AI me?

I see this coach on LinkedIn. I can’t remember what they coach, but they keep going on about the need to have an AI version of yourself in this new world. The posts are riddled with that fear language, the do it or die by the side of the road type stuff.

The other day it really got to me. Bad day, vulnerable head, and I just quit the tab, put down my phone.

On reflection it was a slight overreaction, but my fury was real. I’d had a coaching call with one of my own clients. He came to me because he felt seen when we did a Pit Stop together. He knew I adored his story, recognised the traps he was falling into, and had a genuine desire to help.

During one of our calls, he told me about attending a big festival in the States, where too much was about sticking the collective tongue up the arse of AI, to the point where he felt unnerved by shoals of gawping designers and artists mindlessly prodding at the tech, getting it to ‘spit stuff out’. He called them out on it, asking what the point of all this would be if we fucked the planet by spunking all of its resources on this sort of vanity addled tech wanking. People just scoffed and shrugged and probably shoved it out of their minds. But I’m with him. I’ve used ChatGPT about eight times for questions around mental health and career direction, only when it felt reasonable enough to use such energy-intensive tools.

After calming down later that day, I reflected on the potential demise of my career. If it’s death by a thousand heads in the sand, then so be it. I never had a say about whether they should have opened Pandora’s box when they decided AI was going to be everywhere, harder to escape than access, and unpoliced, but I do have to look my kids in the eye when they’re old enough to want to cave my head in if the latest human frivolity is the straw that breaks the ecosystem’s back, and tell them my truth. And if things are that bad, and they do cave my head in when it all comes crashing down, at least that’ll be that, and they don’t have to deal with a virtual ghost haunting the wastelands.