Off the Bench

As a quick prologue, this is my journey of what got me off the bench, what got me thinking of AI in a different light. Go with me on this one.

I am a bit of a unicorn, sounds haughty, but it’s what started my career in IT. I was working building maintenance in a hotel, it was the early ‘00’s, it was not what I wanted to be doing but it was I had the tools for. I had a passion for technology, but growing up in small town (bush) Alaska didn’t offer the access needed to break into the emerging fields of computers, the internet, and tech.

My hotel had just installed it’s first wireless access network for guests, in fact it’s first wireless anything. The tech had just left and we were now on our own. Within a few days we started having connection problems and instability. I worked my hardest to figure out where the problem was. Checking routers, modems, switches, even running the rudimentary cmd testing I knew to see what a network was doing. I had a grasp of IP, Ping, subnets, DNS, DHCP, etc. Alas after hours of digging I couldn’t find the issue, which lead to reaching out to the Hotel’s parent company and asking for their IT’s support.

The IT manager came over within a few hours, we sat down and started troubleshooting. Within a few minutes I had walked him through my troubleshooting steps, and the network. We sat on a computer, I was running cmd prompts against the network and showed him were I got stuck. He paused…

He was insanely impressed at my tech skills, but also in my ability to communicate clearly and concisely with him.

After we finished up the troubleshooting, found the issue beyond my ability to reach, and repaired the network he offered me a job. He had stated that I was one of the first people he had ever met that had strong technical abilities mixed with the ability to talk to people, read people, and help people on their level. It was a rare gem in the early days of compute. This launched my IT career.

Let’s jump ahead a few decades.

I was working in a corporate job for a direct supervisor that had never ran an IT team before. They were a former State employee, and CYA was their life. They perceived everything as a threat to both their job and their power. Which meant if they didn’t understand what I was attempting to inform them of, I was the issue.

Over a years time it devolved. I watched as they took everything I gave them and handed it off to AI to “summarize”. This became a standard for them. I then watched as they gave me feed back, increasing to every single email, washed through AI. I witnessed a smart, intelligent human offload their cognitive reasoning to an algorithm. Everything they sent out was now washed through a bot.

I watched as she sent my work upward, as far as the board, completely altered by AI. She had no idea what I was suggesting, asking for, or planning, AI was making the decisions. The write-ups, plans, warnings, suggestions, even the budget, left my email, were tossed into AI, and came out the other side devoid of what I was trying to actually communicate. The documents were utterly sterile, and devoid of human reasoning.

This ultimately ended my job. We became ultimately incompatible because I could not find a way to communicate with them in an effective manner.

This sparked something in my mind of the dangers of relying on a tool to the detriment of your own mind. I witnessed first hand the dangers of AI, and that rabbit hole has only gone deeper.

Stick around as I speak of my journey, both from experience, and from what I’m watching in the world around me unfold.