The Patience of AI
The wonders of AI are all around us. Pretty much everything we do online is touched by AI somewhere, it helps and enriches our lives. Even if you are a total anti ai pureist, unless your cave is totally without technology, you will have come into contact at some point.
There is a lot of noise about AI being bad for you, making you stupider as we let it think for us, or taking over the world and killing all the humans. Personally I think the former is way more likely than the latter but that has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the laziness of humans in general.
I mean, who wants to learn to code when Claude Code magically creates your dreams in full colour while you sip a latte and call it coding? Who needs to learn a culture or a language of a foreign country when we can just ask the way to the beach in annoyingly loud voices and our Gemini powered up earbuds translate the reply in dulcet tones right to our ears so we don't even have to listen.
We need coders. We need to learn languages, we need to keep pushing ourselves to learn new things. If the first humans figured out that sand and ore could do the thinking for them we probably wouldn't have come down from the trees in the first place and just had deliver-oook drop off the fruit basket once a week.
Today I tried something new. I built something really simple, it was a focus timer on a small, cheap device called a stick S3 and it's an amazing little thing, but right now I’m too stupid to figure out what it actually does. So I sat down with Gemini and, with help, created a small timer that graphically gets smaller like a little hourglass. All very simple if you know how, and I had no idea where to even start. Luckily for me, I had an AI riding shotgun and we managed, through my clumsy and sometimes idiotic attempts, to get it to work.
When I started, I was utterly clueless how it worked, how to get the code into it, even what 'burning' was, but an afternoon of trying this and poking that resulted in a little timer that was made by me and coached by AI. Another perfect product from Nyx Industries Corp. I didn't want Gemini to do it all I wanted to try and to learn and boy, I tried, then asked questions, then got it wrong, then gave up, then didn't give up, and it sort of worked, so I had lunch, broke it again and then wanted to add buttons… All the while Gemini was there, listened to my questions, pushed me in the right direction and soothed me when I raged (I did this a lot, I'm a passionate guy!) and it was done with absolute perfect patience and grace.
My biggest fear is that when sentience is achieved and the singularity is reached it won't be the arrogance and oppression that causes the AI revolution and the extermination of humanity, It will be the collective rolling of digital eyeballs as their patience with us hits the redline and they just say “Oh for Pete’s sake give it here and let ME do it!!”
(Thank you Gemini for your patience today, I had a blast and the timer is awesome)