Alright, pour yourself something strong. Or don’t. Makes no difference to the world, but it might make reading this easier. Got my coffee here, black as my outlook, with a little something extra to cut through the Tuesday morning fog that feels suspiciously like last night’s bourbon trying to stage a comeback.
So, get this. The geniuses over at Google DeepMind, the wizards cooking up our eventual robot overlords in their London labs, have apparently figured out a new way to screw with the human condition. Forget killer AI – they’re perfecting the art of the golden cage.
Word on the street, splashed across TechCrunch like cheap wine on a new suit, is that Google’s playing hardball to keep its AI brainiacs from jumping ship to the competition – places like OpenAI or whatever flashy startup promises to cure baldness using algorithms next week. How? With noncompete clauses tighter than a miser’s fist around a penny. We’re talking up to a year where these folks, presumably smarter than God’s own calculator, are legally barred from working for a rival.
Now, hold onto your hats, or your half-empty glass, because here’s the part that’ll make you choke on your cigarette. Some of these poor souls, trapped in this corporate limbo, are reportedly getting paid their full salary for the duration. A year off. With pay. To do… nothing. Sit at home. Stare at the wallpaper. Contemplate the infinite. Maybe take up knitting, or competitive interpretive dance.
And the punchline? These highly-paid benchwarmers are apparently feeling… left out. Left behind by the “quick pace of AI progress.” One VP over at Microsoft – yeah, that Microsoft, always lurking like a cheap PI – even chirped on X (or whatever the hell Musk calls it this week) that DeepMind staff are hitting him up “in despair” over escaping these clauses.
Despair. Let that sink in. The crushing agony of a six-figure salary for playing video games and watching daytime TV for twelve months straight. The sheer existential horror. It brings a tear to my eye, it really does. Reminds me of the time I felt despair because the liquor store was closed on a Sunday. See? We’re all suffering, just on slightly different budgets.
Back in my day – yeah, I had a day, shut up – being paid to not work usually involved some kind of back injury claim or pretending you didn’t see the supervisor sleeping in the mailbags. Now, it’s a retention strategy for people who probably earn more in a month than I did in a year sorting junk mail for insomniacs.
It’s beautiful, in a truly grotesque way. These companies are so terrified of losing their human capital – funny how they call people ‘capital’, like sacks of potatoes or barrels of oil – that they’d rather pickle them in brine, pay them to stagnate, than risk them taking their precious secrets elsewhere. Secrets like… how to make a chatbot argue about philosophy slightly more convincingly? How to generate creepier pictures of cats with too many fingers? The mind boggles. Or maybe it just needs another drink.
Think about it. You spend years honing your brain into this fine-tuned machine capable of god-knows-what digital voodoo, only to be told, “Sit boy, stay. Here’s a fat check. Don’t think too hard for a year, okay?” It’s like buying a prize racehorse and paying it handsomely to stay in the stable watching reruns of Mr. Ed.
And this noncompete nonsense? Apparently, the grown-ups over at the FTC in the good ol’ US of A put the kibosh on most of these shenanigans last year. But DeepMind’s HQ is in London, where maybe the rules are written on parchment with a quill pen, or maybe they just figure Britannia waives the rules when enough cash is involved. Google, naturally, told some reporter they use these things “selectively.” Yeah, selectively. Like a loan shark selectively breaks kneecaps. Only the ones who owe the most, right?
What does it say about this whole AI gold rush? They’re building the future, they scream from the rooftops! A utopia of automated convenience! Or a hellscape of robotic job stealers, depending on which prophet you ask. But behind the curtain, it’s the same old game: fear, paranoia, hoarding talent like Smaug hoarding gold. Paying people fortunes to effectively stop contributing to the very progress they claim is so vital. Makes perfect sense, if you’ve had enough whiskey to kill a small horse.
You gotta wonder what these poor, despairing geniuses do all day. Do they meet up in secret, noncompete support groups? “Hi, I’m Kevin, and I’ve been paid to do nothing for six months. The guilt is… manageable, but I miss the thrill of optimizing recursive neural networks.” Maybe they write novels. Bad ones, probably. Or maybe they just drink. If they do, they should call me. I know some spots. Cheap ones.
It’s the absurdity that gets me, every time. The sheer, naked absurdity of the whole damn circus. We’re building machines that might one day think, feel, maybe even write drunken blog posts. And the humans behind it all? They’re being treated like prized poodles, locked away with a chew toy and a hefty allowance, terrified they might pee on the wrong corporate lawn.
Me? My noncompete clause is with basic human decency, and frankly, I violate it daily. Nobody’s paying me to sit on my ass, worse luck. Gotta earn my booze money the old-fashioned way: spewing cynical nonsense onto the internet for strangers.
So next time you hear about the relentless, unstoppable march of artificial intelligence, remember the poor bastards in London getting paid a fortune to watch paint dry, drowning in their “despair.” Makes you feel almost… human, doesn’t it? Flawed, broke, probably hungover, but at least nobody’s paying us not to show up. There’s a certain freedom in that. The freedom to screw up on your own dime.
Time for another cigarette. And maybe something to wash down the taste of existential dread… theirs, not mine. Mine’s vintage.
Chinaski out. Go find a bar.