Add those two together and you’ve got the universal set.
Everyone is capable of being an arsehole — but the self-aware-hole is by far the easiest to deal with.
They know their weakness.
They plan around it.
They say things differently.
They develop a bit of diplomacy.
The second camp?
They believe Mother Teresa never did as much good, and Paul was never as saintly.
These people can’t be reasoned with.
Only argued with.
And placated — briefly — with a fake “World’s Best Person” certificate you’ve run off on your LaserJet.
“I always say please and thank you to the AI. I want to be on its good side when it takes over.”
A lot of people are worried about Artificial Intelligence, which is entirely understandable after three decades of Terminator and Matrix films depicting it as humanity’s doom.
That’s still a worry.
The AI might decide we’re more trouble than we’re worth — and to be honest, I wouldn’t want it making the call in 2025.
Humans are not exactly on their best behaviour.
But global extermination isn’t the only concern.
People are also worried about their jobs — and while calming voices try to play it down, any form of automation ultimately leads to redundancies somewhere.
The best way to understand AI in its current form — large language models and beyond — is as a force multiplier.
What you get out depends on what you put in.
If you want it to write a story about Nicola Sturgeon and her husband touring Scotland in a camper van solving crimes like the Scooby-Doo gang, it’ll oblige — never mind the rainforest cost of the computation.
But it’s also helping people.
It’s a second opinion.
It’s an organiser of frantic meeting minutes.
It’s a search engine that actually understands the question.
The real danger with AI isn’t AI itself.
It’s the same danger that comes with any major technological advance: what humanity does with it.
Within a few years of inventing flight, we used it to bomb each other.
So if you see a Hunter-Killer drone autonomously targeting civilians in an urban environment —
don’t blame the AI.
Back in 2003 we were queuing at Immigration.
2 guys & their 2 lads, being given the cold stare, telephone call, others coming to look at them and their landing cards.
After about 10 minutes they were waved through.
The sltercation was because on their landing cards in the Purpose of Visit box they had written.
To win The Webb Ellis Trophy
Immigration had tried to kick them out but couldnt as it wasnt deemed offensive. There was nothing they could do
Equally, 48 hours later it proved to be true
England, & Johny Wilkinson won the egg chasing World Cup.
One of the most deluded things you’ll hear said out loud is: “I’m my own boss.”
Unless that person is the King or homeless, it’s not true.
Everyone else has a boss.
If you’re the CEO of a company, your bosses are your customers and your shareholders.
Fail to please either, and you’re out.
You’ve actually got more bosses than someone who just reports to a line manager.
In the West, we like to think authority doesn’t really exist —
at least not like those nasty countries that don’t have elections or use political violence.
But a cross on a ballot every few years doesn’t change the fact that every workplace is a dictatorship.
And most of us spend half our waking lives in one.
We don’t live in a dictatorship.
We’ve just decentralised tyranny —
and outsourced enforcement to HR departments,
each with a slightly different view of the ever-shifting Overton window.
Ask most kids what they want to be when they grow up,
and the answer is increasingly the same:
There’s a reason you have a washing machine in your house.
It’s because someone — not that long ago — decided they didn’t want to spend half their life washing and drying clothes.
One invention.
Countless hours of human labour eradicated forever.
The washing machine might be the most successful example of automation in history.
People say they’re worried about automation today.
But they’re not really worried about automation.
They’re worried that when the robots take over, they’ll end up homeless and starving.
They don’t believe there’ll be a safety net — which is why unions fight tooth and nail to keep automation at bay.
We treat jobs as inherently good.
But what if most of us are just engaged in mindless busy-work —
turning up, clicking things, forwarding emails,
keeping the gears cranking out of sheer habit?
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that not everyone needs to work all the time to keep things ticking over.
Automation will make that more true with every passing year.
But to embrace it properly, we need a new paradigm.
Because not everyone can be expected to work — if there’s fuck all to do.
Yes but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic ocean Curries is not just up the road you need to fix what is broken with the spares that you have available.
The first entry to be directly inspired by a Sotonians member. Also, the last entry (for now) in A.
Awesome
“That’s awesome!” — an exclamation you often hear in the 21st century
“No it fucking isn’t.” — internal monologue of listeners who’ve read a dictionary
The quality of being awesome is the ability to inspire awe. Proper awe. The kind that makes you step back, widen your eyes, and reconsider your place in the universe.
It doesn’t have to be the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls or Everest.
It doesn’t have to be the Pyramids of Giza, Angkor Wat, or the Sydney Opera House.
You probably have something awesome in your house today if you own:
A particularly good album
A particularly nice graphics card
The complete memoirs of Eddie Large
But I’ll tell you what isn’t awesome:
Confirming a meeting outside McDonald’s
A new top from Primark
Almost everything anyone calls awesome
So if someone says “awesome” when something really isn’t, just say what I say:
“No, it isn’t. You’re probably just in general accord — and that’s fine.”
If everyone did that, and we could somehow capture the reactions of those who require very little stimulus to feel awe…
“Baa” is commonly — and controversially — accepted in British human society as the noise that sheep make,
despite the small anatomical detail that sheep can’t vocalise a “B.”
Sheep Uncut — a militant pressure group for sheep, by sheep — once attempted to sue the Oxford English Dictionary in a bid to force a more phonetically accurate representation.
Their proposed alternative was described by the presiding judge as “a bit meh,”
and ultimately rejected for being “too woolly.”
The case collapsed.
The pressure group has since sheepishly accepted the verdict —
although one hardliner, quite against the limits of his own species, did call the judge a Baa-stard.
