The Sunday Dreads Vol. 57
An acquaintance heard I was burned out and suggested I used chatGPT to “take writing off my plate.”
If I could raise my eyebrows, they would have flown off my head entirely, but instead I just widened my eyes in the way that means “what the fuck are you even talking about” and said “oh, interesting” which is Minnesota for “what the fuck are you even talking about.”
There is no driver in the car idling next to me at the stoplight.
My city is where they test and train driverless cars. Maybe this is because Phoenix is a neat grid system. Maybe it’s because it rarely rains and rarer still does it snow1. Maybe it’s because if your driverless car kills a pedestrian it will cause barely a blip in the news.
I have an unpaid part-time job at Target.
I pay them to check out and pack my purchases, so they don’t have to pay a human cashier. When I’m done, I smile into the surveillance camera and tell myself to have a good one.
My podcast software is ready to replace me.
I can use their new “AI Tool” to correct any mistakes I’ve made or create entirely new pieces of dialogue that I never recorded in the first place.
AI wants to write my emails. Write my books. Book my next meeting. It can create a fake me for “fans” to interact with. It can make “content” to my heart’s content. But my heart feels like a better use of all this enter and water would be solving our energy and water crises?
I realize how curmudgeonly this all sounds, but I was born a curmudgeon. I was a child who wanted to churn her own butter and read by candlelight or oil lamp.2
But I was also a teenager with a Palm Pilot3 because the promise of this device was that it would make my life easier, make it possible to manage all of the chaos in my brain that was just ADHD before girls were allowed to have that (we were diagnosed as annoying, a comorbidity for which there is no cure).
My mother ran that Palm Pilot over with a rental van the day I moved into college, because I left it in my bag which I set right behind the van for some reason.4
I am easily transfixed by the promise of Better Living Through Technology. People are great and also, have you met us? I don’t think an autonomous vehicle has opened fire on another driver in a fit of road rage.
But when the robots are writing books and creating illustrations for people’s newsletters on this app, when the robots are driving the cars and making the salads, when they are reanimating our dead loved ones. When Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is feeding all of our posts into his AI without our consent it doesn’t feel like better living, it feels like sacrificing art and life at the alter of efficiency and capitalism.
Last week all traffic on the busy road by my house was at a standstill while cars tried to drive around a giant dead bush that was taking up a lane of traffic. I assume it had fallen off the back of a landscaping truck, but it definitely didn’t belong in the middle of the street.
But then, neither did the man who pulled his car into the center turn lane, put on his hazards and dragged the big, dead bush over to the sidewalk, saving the evening commutes of thousands of strangers.
I’m still thinking of it all these days later.
The way he blinked into the setting sun, his worn-in baseball cap, the way my kids and I cheered from our car even though he couldn’t hear us. The way an impatient driver in a white Mercedes nearly ran him over once his civic duty was complete, blaring her horn in protest at the inconvenience he spared her from.
It was just so human.
I found the bathrobe of my dreams.
One of my favorite brands has a set of packing cubes on sale.
Someone send me a post about a woman who wants her widower fiancé to take down photos of his dead wife and…I HAVE OPINIONS!!!
A very cute set of flannel jammies on sale at Macy’s! (it’s 109 degrees today where I live).
A day in the life vlog from September.
So listen to this…a collection of my current favorite podcasts.
Hey Siri am I having a heart attack?
We had a very short flurry in our backyard in December 2020!
I invented cottagecore pass it on.
A link for the those who do not remember this technological blip.
ADHD
Oh, really, What the fuck are you talking about….. says the 70 year old Minnesota Nanna? I had to help teach my grandchildren
London Bridges Falling Down and Eye Love You with hand singles today. They loved it, Ai can’t compete. I may be Old School, but I am not hesitant to acknowledge how our life grows and expands. Reality just means keep that personal touch, and whenever I see someone famous encouraging the use of———— fill in the blank, ignore it! Have a great October, Nicky
I keep calling myself a Luddite because I really don’t want to try AI at all