When I joined my current job 11 years ago, I felt like it had saved me from working somewhere where "the norm" was extreme frustration, that feeling of banging your head against a brick wall to try and achieve something but constantly being pushed back or dragged down, or bamboozled by bureaucracy to the point where every monday morning felt like resuming some sysiphean challenge to climb the highest mountain, only to have to start right back at the bottom again the next day.
At the time, landing my current role felt a bit like a mixture of 'impostor syndrome' and 'no wait, I can do this' and I threw just about everything I had into shaping that role into something special. I would always be the one who stuck my hand in the air to volunteer for stuff, I would always be the one who would work longer hours or put in that extra bit of effort feeling that the reward for a strong work ethic was a level of professional respect that I'd seldom achieved in previous jobs. It all felt so good back then, felt like we were part of a team and that we were really helping the place stay on track and excel, particularly during the dark couple of years where COVID raged.
Then something happened. I think actually "Something" is less accurate than "A lot of impactive things". Our division was restructured, our department fragmented. Then along came AI, and suddenly the old cliche of someone second-guessing your forty years worth of experience based on some glib answer back from an algorithm that has no more clue about the world you have developed your skills in than a baby bird.
From that tiny twisted bitter little seed came the gigantic sprawling choking vines of having people not only disrespect you, but openly being hostile to you if you weren't "in the gang" of folk who had fallen completely in love with this new technology, purely because it suddenly made them look like they had actual skills of their own, and could bullshit their way through meetings with some hastily AI-generated notes that were often filled with supposition and inaccuracy. To put no finer point on it, "Those who worked" found these new tools fairly toothless and useless while "those who do not work" fell hook line and sinker for the grift.
I've spoken out against AI many times, and I've never seen a convincing argument for its use, other than being a very expensive planet-killing way of crunching large assets of data to produce a tiny microscopic atom of gold from time to time. Like destroying an entire rainforest just to extract a couple of teaspoons of palm oil, or over-fishing the world's oceans just so some rich knob-end can feast on fish eggs. I see AI exactly like this (and I hate using the term "AI" because it implies there is intelligence here, when really all that is there is a very expensive and compute-heavy method of sifting through data we've already collected (and in a lot of cases have already dismissed).
There's no thought, there's no emotion, there's no chaotic flight of fancy or imagination, there's no intelligence at all, but the artificial bit is right - there's the artifice of pretending that these 'clever' algorithms are somehow going to be the single defining thing that revolutionise civilisation and take us to some higher level of existence, akin to discovering fire, or the wheel or a zillion other real-world examples of innovations that truly did do that very thing.
AI is of benefit to two sets of people: Those who cannot perform the tasks they set it themselves, and those who sit on a pile of promised revenue streams, mostly from selling on or trading in the very information their algorithms are scraping from organisations across the world. Copyright? Intellectual property? Nah mate, that's all done with now, did you not read the small print?
Back to my job and our place has just signed over all our data to Open AI / ChatGPT Edu with the weakest 'clause' in place that I have ever seen in a broadcast document. The weak "If you think you're going to be using personnel or sensitive data with ChatGPT, you may want to consult your information security notaries first" - And that's it. No actual rules, no actual regulations, no actual thought to who will need to pick up the pieces when this debacle ends up in a massive data breach because some careless cunt let the bloody thing crawl over ten years of their mailbox to extract a couple of useful lines. We've seen it happen many times through people being dropped into roles they don't understand, and having to start on day one with tools they're unfamiliar with. But now they have this and it will inevitably lead to misuse, and not a single person will care a toss about that information security line.
I'm leading a project dealing with a specific slice of technology that could have revolutionised what our place does in a different way, allowing people to tap into their information in a controlled and governed way with toolsets they build themselves and authentication right across the board for access to that information, but instead we've pretty much just signed over 'the farm' to one of the most uncaring unscrupulous technology companies on the planet, and I'm fairly sure we'll do exactly the same with the Google and Palantir equivalents before long too.
I'm about three years off retirement. I've just come back from two weeks vacation where I started my first day back to find that all this had been put in place while I was on leave, and that comes as no surprise to me. Again, that complete lack of consultancy or respect and the expectation that we'll just grin and bear it.
I'm grinning and bearing it, but the reason I'm grinning is because I'm imagining what's going to happen when this shonky shit blows up in their faces. I can't wait.
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