The Elaiphant In The Room
12:00 Sun 02 Feb 2025
It's been hanging about for the past eighteen months or so. If you can consider something to be a room-elephant when people are actively asking you if you can... train an elephant for their company, I suppose. And also work out how the elephant applies to their business because to be honest, they're not that sure what elephants can do - just that elephants are the future, and it's vitally important that they stuff their organization with as many as possible.
The elephant is AI, of course; or to be precise, large language models and machine learning, and what it can do for industries. For god's sake, can you tell us how we can fit an AI into our carwash?
(It's a little impressive, incidentally, the facetiness of the organizations offering under the rates for web developers to train AI models to develop webs. I suppose it's comforting in some ways that when you ask the RhombusSpace LLM to spin you up a startup based on your two sentences of midnight epiphany, it'll at least have shitty table-based layouts.)
For the time being though, management are stuck trying to work out how to stick AI into themselves, and everyone else is feverishly trying to work out a spot where they can shove themselves into it. This is the uncomfortable dance that filing clerks and typists found themselves improvising in the nineties; heaven only knows what it'll be in the 2060s. Now, like then, it can be a little tricky for some to eke out the optimism about life among the electric people.
So what IS going to be necessary ten years from now? Well, answers on a postcard, if that isn't too much a reference for the filing clerks. Physical goods. Handmade stuff. (Possibly bows and arrows, the way some things are going.)
In the digital space I anticipate some level of human supervision being needed for the immediately foreseeable future. While LLMs are great at delivering prose, and to some extent "understand" that poems should scan and rhyme, they aren't great at deeper meaning like nuance or metanarrative. You'll get a limerick on a good day, but it's unlikely to be very *funny*.
In short: Piers Morgan should be concerned for his job, but Patrick Rothfuss can rest easy. And if that doesn't inspire optimism about the age of AI, I don't know what will.
- RG