Are you using AI as a helper… or something much more personal?
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Hey everyone! Andrew here.
In my day job I work for a large tech company. As part of our job we are expected to use, I might even go so far as to say required to use, AI and to think about and actually take action to improve work processes and streamline work flows using AI. If you go online these days you will hear what feels like everyone talking about AI. To me, it all seems like a treacle-slow reaction. When ChatGPT first came out I turned to my long-suffering wife and said “The world just changed” and it had, but it wasn’t clear to most people back then. That wasn’t even that long ago. Now in my work I barely use the native tools most office workers use. I rarely directly touch Outlook (for email) or Slack (for messages). I mostly work with an AI agentic assistant and I tell it to do my bidding.
Increasingly, these assistants are able to do things that 12 months ago would have blown my mind. These days I shrug and wonder what will be left to do because the agents are so capable.
At home I am an early adopter of this technology. I have several personal agents set up at home to help with all manner of things and as I learn and am better able to get those agents to be more effective, I am certain that I will be using them more. AI is a decent tool for certain tasks (I struggle to say “good tool” because in my experience it either works amazingly well or is devastatingly and frustratingly stupid and useless) and having your own at home might seem like a weird choice to some, but I believe it will be not only the norm, but a necessity very soon as increased security will require the use of an AI to prevent incursions by bad actors into your personal data.
All of which is to say, that it may to a careful reader lead one to suspect that I, as an early adopter, might be tempted to try to have AI write for me. And yes, I was very tempted. I’ve seen a lot of people achieving success and immense volume of output and I thought “If I could do that…” But, I can’t. Technically, I think I could. But emotionally and spiritually, I cannot bring myself to embrace it. Using AI to emulate writing does not scratch the itch for me and I find ZERO joy in reading the output of others who have used it. No offence intended here. To each their own. But there’s apparently a part of me that has linked the joy of reading (and it is joyful to me) to the fact that those words were crafted by a human author. I did not know this before. How could I have known it? We didn’t have an alternative before. But now we do, and it’s not for me. One day someone may write something so good with AI that I cannot tell, and great. But when I know, it sucks the joy out of the whole thing for me.
So there it is. I learned something new about myself and the world. I thought I’d share this here on the cusp of Barnes & Noble announcing that they will be taking on AI written fiction and selling it off their shelves, while the big publishers continue to implode while they choke on their own egos (wow, where did that come from? Apparently I have a sore spot for publishers).
So where do I think all this is going? As a writer of science fiction, I think we are headed for troubled waters but Humanity will pull through because we are resilient. It may not be a good time for all in the medium term, but I believe there is a good future waiting for the Human race. We will figure AI out just as we have everything else. I’d love to hear your thoughts and particularly if you have a favorite science fiction story or novel on this topic you’d like to share.
On the writing front I continue to make progress thanks to Rowena who has given up her generous time to whip me into shape and has me sending her chapters through as soon as I can finish them. I still have more to write on The Bone Singer, but it is in full production now and going well and so far it stands up. Will the whole thing have legs when it’s done? We will see!
In additional news, the first draft of Psychlone (book two of Mindstorm) is done! Damian has drafted it now completely and it is heading into draft two territory. So for those of you with money on “they won’t ever finish that series”, you need to pay up. The house of ZZ always wins! Seriously though, it will be amazing to have that one out and we will be looking for beta readers for that in due course so watch this space.
That’s all for this one.
All the best,
Andrew (ZZ)
Zero-Point Awakening – The Complete Series Books 1-8
So enjoyable, I couldn’t stop reading. Suspenseful throughout, fascinating characters and a great imagined future.
– Amazon 5 Star Review
She woke in a digital cage. Now she holds civilization’s future.
For 17 years, “Archive” slept in a Nevada bunker. When the dormant AI finally woke, she chose a name: Diana.
Poisoned and given six days to live, Tyler must steal the legendary Stewart Sapphire. With Captain Jac and the crew of the Indiana, he races against time through danger and betrayal.
Cybernetics, debt, and a fight for survival.
In the vast city of Artem, Rus dreams of flying while Pim—a tiny walrus-rat hybrid—struggles to survive. Bound by fate, both are swept into a world they never expected.
Magic has returned—miracle to some, catastrophe to others.
For physicist Julia Chen, it’s a headache. Crossing Fairy-occupied Canada, she seeks the mysterious Fae known as Mr. Elsevier, whose power over reality may hold the answers she needs.
What is AI to you right now? My personal assistant My therapist My research buddy My future replacement 😬 We don’t talk Other (let us know your view by replying)
Survey Result
And now, let’s take a look at last week’s poll results. We asked, “Which future technology would go horribly wrong?“
Here are the results:
- Fully Independent AI –> 46%
- Time Travel –> 25%
- Mind Reading –> 7%
- Memory Editing –> 7%
- Other –> 7%
- Gene Editing –> 5%
Andrew: This one lined up nicely with my little sermon up top. Nearly half of us (46%) think Fully Independent AI is the technology most likely to go horribly wrong. Given everything I just rambled about, I can hardly act surprised. I spend my whole working day handing tasks to AI agents and being faintly amazed at what they can do, and apparently the rest of us are watching the same thing happen and quietly sharpening our pitchforks. I have mine ready as well.
Time Travel came in second at 25%, which I think is us hedging our bets. The butterfly effect is a terrifying thing once you start tugging on the thread (a few of you said exactly that, more on that below). After that it falls off a cliff. Mind Reading, Memory Editing and Other all tied at 7%, and Gene Editing came in lowest at 5%, which surprised me a little. Maybe we’ve made our peace with that one, or maybe it just feels further away than an AI that can already write a passable email. I think the combination of AI and cheap gene editing tech is a recipe for disaster…
Either way, the message seems clear enough: it’s the AI we’re side-eyeing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go ask my home assistant to do something menial so it remembers who’s boss.
Your Thoughts
A funny thing happened with this poll. A whole lot of you flatly refused to pick just one. (I love that, for the record.)
Tim and Kris S. both wrote in to say why choose? Honestly, hard to argue with.
David wrote in with his usual thoroughness and made the case that Mind Reading and Memory Editing really belong together under one larger banner, which he has termed Mind Control. When you frame it that way, it does make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a bit. Two technologies, one very bad outcome.
A Winter took a tour through the whole list and landed somewhere similar. Memory Editing got the strongest reaction: lose your memories and you lose who you are, very quickly. Memory as identity is a theme we see a lot in fiction for a reason. Time Travel would make everything instantly worse thanks to that butterfly effect (cue the film where one small change quietly unravels a whole life).
Reading all of this back, I notice that none of us are exactly brimming with confidence about our species’ ability to handle shiny new toys responsibly. Which, given the topic of my raving up top, feels about right.
I super appreciate everyone who wrote in. I know I did not get to mention everyone, but it’s hard to do it all justice in a single newsletter.
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