Haley Joel Osment

The thing about learning is that it happens whether you want it to or not. Earnest (read that as: boring, invasive, not particularly attentive) people will tell you to ALWAYS PAY ATTENTION because you never know when a "teachable moment" will occur. But look, you only really have to actively engage at that level if you have some kind of deficit in your sensory inputs. Learning is happening constantly, every second you take in stimuli and react in accordance with it. Hell, even if you don't react and go right ahead and ignore the brake lights in front of you, merging the front of your car violently with the back of the one you were trailing in traffic, that moment of passivity will very quickly pivot to an active lesson in physics involving velocity, mass and the respective tolerance extremes of your muscular and skeletal structures. A week after that, when you're a recovered enough to be coherent, and for the rest of your life, if anyone wonders what it feels like to have a punctured lung, you'll be able to raise a slightly misshapen hand and say honestly: I can help you with that.

Teachable moments have gotten a bad name in recent years, as they only really seem to be openly invoked when a celebrity or a politician gets caught on tape abusing a service worker, driving their Cadillac Escalade into the wall of a Denny's or lustily deploying the N-word in conversation. We know all the standard boilerplate in the ensuing definitely-not-crafted-by-a-PR-professional heartfelt apology... "horrified," "not who I am," "anyone who knows me will tell you...," "teachable moment," "seeking help," "step away from the spotlight," and the classic "inadvertently mixed a decent red wine with my mood stabilizer/back pain pills..." You know it's really serious when they invoke their children, the gross pinnacle of which is "as a father of daughters..." You also know in all those cases, that person is learning some stuff behind the scenes in the moment, mostly what it feels like to be yelled at by all the personal and professional women in their lives.

Recently at work I've been asked to actively learn some things, which I never really mind doing. It's a good idea to keep up with the state-of-the-art in whatever industry you're in, even if you're like me and your industry is basically "what do we do with all this stuff that definitely isn't state of the art?" Also it doesn't hurt to break up the routine of your day-to-day by taking some training modules, even if they're online click-and-play and not particularly compelling as a presentation. It's really down to the content to keep you locked in. Now, I just said I was asked to learn about the state-of-the-art in my industry, so I would wager that even though you have no idea what my industry is, you know exactly what the subject of the training is: that's right, it's fucking "AI."

I use the F-word adjective advisedly though, as the combination there with "AI" has/can now lead to some pretty shady shit on the interwebs, but in this case I just mean "accursed" or "bedeviling" and not any kind of sex act. That's the fastest way to have to issue a public apology at work.

I'm actively learning things about the background of AI (which I normally use in quotation marks, since nothing as it exists is actually "artificial intelligence," but I'm too lazy to do all the extra keystrokes to get two of the " going every time I use it) as a technology, which in itself is interesting, I suppose. I'm not really a bleeding-edge technology person. I'm an adamant opter-outer of a lot of it, like Siri or Alexa or whatever specifically. If anything, what I'm learning is that all my attempts to stay un-tracked as much as possible are pretty much a giant waste of time as "AI" has been around WAY longer than I think, and already ingested pretty much everything there is to know about me probably sometime during the second Obama administration.

Passively what I'm discovering--more of a dawning than a thing I learned--is that pretty much every instance where someone in any job is asked to "check out what AI has to offer" for the industry, you're being asked to begin a process that at the end of which involves you or a significant number of your colleagues getting fired and replaced by this thing that never actually does what it promises, even all these years after it's been actively deployed. The result is largely the enshittification of some things that once actually worked and the gleeful firing of whole banks of employees across industries justified in the name of "innovation," unsupported by any facts or results.

I'm realizing I'm being asked to figure out the best and fastest way to outsource my job to a difference engine. The mistake I've made is also following Ed Zitron on bluesky, probably the loudest and best-informed voice out there railing against the tech industry's internal self-talk about what "AI" is at the moment and the feasibility not only of the technology of the industry as a business proposition. So not only do I know I'm abetting my own demise, I'm also actively aware that it will be death by buzzword and bullshit.

I guess I can take some comfort in knowing that a machine will replace me, but it won't replace me competently for another several decades. And that it will be much more expensive in the long run to pay for the cyber-brain services of doing what I do at a poorer or less interesting level of output in both quality and quantity. But I do have a government job; that will just be business as usual.