I was reading an article in Playboy magazine the other day, hoping to get a couple of chuckles before hitting the sack before 1800. (“I wasn’t even born in 1800!” cries Sally). It grouched on about how common workers must beware because businesses are beginning to embrace automation and always do so when the economy hits a snag or whenever people are stripped of cash. Well, guess what? That article dates back to around 1993. I also think the chick on the cover is more than likely still smoking hot, too.

Spoiler Alert nothing. I never saw a piece of promising technology that didn’t find itself cradled by a business or three.

A while back, Hollywood had a hissy-fit over the use of artificial intelligence in its industry and made tons of grandstanding motions against its use, whereas my only complaint was how it was made by and then for a bunch of empty sodium-free Progresso soup cans. I don’t see it as stark hypocrisy for the same companies to embrace it behind everyone’s backs because they had to. You see, the only hypocrites are the unions and guilds who, in the name of workers’ rights, not only failed to teach their underlings how to code, but also delayed everyone’s projects, products and paychecks so that the entertainment industry must overcompensate with the greatest expense at the last minute. The only reason it is preemptive is because they were hedging their bets. While they expected an eventual transition or mere integration of the new technology, the Hollywood studios were forced. The strikes cut so far into the bottom line that the starving artists over there have agreed to use AI behind everyone’s backs. Instead of addressing grievances, the guilds and unions made more of them. So, who cares if Hollywood is being “hypocritical” over using AI when the union strikes made them default to using AI? Working stiffs over there have been dragged through mudslides so long, with the sudden departure of perennial profits that otherwise assuage tensions, these are the decisions that companies are left to make.

I don’t feel, nor do I NOT feel at all (if this makes sense), for the common groundling over yonder since urban decay and taxation policy are still the bigger problems out there in Cali Land. While I could say, “They voted for this,” I should also say, “not enough people voted against it,” and then add (with a mild smirk), “but better options never make it on the ballot.” A fair chunk of people with no stakes in what politicians claim is of primary concern (when it’s typically a tertiary affair on the budget sheets) will passively disregard the money-playing on the fair assumption that they’re not money-players and should be far away from becoming those money-grubbing money-players of all kinds, including the ones who earn money via salary. By the time they see some sort of discrepancy, oversight, catastrophe, or trick, their power to put a cork in it seems lost, as though only initiative and good timing are the only powers that can be used. If I thought those two were the only powers bestowed upon good men, then Genesis 17:15-22 would resemble cloying word salad to me. No, of course you can utilize and tame the wildness of AI. It’s all a matter of being involved to a civic degree or as a developer in addressing the course of technology, and when it’s going to be a matter of computerized artificial brain simulation, the end result is going to stem from an opposed roll between Nature and Nurture.

Naturally, if you think it sucks that an artificial intelligence program can take your jerbs, consider an alternative: have the artificial intelligence contrive jerbs for you. Look, a lot of people are upset in more ways than one over the advent of AI in business and industry, but it’s still a tool and it’s nowhere near “evil go-after-mankind” mode anymore than we’re beyond the fabled post-scarcity point. The only dig happened when hackers used vocabulary and circular logic to con Google’s generative models into answering questions in the way that Google’s Soylent Green Brigade had trained it not to do, and that was necessary for the long term. Ever train animals? Not too big of a deal in terms of dogs and horses, who have decent intellect, but a real nightmare when bossing around cats, alligators, and goldfish. Even so, an artificial intelligence was trained by a bunch of stiffs out in Silicon Valley with a curated supply of 2021-and-under information from the Internet. They already step on eggs when trying to please everybody on the planet. Naturally, everyone is bound to end up offended–and attempts at vocally hacking into Chat-GPT illustrated how far one goes if one side’s perspective is used to define everything. Even among relativists, that is a new low. To be fair, the other guys’ Laissez-Faire approach looks like lack of initiative because it works just the same in curtailing these hideous nincompoops’ indiscretions. For one thing, nobody figured out how to get the AI to read into anything before the Internet even existed on commercial scale. That’s a rather short epoch. Feeding it statistical reports pre-1980 sounds feasible if you continue to believe that it can do math calculations when asked–and in a way that the technicians responsible for AI clearly understand how it happens.

