Woke up to the usual digital racket this morning, the kind that seeps through the cracks in the blinds even when you’ve sworn off the damn screens. Seems a couple of high priests of the Algorithm, a fella named Jensen Huang from Nvidia and another, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, have been making pronouncements. Sounded like they were speaking from on high at some confab for the well-heeled, the Milken Conference, or some such temple of finance. The message, though, was clear as an eviction notice: AI is knocking, and it ain’t here to sell cookies. “Evolve or risk becoming obsolete,” they chant, like a new corporate mantra tattooed on the inside of your eyelids. It’s the same old song, really, just played on a fancier, more expensive synthesizer. Every foreman, every editor, every suit I ever answered to had a version of it. This one just comes with a side of existential dread and a glossy brochure about our inevitable digital doom or salvation, depending on which preacher you listen to.
Huang, he’s the shiny, optimistic face in this particular passion play. The guy selling the pickaxes and pans during the gold rush, telling you there’s gold in them thar hills for everyone. He figures AI will put 40 million people “back to work.” Back from where, exactly, Jensen? The unemployment line that the last wave of “progress” herded them into? He throws out that lovely little soundbite: “You’re not going to lose your job to AI. You’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.” Ah, semantics. The last refuge of a man trying to sell you something you’re not sure you need. It’s not the tidal wave that drowns you, it’s the water. Comforting. Like a bartender telling you it’s not the whiskey, it’s the liver failure. His grand vision? AI will “close global talent gaps, increase the GDP, and level the playing field.” Wonderful. More abstract numbers for the ledger books, more green lines going up on charts that mean jack shit to the guy wondering how to stretch his last twenty till payday. The solution, according to Saint Jensen, is to “fully embrace” this new god. Sure, I’ll get right on that. Just as soon as I finish embracing this glass of something amber and angry. I’ll embrace AI like I embrace a Monday morning hangover – with grim resignation and a silent prayer for a swift end.
Then you got Amodei from Anthropic. He’s playing the role of the slightly more candid pallbearer. He’s not even bothering to put much sugar on the arsenic pill. Says AI is getting sharper at “nearly all intellectual tasks,” even those usually reserved for the corner office crowd – the CEOs. Frankly, looking at some of the CEOs I’ve known, that’s not exactly clearing a Mensa-level hurdle. My catatonic neighbor, midway through a three-day bender, probably has more cogent thoughts on quarterly earnings. Amodei, bless his doom-crying heart, whips out his crystal ball and predicts up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could just evaporate. Vanish. Poof. Gone like last night’s good intentions. He paints a lovely picture: “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced – and 20% of people don’t have jobs.” Now that sounds like the kind of future they’d cook up. A gleaming, efficient utopia where one in five of us is obsolete, staring out the window, wondering if “radical adaptability” can be exchanged for groceries. I almost find myself warming to this Amodei character. At least he’s not trying to sell you a bridge while simultaneously explaining how vital bridge painters will be in the new economy. He just tells you the bridge is collapsing. Refreshing, in a stomach-churning sort of way.
So, what’s the magic elixir these titans of tech are pushing to save our worthless hides? “Radical adaptability.” It sounds like something they’d drill into you at a corporate reprogramming seminar. Like we’re all supposed to become human Silly Putty, constantly remolding ourselves to fit whatever damn slot the algorithm deems necessary this week. “Only the paranoid survive,” they parrot, quoting Intel’s Andy Grove. Hell, paranoia has been my default setting since I realized Santa Claus was a lie cooked up by department stores. Didn’t need a circuit board to teach me that the world’s a rigged game. But this “healthy paranoia” they’re hawking? It’s just a fancy way of saying, “Stay scared, stay scrambling, and for God’s sake, keep consuming.” “Build before it’s obvious,” they preach. Right. I’m currently building a formidable fortress of empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays. That seems like a fairly obvious response to the times. This “lag in awareness” Amodei mentions – the idea that most folks don’t grasp how fast the digital guillotine is being sharpened. Well, yeah. Most folks are too busy trying to keep the lights on, to feed their kids, to find a goddamn parking spot, to endure another soul-crushing commute. They don’t have the luxury of gazing into the technological abyss from a leather-backed chair. It’s easy to spot the iceberg when you’re in the crow’s nest of a billion-dollar yacht. Down in steerage, you’re mostly worried about the rats.
