Thoughts About AI Taking All the Jobs

Maybe this is obvious to people but I just realized the "AI will take everyone's jobs" line is being pushed so hard because huge multinational corporations want it to seem normal and expected when they replace huge numbers of jobs with AI. I'm looking at this latest move by Amazon and thinking of course, they're one of the central players in Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" trend in which companies that have monopolized a sector of the economy can sacrifice the quality of their service or product to maximize profits.

Some data points that support my thinking:

From my extensive research on reddit (lol) it's clear that AI is only successful at doing very specific tasks and only then will extensive oversight. Even the most narrowly defined jobs have to deal with edge cases and anomalies and that's when AI screws up. So it's not capable of doing anyone's whole job well. But I've also been teaching high schoolers to write apps that incorporate it and it's just really hard to keep its hallucinating tendencies in check.

So any small to medium company that needs to maintain the quality of their product or service is just not going to be able to replace people with AI. It's only huge companies that will still reap their profits as their product suffers.

New Tree

An infestation of whiteflies at the mid to end of summer '24 killed the 12' holly bush and I had to remove it. We were not unhappy to see it go. After some research we chose a 'hearts of gold' Eastern Redbud tree to replace it with. It's been beautiful to see its transformation as it's grown over the first 6 months.

Growing Flax

 Last spring I planted some Blue Flax (Linum perenne) to cover the ground around the new tree. I wanted something native and pollinator friendly that would provide flowers with a nice color contrast to the many yellow and white flowers we have. We won't get the flowers this season, though, but it's a perennial so next year I look forward to many small blue flowers in early summer.

Wild Bees

I've enjoyed the wild bees this summer. One of the highlights of the summer was coming upon a nectar and pollen feast these black bees were having in a gentle winding ravine behind the Las Madres Pueblo on my dad's property. 

VFD Filament Driver Circuit

Don't give up! I spent the last 3 years troubleshooting this circuit with an LM4871 chip with the goal of supplying a low voltage alternating square wave current across the filament of vacuum fluorescent displays. Spoiler alert: it was the addition of a single 10Ω resistor to lower the voltage from ~5V down to ~3.3V.