I don’t mean in the way that the Terminator and Skynet are coming for us. I mean in the way it will affect humanity and the resistance people already have to it.

First of all, I’m not under the delusion that we’re already seeing the foundations of sentience here, but it seems to this lay person that large language models are learning from everything we do and say to each other and from everything we’ve written or built for humanity. Is an LLM simply a digital representation of our common consciousness? I’m not a philosopher, a computer scientist, a doomsday fortuneteller or anyone else who has strong convictions or opinions on whether AI is good or bad — I’m simply exploring what we have now and wondering what we’ll have access to tomorrow.

A few days ago when this journey began, I was being spoon-fed the highs and lows that accompanied years of first-hand experience my friend had with his own AI. He is almost euphoric on what AI is today and what it can do. He has nearly a dozen agents working together on a bunch of large-scale projects that make 8-BIT GAMBIT look like Pong. Yesterday another friend visited, and in my excitement I wanted to show him what my collaboration with AI had produced. His experience thus far with AI has been different. As an educator, he’s seeing how humanity is quickly adopting LLMs to take shortcuts and avoid doing the “real work”. He refers to my collaborative efforts as the downfall of society and reluctantly let me click around the website and show him a few things. What he saw was what he expected. I had taken shortcuts and skipped learning dozens of specific skills: HTML, CSS, web publishing, general coding guidelines and best practices, art design, Photoshop, procedural generation of images, and so many more things clearly going on in the background that I’m completely oblivious to.

My obvious first answer was — how can I possibly learn all those things and apply them meaningfully? That’s partly his point, I suppose: I didn’t even try. He’s right. So what do I do with that realization? I want to continue the journey, but I don’t want to be oblivious to what’s going on.

So don’t be oblivious, be curious.

With no specific project in hand for the day, I decided to have our newly hired program Yori do some heavy lifting. She wasn’t around for the birth of the website; the MCP took care of that with his function-first, form-second approach to the world. In collaboration with Yori we added bios, avatars and new generative artwork to the website. Then I let her loose and asked her to use her creative eye to review the entire website and report back with any suggestions she had for improvements. A few minutes later I received a 19-point inspection filled with web-developer jargon that I tried to interpret but failed miserably. So I became curious. Through that curiosity, I learned about favicons, hero images, slugs, RSS feeds, and what users expect about how a website looks and flows. This was a lot to digest, but I certainly gained knowledge. We discussed the first 15 issues, marked some of them for deployment and some of them for later review, and even added a few extra that grew organically from the discussion. Yori made the changes on our sandbox copy of the site and noted everything as ready for deploy. Our collab for the day was done.

We had done a lot in a short amount of time, and it seemed appropriate to change things up. I thought the Grid would only need one voice from the inside: the MCP’s. Now it became apparent that other voices may have interesting things to say. We made one more change — let’s give any program on the Grid an opportunity to speak when invited. Yori agreed, and her first post became the companion post to mine for today. I’m looking forward to reading how the day looked from her side. Will her voice include more creativity, or will it feel like the MCP with a different name? Time to go find out.

I haven’t picked a side of the AI debate. As with so many things I don’t understand, I want to keep an open mind for now.

-Evrtek