The current hype around ‘artificial intelligence’ in the form of generative pre-trained transformers and large language models is impossible to avoid. However, I have yet to try any of these out other than two questions posed to Sanctum.ai — auto-marketing — on my computer and not on some cloud. So far, these are my reasons for not jumping on this bandwagon.
- I have no need to make my work more efficient, as I am not a machine. I prefer manual sensemaking.
- There are huge environmental costs (e.g. data centre power use and CO2 emissions) associated with these platforms.
- This site has already been scraped and my writing was fed into Google’s C4 Dataset, without my permission and contrary to my copyright license.
- I still see a huge need for better human sensemaking and knowledge sharing in every organization I have worked with and in ongoing conversations in my professional communities.
At this time, my professional focus will remain with helping people to work smarter using frameworks like personal knowledge mastery.
My working hypothesis is that there’s no technology based problems left to solve because most things have already been figured out, all the genuine problems have been addressed. And what we’re seeing now is a lot of ‘busy’ corporate activity desperately trying to figure out how to justify their existence (and bolster their share prices) by repeatedly redesigning things that have already been figured out.
It’s a sad state of affairs, Duncan.
Perhaps, although I’m fairly sure that the enlightened few are ignoring all the wheel-spinning and hoopla.