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The Human Experience | ✉️ #44

Illustration for MKDEV Dispatch #44 featuring a stylized male figure and the title "THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE" with graphic elements, including a paper airplane and chain of paper dolls. Illustration for MKDEV Dispatch #44 featuring a stylized male figure and the title "THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE" with graphic elements, including a paper airplane and chain of paper dolls.

Hey! 👋

Leo, Pablo and Kirill are out for today, so please indulge me, a humble editor, in a few paragraphs of AI blabbering, and we’ll get to the good stuff immediately after.

Do you sometimes get tired of talking about AI? Not because it’s out of nowhere or the topic you were talking about suddenly pivoting to AI was unreasonable. Just in general, on a human level, do you sometimes have this feeling that, while interesting, it’s so exhausting just to think about it? No, just me? Anyway, you simply can’t do that anymore, you can’t afford it.

AI is changing our everyday life. Have you checked out mkdev’s podcast recaps already? They are partly AI generated. They could be written by hand by yours truly, but they aren’t, it’s simply just not time-efficient enough anymore. You might think they could also be fully generated. Re-caping texts is one of the things AI is supposed to be really good at after all. But that’s also not true yet, the AI product is still almost unreadable and useless. So the everyday change of my personal life wasn’t “One of my tasks is automated now”, but rather “I now talk to a wall for a few minutes a day and I have a special relationship with this wall, to get what I want”. I didn’t have relationships with software before, that’s new. (Insert a “Her” poster here).

That might be a part of the reason for the frustration AI causes. The disruption it brought is already here, but so many of its potential benefits are still in the future. You might have seen the scandal with MKBHD and a useless pin, or another AI device that could just be an app on your phone, but is a product somebody wants you to buy now. Pablo talks about things like this on mkdev all the time.

The pressure of AI products solving every problem ever while they certainly aren’t at the point where they can do that yet, is huge. But it’s already quite good at some things, so for now we are stuck in this limbo of possibilities and promises. It is exciting for some, but it’s also exhausting. And then we get to the things that AI won’t be able to solve, but that are still affected by it. In a recent essay musician Adam Neely talks about the problem with AI in music. And it’s not another “We shouldn’t generate songs, that’s not art”, I promise. It’s more related to the things from the 35th episode of “DevOps Accents”, about the social nature of many human processes, about the nature of value and other interesting stuff.

AI predictions can sometimes be bleak when we talk about social consequences (here’s another essay, by Kyle Hill, about that). AI is already massive in the scope of its production, making everything a sea of faceless content, a dump of products. But despite a fun quote from a recent “Fallout” show (“You're a product, I'm a product, the end of the world is a product”, says Matt Berry cheerfully), we’re very much not products. That seems to be the heart of frustration in all the AI talk for me. But I’m sure we’ll figure it out, I mean, look at all the promises!

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The 45th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, May 24. See you next time!