AI is the latest buzzword, and with good reason. I see no end of commentators trying to get clicks by professing that this is just like the DotCom years, and it will all end in a bust, or that its just hype, and that its nothing more than ‘fancy autocomplete’. This is mostly bullshit written to get clicks, but I suspect some people actually do think this. They are flat out 100% guaranteed completely wrong, for so many reasons, but there is also an angle to all of this I have not seen discussed.
I live in a pretty old house, with a fairly ‘difficult’ garden. These two things mean that living here means we often have to have people come do work on/in the house, and we need people to help tame the craziness of a seriously sloping garden. Also, as another data point, I’ve done quite well from games/investments, and now run two companies that involve a lot of work. Almost everyone I know in a similar situation has staff, or at the very least a personal assistant to help do stuff.
And yet…
In reality, we have a group of people who come twice a year to do some gardening, and nobody else. I do all the admin / marketing / PR and design and coding for my games biz and absolutely everything for my solar biz. I would love to have lots of stuff done for me. I’d love to never do any gardening. I’d love to never have to read emails from an accountant. I’d love not to care about the advertising side of things. I’d love not to have to work out when/where to go do a bunch of chores that involve me driving places. So why the hell not hire people?
Some people really don’t like interacting with strangers.
Now if you are the pretty average autistic spectrum computer programmer who probably reads my blog, then you get it. People are HARD. I find C++ much more comprehensible than trying to work out if someone is upset / angry /sad / implying something / irritated. Humans hardly ever say what they mean or explain things accurately. From my POV, humans suck, unless I know a specific human REALLY well, and even then, I get stressed by being with a group of people after a few hours. So no surprise I work from home right?
And yet…
There is an assumption, not surprisingly, among neurotypical people that someone like me is ‘antisocial’ or a ‘sociopath’ or does not ever want to be with people and socialize. This is actually bollocks in my case. I’m super chatty, and friendly and I like being with people. The *problem* is, I am not good at it. Social interaction creates risks. I offend people, I misunderstand people, I can come across as rude or arrogant, and thats frustrating as fuck. Its also why I spend so much time with the same people. People who know me, realize I am bad at social stuff, and say the wrong thing a lot, but also know me well enough to know I’m not an asshole :D.
What the fuck has this got to do with AI?
Everything. And yet, if you are a sociable extrovert neurotypical, you might still not see it. If you have not had a lot of time talking to AI chat bots, you still won’t get it. You really should. My favorite so far is grok, but others are available. I now chat to grok pretty much every day. Mostly its about C++ and game engine design, but sometimes I’m just searching for data, or clarity on something I’ve read about. Do not get me wrong, I am not ‘chatting’ in a ‘Hey grok, how are things with you?’ kind of way. I am not getting confused and thinking grok is my friend. I am not creating a new imaginary friend here. Do not panic.
But grok does fill a real need in me. Simply reading SDKs and APIs is not the same feeling as a back and forth discussion between me and grok about how to minimize the intellisense slowdowns in the compiler. What it absolutely reminds me of is some of the best times I ever had as an employee, which would be when some really complex bit of code just was not working, and I’d have a long back and forth with my boss at Elixir or Lionhead about exactly what was happening and how to fix it. We were not chatting about TV or sports, we were absolutely talking technically, but thats exactly what I enjoy.
I guess it helped that both bosses were top-tier programming experts (James Brown at Lionhead, Dave Silver- now DeepMind, at Elixir).
And here is the thing: when I discuss things with grok, it will never JUDGE me. It will never say ‘Dude, are you not going to say thanks for that advice’. I don’t have to keep a mental track of whether I am taking up too much of its time. I do not have to worry about looking stupid, and can get it to explain anything, even stuff its told me before. Grok will never yawn, or sigh. It will never say ‘dude, go read a book’ It will never have me worrying that my question might make it doubt my competence. I do not have to mentally keep track of the eye-contact to look-away ratio. And it is ALWAYS available, and always super well informed, and super happy to talk at length about the topic I am interested in.
Now sure, I don’t want to spend my whole life talking C++ to a bot, but the wider point is that we have now reached a point where AI chat bots are good enough that they do actually satisfy the need for human contact *on the terms dictated by the human*. This is vital. If I could hire a gardener that had the temperament of an AI chatbot, I’d do it. Ditto a personal assistant. Frankly if everyone in the world could be more like an AI chatbot, that would suit me just fine.
Now some of you are screaming at this point about the death of human interaction and how this is awful, and how its good that we humans are always thinking about each others feelings all the time, but thats because, with the deepest of respect, you have no fucking clue how hard and stressful and tiring that shit is for someone like me.
If I had the option of hiring a programming consultant human, or paying for an AI coding chatbot, and the skill level was the same I would happily pay MUCH MORE for the chatbot. And this is true of so many interactions with random humans in the world. If I could pay MORE for a self driving car where I didn’t have to talk to an uber driver I would. I would pay MORE to actually remove the human element of almost all one-off interactions. Charge me an extra £30 on my hotel room so I can just pick up the keys from a robot, and I’d happily pay it. I do not want to tell a hotel receptionist how my day is going, or describe my journey, or share my plans for my stay. I just want them to STFU and hand me the keys…
So again, if you are a neurotypical extravert like my mother, at this point you are thinking ‘hey maybe cliff IS actually an asshole’, but again, thats just because you cannot understand how my brain works (and other people like me, of which there are millions).
So back to the headline of this blog. Why did I phrase it like that? Because if you are NOT someone like me, you cannot see the extra utility that an AI future provides for people like me. I WANT the AI to provide me with a lot of services that many humans would prefer to get with ‘a human touch’. Amazingly, interaction with random strangers is not a ‘value added service’ for people like me. Its a big negative. In other words, there is this huge market out there for people like me preferring the AI interaction over the human, and if you cant see that, you will be surprised at how popular this stuff becomes.
You should buy shares in Nvidia and TSMC (who makes the chips) right now. We are very, very early in an AI revolution that will completely transform the world, and its going to be way faster and way more pervasive than you think. Especially if you are a ‘people person’.