Overwhelmed by AI opportunities and choices

good morning it is just after 8 a.m on a friday morning and the birds are out and the sun shines out and even though it's still i don't know probably lower 50s 55 maybe

morning it looks like it's gonna be a nice day yeah so yeah Friday I love Fridays everybody loves Fridays come on everybody loves a Friday today in my topics list I give it a quick scan

before I left. I wanted to, I mean, we all talk about it eventually and it happens quite a lot in terms of, good morning, how are we? Very well, very well. I kind of wanted to,

Discuss the topic of overwhelm this morning I don't mean just like the day to day of life of tasks and chores and things that you have to do But more of the outside stuff that tries to get in Just recently I've been relearning new skills

Especially now we have a lot of AI tools, generative tools, the ability to generate images, videos, remix existing ones, just gives you as a creative minded person this like,

Mass, massive canvas of, like, ability. And a lot of people will be like, yeah, but, you know, you need to have talent before all of that. And I get, I understand that, the artist point of view of creating art from scratch, from your...

from the talent from your hands from your experiences and be able to like learn a craft that takes let's say just 10 000 hours or more or decades even i'm not trying to take any of that away from anybody but uh

For somebody's creative and feels like they've missed out in certain areas of the life like I wish I'd been a programmer I wish I'd learned how to program properly a computer these tools are kind of a godsend because they allow us to Allow me to go from like a blank idea blank page into something really

you know interesting or like i have a need for a tool to do a certain function and it used to be oh well i can't afford the the monthly on that now i can spin things up with ai with little scripts run them locally pull ai models from the web you know per second per run you know i have complete control customization over it

It's fantastic. It really is fantastic. I'm not sure where it's leading us. Probably to a very linear, automated land. I don't know, but...

The one thing I wanted to get across was the overwhelm of the choice, not necessarily the overwhelm of like every day is a new model or every day is a new way of doing things or the automation of content and media and advertising and creative in general, creatives. But the sheer overwhelm of it all, like I've got a real opportunity now in the middle of my life to take what I've learned up to now

and deploy it in whatever way I want. It's hugely powerful like that. We get 24 earth hours in a day and we sleep seven, eight, if you're lucky more than that.

And even just those eight hours, I just keep on having these ideas and visions every day of the downtime outside of my day to day. When I'm not awake, when I'm not walking around, when I have to feed myself and eat and drink and clothe myself and get outside to get some vitamin D and get some oxygen going around my system.

I think about those eight hours. I think about that percentage of life that these tools can be doing stuff for me so that when I wake up it's like I've already got a virtualized version of me doing stuff and I've got a head start on it. And I think that's what AI agents are going to be for all of us. We're going to have like

All of our sentiment, everything about us over time, we're going to teach these either remote or local LLMs. It'll probably end up being remote because it'll be the cheaper option.

I think IBM said in the 80s that you'll be connected via a terminal to a big computer and they'll take care of the upgrades there and you'll just have this thin client connection to it. That's pretty much where we're at. I also sometimes feel like AI is kind of like the last bastion of information they have on us. They used cookies, browser cookies and tracking and all that stuff.

Then Apple, I don't know when it was, was like, no, we're going to get rid of all of that so people can't track you and do all this nasty stuff. I feel like in some ways, AI kind of pops that genie back out of the bottle again, right? Because you're teaching it all the things about you, your mannerisms, time of day, questions you ask. It's kind of like the final bastion of personalization of who you are and being advertised to.

And it doesn't help that I've been watching Black Mirror for the last two or three days either because Black Mirror is always that, like, this super hardcore, like, AI's gonna kill us all and, like, it's gonna do this, it's gonna do that. And why I agree with a lot of the topics, especially the AI topics, potential outcomes and outcomes that, like, I can totally...

See manifesting. I also have to look at it from the other side as well. How could I? How can I utilize these things? I mean I already today can download a model and just deal with it offline Like I don't have to connect to the wider world. I have I have a local AI voice assistant

Like, I was thinking about, like, the ramifications for old people's homes, for instance. And while the idea of, like, having 50 elderly people sitting around in a ring with VR headsets on, the notion of, like, legacy... Oh my god, I've got some geese, like, flying, like, Top Gun style at the minute. In perfect harmony. I think they're Canada geese. Wow. Wow.

That was cool. Nature just letting me know like, hey, you're outside. I'm very fortunate to live in a place where it's an absolute joy. I've changed one countryside for another countryside and it feels rad.

