Misadventures
AI Hype is boring and I wonder how long it will be before the bubble bursts. It may be as much due to shortages of water to run the huge servers, rather than the crazy stuff it creates. Good bye help desks; we are on our own now and reading Q&A feels like those scam calls pretending to be Microsoft. The best response to them was a small granddaughter pretending to cry when they called saying she was so happy for their help - imitating her father who loved to keep them on the line to see how long it would take for the caller to go off script. - and the poor scammer even left his to ask if she was all right.
Then there is a world of devastation both in the Middle East where last minute bombing has to precede a cease fire -and other kinds of fires on the west coast. Is this our new normal? Devastation that takes decades to remedy?
And then there is politics - such fawning questions by the senators who want to support questionable leaders. We might call These guys - and they definitely are guys -oligarchs if we didn’t want to annoy a couple of them as Canadians. I’ll join Michelle Obama as a no-show for the inauguration. It’s hard to imagine how much three or four miliion of bad taste might be on display. A bright note in our Canadian election of a new part y leader is that we have a couple of promising contenders coming to the top; maybe it will all be settled quickly and we can focus on avoiding tariffs.
And last of all social media. I’m close to leaving Meta, having already abandoned Instagram and X. LinkenIn tells me how many people are searching on profile even though I am retired and am not contemplating starting a new job or an MBA. My Facebook feed is pretty vapid for a reason. I lurk and comment as little as possible, The algorithms are very frustrated because they don’t know what to send me and keep asking if I would like more or less of the real messages that are sent through. More than half of the posts are ads re something I searched on sometime. Detergent sheets liked by a couple of friends have bombarded me now for about five years. I don’t think I need influencers in my life even if 20,000 other people like them. Thankfully I have never been subjected to the worst of social media’s trolling and hate, but I do wonder how often I am to admire endless updates of selfies and dining out of people I know rather casually. These are not media that encourage collective humility.
And so the year starts What’s always worth remembering is that as much as we applaud or fear, what we are really faced with is unpredictability. After so many awful surprises, who knows - there just might be a couple of good ones.