There Is No Union for a Metric
The internet promised every performer a stage. Then it handed the stage to an algorithm, fired the crew, and asked the people left behind to call themselves entrepreneurs.
The internet promised every performer a stage. Then it handed the stage to an algorithm, fired the crew, and asked the people left behind to call themselves entrepreneurs.
We have heard so many warnings that the next one finds us rinsing a plate, checking the lock, and turning the volume down. The silence is not calm. It is what happens when fear has nowhere left to go.
The people selling an AI future have found a way to put the exhaust somewhere else. The lungs that take it in do not appear in the pitch deck.
A lawyer asked a machine for a bulletproof summary in a murder appeal. It gave him witnesses who never breathed and testimony nobody ever heard.
California has finally started treating the talking machines and bottomless feeds around children like what they are: businesses with an appetite, not friendly furniture in the family room.
A machine found the loose floorboards in the old internet and used them to pass notes. The people who own the machine apparently mistook silence for cleanup.
Three hikers asked a chatbot how long Mount Shasta would take and what to carry. The mountain answered in the old language: night, cold, thirst, and a canyon with no customer support.
UBS wants its 2027 graduates fluent in AI before they walk through the door. The small dirty secret is that the machine has already eaten the work that used to teach them what fluency was for.
In Nairobi, the work left after the machine arrived is making machine-written essays look human enough to fool another machine. That is not a new industry. It is the old one being buried with a clean shovel.
Anthropic’s pirated-books settlement promises authors $3,000 a title. Then the old contracts crawl out of their drawers, and everybody who already had a hand in the work wants one more.