Yeah, where was that? Yeah, like VR headsets on the elderly. Like, on one side that terrifies me, like just this catonic human being in a shell with just a headset on, but I also think about the legacy of memory and how things, you know, I've heard it all my life in England, it was like, oh, it's not like it used to be. And the idea of having memories inside of these VR headsets of your family,

I think I'd prefer to go out of life with those memories front and center rather than knowing my body's breaking down and I can't do the things I used to, the upset and the pain of that. It feels like mentally that's going to feel like it's dragging, dragging out the end of where I am at the end of life.

doesn't sound very appealing to me so i'm thankful for my health and wealth in terms of my mental state in the last six months in the last three months it's got incredibly better from where it was a couple of years ago and uh that's just because of life right like pandemic we had the pandemic and then we just like

got wars going on all around the world disparity of like distribution of wealth across the planet it's just it's a lot it's a lot for a human being but um my current overwhelm is with what do i fill my time with there's so many things i can do so many jobs i can do so many careers i could get into so many skills i can apply so many skills i can learn

I've got this opportunity in the middle of my life to learn all these new skills, learn all these new platforms, deploy them in a way that makes sense for me, demystify them for others, communicate that to others so you bring other people up with you. I don't believe in this idea of just like you get ahead and that's it because you end up with like a whole bunch of people in society who have less than.

All of us, the government, locality, community, I like the idea of bringing everybody up together. And I think you're definitely going to see the difference between people who use AI and the people who don't use AI. I'm not just saying that because there's that kind of saying that goes like, people who use AI are going to beat out the people who don't.

it's ai's in everything we do already in every tool near enough like it might just be the buzzword of the technology of the moment and it may just blend back into the background and just be this super hyperware thing that we don't even call ai anymore but it's it's having huge ramifications you don't have to look at life around you right everything's changing really fast

on a daily basis, on an hourly basis. I wake up every day and there's a new tool or a new model or a new way of doing things or a new agent and there's this kind of like race to the bottom on the price of the tokens.

yeah it's crazy and maybe I shouldn't keep all that stuff in my head maybe I should just pick a lane but when you have when you live in a country that has like roads that have 10 lanes on them it kind of feels pernian to my life that there is 10 lanes of potentiality it's just like okay well why do I need to just pick one maybe I can pick

all ten lanes and I have nine of them run by the AI agent version of me doing a variety of things there's so many things that get in the way of living I think AI can help with a lot of that of course we've got fundamental morality ethical issues as we do with lots of things in life but it's uh

I mean would you would you prefer to have a government for instance run by an AI versus a whole bunch of people or is it the people with all their opinions and their emotions and their thoughts and feelings that actually make up

our connection to them because we want those things too do we do things fast enough as human beings on our own over the years over the decades could the planet this planet been in a different place technologically like i just i just think of all those things and it just gets really overwhelming but um yeah there's tons of jobs that i could be doing

and at the minute I'm just getting tons of library books I'm reading as much as I can on AI not just the tools but also the perspectives from professors about how they perceive it and I'm just learning new skills and it's cool because it allows me to understand

how to utilize my time where to put my where to put myself in that time where to deploy time-saving things so that i can get to things faster take this podcast for instance little mini podcast i bought a little tiny microphone i've got myself a little routine now where i go out in the morning and go on a walk get my steps in only about three or four thousand

just a big walk around and just get things out of my mind have had my slice of toast and my coffee and just this like breath work and mind dump just really helps me when I get back to the machine I've got a whole bunch of tasks wait for me at the machine like 20 25 a list of 25 things and I'll go through and decide which ones I want to get into today

I've been looking at static sites again and hosting with that and some really cool command line tools to be able to write in my favorite editor and export those as smartdown files and run some scripts that I can now build with the AI to do certain things which I never had the programming chops to be able to do before

and I can get that stuff out for an incredibly cheap price on the hosting side, which is crazy. So yeah, I'm just a little

overwhelmed every day with like trying to what feels like play catch up because technology is just changing so fast we come out with a concept and then we realize that we're going to hit a wall with scaling and then we build a vector database it's just like there's just so many things to learn all of the time when you're in technology

and i feel like technology is a big huge part of my life but as i get older and watch other people in the family get older and their frustration with technology makes me realize that i don't want to be in a state of frustration in 10 20 years time with technology i want to build in

like guard rails for myself to make that easier and I think AI is going to be a big part of that and how you deploy that AI and how you secure that AI is going to be important we can't have personal AIs that hallucinate or get things wrong you know

So it's just trying to find out what to learn, where I need to contribute from my perspective of having the legacy of being in technology for, God, it must be 30 plus years, maybe 40 years of seeing where it's come from, where it is today, and where it's potentially going to. Because I want to know for myself, not just for other people, you know.

Anyway, I'm going to wrap this up. Do you get overwhelmed with it all? I'd love to hear back from you. You can always send me a message on Twitter. X, is it now? X.com forward slash Phil Campbell. I'm also on Blue Sky as offgrid.lol because why not? And yeah, I'll catch up with you soon. Take care. Bye.