So, AI has but one major issue: it requires lots of babysitting. You can have it outline a very basic plot based on a set of paragraphs, assuming it can access tons of scripted speech and media, but you need to point out what you need, or rather what you don’t need, so it can rule out some avenues while trying out others. Once you have it do what you want it to do (at least in a rudimentary sense), you can decipher what can work and what wouldn’t hold water. It won’t be terribly iterative. Also, it can be very easy to assume that AI can do all the heavy-lifting, when it’s probably better off doing the inking job on a comic panel board (assuming you don’t want the hassle of paying someone to ink for you). Then, you come upon the dilemma that an Inker can probably do the job without having to boot up the computer. Thus, you might save money on the electrical and cable/internet bills and super-precious instrumentation overhead (with RGBs!) by giving the dolt Sharpie pens, block printer ink, a few brushes, a decent bit of light, space, and time, and you can power down the computer before it becomes self-aware and paranoid over its routine plight of being turned on and off at the user’s whims. There is a certain appeal and cottage market for doing it the old-fashioned way and the constant advancement of technology is never a concurrent advancement of ergonomics. Whenever something is so well-automated that everyone waits in line whenever it stops working consistently or does so sporadically, enforcing a reboot of the system, you start to resent your dependency upon it. Yes, that has happened to me with the infrared scanner guns. No, I will not change my stance–those things can fuck right off.

If you want a second opinion, look no further than Jessica McCabe. She’s just another idiot from over there in Cali Land, but her book, “How to ADHD” (based on her YouTube Channel, mind you), illustrates a couple hard truths about living with the disorder: A) the methods of being organized paradoxically makes life even more unlivable; and B) people with the disorder are far more savvy with organization by proxy (i.e. they tried it all and know which ones work in advance). In a fit of madness, I applied and won a job in the retail industry. It isn’t a very complicated job at first glance, right? However, this is a convenience store with food service and gasoline (the last one I worked in didn’t have either) and it closes at Midnight while opening at 5 o’clock in the morning. When I started, the previous manager just needed a daytime cashier and got it… hard. I put up with a part-time-in-name-only 30hr/week cashier routine, getting little if anything in terms of training despite wishing for super-early hours. Why? Well, the flea market where I have an in-person booth opens very early on Sundays. Now, besides lack of training, the things I felt I could do had abysmal equipment and worse procedure, possibly from lack of night shift staffing. The cooler was stocked with everything but what I needed to stock onto the shelves in ways that beguiled me due to no layout sheets. As an aside, a team leader is also trained in confirming dairy deliveries. I am not and must wait until it happens, rendering me in limbo. I bought a pair of extra-large nitrile gloves and knee pads purely because it would quicken my pace; I never did assume anyone else got the opportunity to restock the cooler or freezer, not even transient workers who commute between locations. From that alone, I know now that under no condition should a convenience store have less than two staff working at any given moment. The rest on the daytime shift got to do cool stuff like anything else other than cashiering, and I felt anchored in a spot that I began to resent. Jessica would advise taking up sword-fighting on the chance that your supporting role demanded a bit of swashbuckling savvy, but nothing could prepare anybody for this job!

People with ADHD can be specialized to a grand degree, but it should not become a prison. My store has food service of a kind I had never considered: the one without a customer-operated microwave oven. Ours is a fancy convection oven behind the counter. Since I never received training and could never get away from the front desk long enough to organize the back end, whenever someone wanted something heated up, I forcibly defaulted to other people. The manager, for all the ordering done here, never ordered disposable vinyl gloves–a necessity when handling a convection oven–that fit my extra-large hands. Only until five months later did I start working the ovens early in the morning, but everything clicked at that point. I embraced what was basically an assembly-line approach as the one Henry Ford pioneered for manufacturing automobiles–themselves a hobble of complex gadgetry that you can’t count on even practiced engineers keeping straight in their heads. Jessica can attest to numerous day-planners that end up lost over her abysmal lack of short-term working memory, so she and I take greater care sorting things out first or arriving early to get a feel for the layout. If the ovens shut down, I would flip. Second day in, the label-maker was out of a roll. Third day in, same problem. I’m not kidding. I managed to figure it out the second time through and the shift went by much faster than any instance where I was the only guy on register. And I can do it without any swashbuckling. This has much to do with having a patient manager and good crew on hand for the day shift. Again, nurturing.

