. But, on referendum day – December 1st perhaps – the hero turkey succeeds and 52% vote "No" to Christmas. “Chrixit” has been approved, and the turkeys have spoken. The power of democracy.
The farmer, is oblivious. Turkeys can’t communicate with humans (Toy Story universe rules, remember) and merely thinks they have been behaving oddly. Come mid-December the slaughter begins.
What should the turkeys have done? Perhaps focused their R&D efforts on a “Beyond Turkey” food alternative, or applied for jobs as circus performers. Yes, the thought experiment breaks down about there.
First, they came for the creatives…
Now authors are voting against Christmas. Kind of.
Hey! I’m an author! So I’ve signed, and you can too…
More than 10,000 writers and their supporters have signed the letter including luminaries such as Dan Brown, James Patterson, Jennifer Egan, David Baldacci, Michael Chabon, Nora Roberts, Jesmyn Ward, Jodi Picoult, Ron Chernow, Michael Pollan, Suzanne Collins, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Roxane Gay, Celeste Ng, Louise Erdrich, Viet Thanh Nguyen, George Saunders, Min Jin Lee, Andrew Solomon, Rebecca Makkai, Tobias Wolff, and many others.
We have been here before. These stolen books have already been stolen several times over. Search Google Books, search Google and find the PDF and ebook hoards of pirated versions of books. I mean, Big Tech could at least buy a copy of every book. What the AI is doing is allowing a machine to imitate people’s voices. It’s hard to see how that can be legislated against.
Copyright has been broken for a good few decades, and lobbying AI leaders is unlikely to change anything. Big tech comes for your tone of voice and prose style as a decade ago it came for your social network and your sense of reality in the social media era. We all need to think about how economic models will work in this new world.
The future of work costs $30 a month
The business model for Microsoft and AI is much less complicated than for authors.
About $30 a month will be the cost of using AI for users of its Office software. There are 345 million paying users of Office365. They may not all sign up, but $10.35BN would be the monthly dividend if they did, or $124.2 BN a year in revenue. This firm has serious competitors – Google Worksuite chief among them – but can confidently double its charges by understanding what it does about the technology. What does that say?
It will be worth it for many businesses. This wave of AI is a topsy-turvy world where up is down and white is black. The savings in time for workers who use these tools well will make $30 a month sound like the biggest bargain of all time. The most expensive humans I work with can save 50% of their time the first time they use AI on a project that they understand well, but this rises to 90-95% time savings as they refine and tune the process and understand the uses of the AI tools better.
Think about the prediction that legal firms will need a 1:1 ratio of partners to associates (very experienced to moderately skilled) employees, vs. The current ratio is 7:1.
Newly qualified associates at top law firms in London earn £100-120,000 a year. They are expected to bill at least three times that. So £600,000 of costs saved while still doing work that has been billed at £3.6M. Partners make something like £450,000 to £4.5 million a year currently. So, depending on whether they pass the savings to clients (yes, I can hear the laughter in Chancery Lane from here) big firm partners would stand to at least double their already considerable income.
A snapshot of the brain
Your brain is looking at some coloured dots on a screen and is interpreting them as a picture. My neocortex – a recently evolved layer of grey matter we all have in our skulls wrapped and folded around some older brains – caused this image to be made. Laid flat, a neo-cortex is about 2.5mm thick, and the size of this table upon which I have placed a cup of a stimulant for said brain and toolset — pen and paper – which helps it operate more efficiently by expanding its working memory (the number of concepts it can hold at any one time) and long term memory (storing ideas and thoughts by revisiting them several times). The picture was taken with a device the size of my hand that previously had access to the sum of human knowledge and could connect with any one of the 5 billion+ people in the world who have similar devices. Over the last year, it has also been enhanced by access to tools that can boost the brain’s ability to think, reason, research, come up with ideas and create words and images instantly.
Have the above read to you by a fake version of me made in the Descript app by following this link.
Yes, I’m still reading A Thousand Brains (and it’s amazing).
That’s all, folks…
That’s all for this week. Thanks for letting me get it off my chest.
A lot of work is going into our new AI-assisted services at Brilliant Noise at the moment. The recent webinar we held can now be seen in its entirety – let me know what you think. (And for more about BN, sign up for the BN Edition, which is like a more practical cousin of this newsletter.)
Thanks for reading, I hope you found something interesting!
Antony