When I first set out working in IT, some 40 years ago (yeah I know, longer ago than some of you were born), it felt like the wild frontier where almost anything was possible via the rusting innards of a desktop PC (or in my case one of the first Macs, a beige blocky little friend that constantly looked like it could grow legs and saunter off for a couple of victory laps around the campus). I had a couple of jobs before I 'settled' at Oxford Polytechnic (as it was back then), mostly wiring their 'wet string' network together via asynchronous connections, ropey soldered-on D25 connectors, and unscreened cable.
"Computing" as it was back then was all via a Pr1me mainframe, connected up to dumb terminals, their glowing green on black text relaying information or running simple programs. More importantly though, it allowed messaging and communication - which became a huge distraction during my early years as I spent way more hours in the working day blathering to students via clattery old keyboards, or I'd sneak off to one of the better computing labs to use a more luxurious terminal.
I stuck with IT for a number of years before taking a career break to launch into an arts degree, but was lured back - mostly because of an empty bank account and a tiny bit of expertise in all things Microsoft flavoured.
I have had a finger in most IT pies. Solutions development, web development, desktop support, automation, SharePoint and god knows what else but in the last few years it's mostly been about the rise and rise of AI - or more accurately the complete 'grift' of pretending that something essentially little more than a slightly poshed up search engine can somehow 'think' and do your job for you.
At my current place of employment, it's dazzling our senior management team who are literally falling over themselves to spend money with any vendor that has come up with the digital equivalent of "The Emperor's New Clothes". Claude, Anthropic, Copilot, OpenAI, ChatGPT - you name it and the place is biting the arms off any vendor offering marvellous insights into how these tools can somehow replace the human-centric work of research, development and communication.
We are constantly told that our place is at the forefront of AI, and intends to stay there - shit or bust. Bust being more likely, as these solutions cost an awful lot of money and rack up colossal costs in a relatively short period of time. One agent deployed in our default environment for our tenancy is consuming credits like Pacman on speed, and shows no sign of stopping. The vendors must be cackling up their sleeves as their money-printing machine goes into high gear.
I am, naturally, extremely cynical about all this stuff. I have no truck with it, I don't boil a lake to compose an email, and I'm damned if I'm going to use any of these tools to produce images, charts or graphics when I can fire up a free art package like Krita and draw something myself.
To me, the rise of this stuff is like admitting we're all shite, and we're better off adopting those sterile digital turds that these things poop out. All the images are beginning to look the same because they have no inspiration other than the art they've scraped from artists across the world. AI is incapable of fixating on a muse for example, it cannot create something chaotic driven by its current mood, by anger, lust, daydreams - and it never will be capable of this. Not in my lifetime at least.
It's obvious to me that the lure of these things for our management team is underlining their own incompetence and lack of skill, lack of imagination and worst of all, their lack of faith in our ability to do our jobs properly. We are constantly under pressure to allow these tools to have free reign over our data, and we push back as systems admins, not because we fear for our jobs, but because every single time a user carelessly uses one of these tools and exposes sensitive data, we end up with days if not weeks of work trying to unpick audit logs to prove what they did and how they did it (and these folk never seem to get fired, which is very telling).
IT is no longer the workplace I feel drawn to. I despise it, and I feel that as I approach retirement that I'm just biding my time till I can escape and hopefully do something more constructive, far away from these idiots who embrace this stuff like a long lost cousin.
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