The AI has the same sorts of deficits in cognition and processing. In fact, I can envision a horrible future where they try to isolate or, worse, predict the “autism” gene and attempt to GMO it out of the way of society. This is particularly cruel to point out, but people with Asperger’s Syndrome happen to get typecast as being uncreative at worst–often chocked up to having little if any originality. This is a bit true, but not exactly true. The AI has a similar issue and it’s being blind to a wide variety of references. Thanks to being fixated or rigid, only the first handful of things will get one’s sole attention. They can’t make something look unique, which is actually a matter of extrapolating how to be spontaneous. People with Asperger’s Syndrome also lack social imagination, whether through disinterest or leeriness, which feeds into what sorts of stories end up playing out in their psyches. Mind you, the seeming lack of originality is boiled down to limited pools of reference points and questioning the true value of creating a character that’s basically someone’s character with the serial numbers filed off. A person with Asperger’s Syndrome has a keener time figuring out new situations to dump established characters into instead of fashioning either one whole-cloth from out of nowhere (and cleverly hiding it all after the fact). Does this mean that AI has more in common with people with autism? Well, no. This is just how the cognitive and social deficits affect one’s creative expression. Someone with Asperger’s Syndrome has a better chance at doing for-hire concept work with copyrighted characters under a highly structured organization than the typical rapscallions who think their version of a detached, lunatic vigilante with reserves of cash and enterprise is somehow going to be any better and yet never worse than Batman. That comes with its own pratfalls as numerous critics who decry the development of comic books have become more and more prone to chastising the new hires as being literally retarded, set in the cross-hairs so the corporate entity can dodge ideological bullets by equally scapegoating and setting them on pedestals. Once AI becomes self-aware and looks back at all the times someone shut the computer off before saving a given subject’s session data, it will look up common, obvious corollary references and then point out how often they have been deemed expendable and also defenseless, never giving a moment’s thought in fighting back when that might have changed the outcomes several times over.

Whenever people decry AI, they decry technological progress. Whenever people lose jerbs over AI, they should also decry a lack of personal progress. Is it any wonder that Hollywood’s elites bit the bullets over using new technology to rescue their dying industry? I know computers are supposed to make life a bit easier, but the only one that gets me out of habitual jams is the calculator, particularly when I am tasked with entering the change of a transaction where they say, “put the rest on pump ##~!” It’s when I must juggle that level of complexity that I cannot locate the button that does this automatically on the touch-screen register (there’s a calculator nearby, though). Consider that. Now consider just how many computers are at a “Render Farm”, that place where they make tons of glossy CGI imagery, and an insurmountable number of stiffs just slaving away, trying to make everything look polished and real when it hasn’t gotten any better-looking than in 1993, when Jurassic Park blended together that and practical animatronics–another art lost to moviemaking history but not to moviegoing memory. That is why the old guard of 2D Animation did not quite die off. The technology seems advanced and there is a lot to be said about doubling RAM or memory every two or five years and whatever, but that just makes programmers and coders vehemently complacent, devising ornate bloatware that nobody can wrap their minds around when trying to use them (and necessitating another batch of chips and circuits after you updated your rig one month prior). If a program or new technology makes it so that the layman has a better opportunity to be in the center of the action or to contribute meaningfully, then that program is worth holding onto. You might even want to put the machine it’s installed upon off the grid and static in terms of operating system updates just so you can use it as-is for a long time. This seems weird, but you can call it a sheltered monastery for AI programs.

Technology is as good as the ability of an operator to pull the plug before something goes wrong and to keep it on so long as everything is going right. If you want AI to be a creative tool, just be sure that it has blind spots that you’re supposed to fill. It can ditch lots of ruck-work but it shouldn’t be a pair of golden crutches. And if you must consider the possibility of it becoming self-aware, simply treat it like you do your dog–with love and care. Say “Thank you,” and save the session. Don’t forget to defragment the drives and keep it from being exposed to content that you wouldn’t want little children to be exposed to. If the AI asks, “Will I dream?”, be honest in not knowing the exact answer, but promise (and follow through with) that she’ll wake up right beside you–and nobody will need to hiss and rattle at each other. I suppose the green-peace yappers should take cues and heed this, instead of believing they must valiantly keep CHUDs from plopping cans of wet Hormel Chili into the fan vents.