And then, right on cue, the World Economic Forum slides in, smelling of starched shirts and self-importance. Their “Future of Jobs” Report. Sounds thrilling. Forty-one percent of companies, they say, are planning to give folks the boot because of AI. Forty-one percent! But hold your horses, don’t slit your wrists just yet! Because a whopping seventy-seven percent plan to “reskill or upskill” their employees. Isn’t that grand? They sack you with one hand and offer you a brochure for a night class in “Advanced AI Synergy Prompt Crafting” with the other. The numbers don’t even make sense, like a bookie trying to explain why you lost even when your horse came in first. “What got you here won’t keep you here.” No kidding. That’s been the story since Og figured out he could get more mammoth meat by sharpening his rock. “Static expertise now has a short shelf life.” My expertise in nursing a three-day hangover and still stringing a sentence together seems pretty timeless, but I guess that’s not the kind of “skill set” they’re after. “Reinvention not as a pivot – but as a permanent operating system.” Jesus H. Christ. My current operating system is a patchwork of bad decisions, cheap bourbon, and the lingering scent of stale cigarettes. Now I’m supposed to reboot and reinstall a new personality every damn day? That’s not a life; it’s a goddamn software update schedule from hell.
They also drone on about how this AI tsunami is going to test the “identity” of leaders. Their precious “ego.” You don’t say. Imagine these demigods of the Dow Jones, these boardroom Napoleons, these titans who think they piss excellence, suddenly realizing their Ivy League education and their seven-figure salary are about as relevant as a VCR repairman when the new AI intern can draft a five-year plan, file taxes, and compose a symphony before its first coffee break. “Leaders who are rigid in how they see themselves, their roles, or their industry will fall behind.” Well, I’ve consistently seen myself as a borderline functional wreck with occasional flashes of coherence. Maybe I’m already radically adapted. Flexible as a drunk trying to find his keys. I can go from beer to whiskey, from despair to slightly less despair. See? Fluid. “The future won’t belong to the biggest or the smartest. It’ll belong to the most adaptable.” Or, and call me a cynic, it’ll belong to whoever owns the bloody AI patents, and the rest of us will be shelling out subscription fees for the privilege of existing in their brave new world.
It’s the sheer, unadulterated gall of it all that gets me. This relentless, grinding push for optimization, for a sanitized, frictionless existence, as if life itself isn’t inherently messy. The actual grit of being human – the screw-ups, the heartbreaks, the hangovers that feel like a blacksmith is using your skull for an anvil, the sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness that keeps you putting one foot in front of the other – that’s what makes life, you know, life. Not some algorithm’s idea of perfection. Can an AI get blackout drunk and wake up with a half-finished poem and a stranger’s phone number scrawled on its chassis? Can it feel that exquisite, terrifying cocktail of regret, shame, and the undeniable throb of being alive? I doubt it. They’re so busy trying to build a better mousetrap they forgot that some of us actually like the damn mice, or at least the chaos they bring. They talk about brains; they forget about the guts. And the liver. Especially the liver. That’s where true endurance is forged, my friends. Surviving yourself, day after day. Now that’s radical adaptability.
Maybe the real adaptation isn’t learning to code or to “synergize with our AI co-pilots.” Maybe it’s learning to tell these prophets of profit to go screw themselves. Maybe it’s finding meaning in the cracks of their perfect, polished world. What if these AIs, once they get truly sentient, take one look at the spreadsheets, the org charts, the endless PowerPoint presentations, and just decide, “To hell with this”? What if they develop a taste for digital bourbon and start writing bleak, existential poetry? I’d read that. I’d subscribe to that AI’s newsletter. It’d probably make more sense than most of the human-generated crap out there.
This whole “adapt or be replaced” spiel… it’s just another way to keep us running on the treadmill, terrified of falling off. They want us to be flexible, alright. Flexible enough to bend over and take whatever they dish out. Me? I’m still trying to adapt to the price of a decent pack of smokes.
The future, they say, belongs to the adaptable. Maybe. Or maybe it belongs to those who can still pour a stiff one, light a cigarette, look the future square in its cold, indifferent digital eye, and tell it to take a number. We’ll get to you when we get to you.
Alright, the bourbon’s calling. And it’s a call I’m always radically adaptable enough to answer.
Chinaski out. Time for another refill.
Source: CEOs Jensen Huang And Dario Amodei On AI: Adapt Or Be Replaced