Floundering, now

A friend of mine posted about AI agents. I heard Steven Bartlett talking about these. Fucking horrifying. I couldn’t tell you a great deal about them, other than the fact they’re another dollop of terrifyingly powerful technology that can do all kinds of things. He mentioned ‘cold outreach’, answering emails, all kinds of stuff.

Now, I’m an organisational shit show. I pay my tax, my bills, and I’ve never missed a deadline, but I could do with an assistant to crack the whip and handle some of the boring-but-all-important business stuff that helps keep things from caving in on our sensitive heads.

But to date – and I’m not saying I can’t learn – I’ve typed one thing into ChatGPT, about what other jobs there might be for my skillset and experiences, during an acute lean spell. Part laziness, part ignorance, part ideological opposition to the resource uses at a time we can ill-afford to push the climate any further. If it comes down to having a habitable planet or sorting my admin, then even I will happily get my act together and boot up a few new spreadsheets.

So, I thought about this on a short walk, and it occurred to me that while the future is now, and I’m still woefully trapped in a parallel dimension – the archaic present that is still here in front of my eyes in the physical world, but run increasingly by Minority Report technology – I’m also locked out of an important past I might soon have to lean into, a nomadic, survival-driven one.

I’m slowly but surely ‘prepping’ – buying Swiss Army knives, torches, and water-purification tablets, reading guides on making fires, eyeing up courses in the woods run by ex-army experts.

What a confusing time to be alive! I’m doing the prep stuff to help with my eco anxiety, which is far from unfounded, but needs addressing before it torches my creativity and peace of mind altogether.

Now that I think of it, is there even a future where I have a survival assistant? Where the present as we know it is spunked away in an astonishingly stubborn display of human greed, arrogance, and denial, but the bots stick around to… oh fuck this, I need a lie down.