Press Enter is a novella by John Varley about a disabled war veteran who inherits his neighbor. The neighbor was a powerful hacker. So powerful that he could make money out of thin air. Another hacker comes to investigate. Unfortunately for all parties involved, the story is a horror and they’ll not have a bright future.
What impressed me is that there are AI prompts, just like the ones we use to talk to ChatGPT. There’s also prompt hacking. By 1984, AI development had apparently advanced enough for John Varley to foresee a trajectory.
An exploration spaceship returns from a distant star with a 200-year delay. They find the Earth and the Moon in shambles. Earth is inhabited by stupid people, and the Moon has a smart but unsustainable population, suffering from radiation, depression, and a shortage of oxygen.
Zajdel explores how climate and genetic manipulation can destroy Earth. Humans decided to replace trees with machines, and it didn’t work very well. They also decided to resolve the overpopulation crisis by changing the DNA so that very few girls were born. That also didn’t work well.
Both disasters are overshadowed by the impact of AI. Robots do everything and people don’t need to learn how to count. They communicate with 50 words and don’t develop even basic feelings. It’s a utopia modern people can imagine – the world ending not because of a war or climate change but because of obedient robots doing all the work.
Some speakers are worried about AI (AI skills threat as defined by Cat Hicks) and shared how they deal with it. The quote of the day is this – “I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been” (Wayne Gretsky, shared by Lena Reinhard). However, given that all the tech visionaries and CEOs know this saying, we all move in packs towards that point with AI doing something. This reminds me of an old quote I shared in 2018 here:
By any normal measure, our growth was great, but it quickly became clear it could be a lot better if we operated less like a soccer team of seven-year-olds: all of us chasing the ball, none of us in position.
— Kim Scott. Radical Candor
According to Cat Hicks, science shows building a less-competitive company culture improves morale and people are less concerned if they’ll adapt to the change. The best response to the lurking AI in all the talks came later, and sorry I didn’t manage to take a photo of it to be more precise. Not a precise quote: “The best things in life come from uncomfortable, messy, and chaotic situations. We will live better if we embrace the mess and treat the situation as an opportunity. (It’s science).” I wrote down the source and it’s a book called Messy – The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tom Harford. I’ll add it to my list.
Apart from the AI-speak, I was impressed by a talk about Architecture, and another about dealing with Technical Debt. The one about technical debt is worthy of a separate post.
The advancement of AI in translation tools makes my blogging more difficult. I get strange results when trying to find a word and get a clear reminder that I should not overly rely on this tech.
The Bulgarian word for “Cleaver” is translated as “Satyr” because of the proximity in letters. The Bulgarian word for “Wild Plums” is translated as “Junkies”. The Lungwort plant is translated as lungs recurringly over a variety of tools.
I tried ChatGPT and it’s better but still fails, and you can’t really trust a tool that fails for unknown words without checking elsewhere.
Bing Translate can do formal or informal translations but both are questionable. The 3 words above produced 4 different mistakes and 0 correct hits.
I’m switching back to using a dictionary for now. The type of assistance I need is not served well by AI-based translation tools. Convenience-wise, they’re super quick and convenient but not accurate yet.
Veselin.blog 