Winter Rant

When the goal is communicating or collaborating with another human to get something done, I suspect that nothing will substitute the manual acts of reading and writing (pithy?) emails. Think about that for a moment … are we really going to automate away the acts of reading and writing to machines? And whatever happens to the notions of understanding, comprehension, and appreciation, if we do not read and write our own way through communication?

There is a latent reality that has been gnawing at me for the past 6 months – that is more or less when I started playing with Gen AI.

The reality is that whatever AI is good at generating now, we will see a lot more of it… more code, more images, more essays, more emails, more songs, and more blogposts.

That’s right … amidst all the bruhaha around coders and white-collar workers losing their jobs, no one is denying that this world is about to see a lot more stuff that is producible by AI. Put it differently, regardless of fewer/more programmers over the years to come, we will actually see a lot more code running through our world.

Similarly, irrespective of how many white-collar jobs are gained/lost, we will actually see more email flying around – simply because we now have AI programs that can spit out these draft emails in a matter of seconds. Which then brings me to question the virtue of more email in our collective inboxes…

Do we really want more email? Are we really going to read any of it? And what does it mean for the act of person-to-person communication, if AI systems are sitting at both ends of an email transaction – both summarizing and composing emails? If you ask me, using email to draft a “profession-look” email, only to have it summarized into a bullet list on the other end, is a very, very expensive use of these large language model (which I hear are not kind when it comes to greenhouse gasses).

But beyond the material expense, I ask again, how do we understand, comprehend, and appreciate each other, if we delegate the task of composing email and text messages to machines?

– vijay, fighting a sore throat 😷