When I left Bloomberg almost two years ago the artificial intelligence hype of the market was overwhelming. It was noisy and chaotic. It still is, but I’ve found “my” signal in the noise. My feelings about AI haven’t changed. I am still 100% against it, but I have spent the last year HEAVILY using it so that I can understand the noise of the markets, and what people are saying when they get all glossy eyed and evangelical about this technology.
I have spent a year, about roughly about 15K on Claude, working deep in what I call the “Claude mines” using it in my VSCode IDE, via the Claude Desktop application, and in the browser. I used it for almost 90% of my work in my staratup to deeply understand where it works and where it does not work. It is a trip to work in the mines each day. It is something that slowly shifts your priorities, and how you feel about the physical and digital world, that I don’t think most people will understand.
Artificial isn’t healthy for two primary reasons, 1) shifts your priorities away from the human things that matter, 2) it extracts all of the important things that make you human. You stop prioritizing the things that make you human around you, and reducing anything meaningful you used to create into transactions and tokens. For example, I stop paying attention to my wife, dog, and health, and I let it extract my daily reading and writing, which I depend upon not just in my work, but also for my mental well being. These are just the personal reasons AI is bad, and I am not touching on the social, democratic, and environmental reasons.
I used Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT over the last year, with the most usage being on Claude. I don’t use Claude to direct my world, but to deliver on components of my world. I experienced working with other people who have turned over most of the direction for their world over to these services. I still depend and thrive on talking to humans and understanding my world, so I refuse to turn over what directs my work (people and processes) to AI, but I encountered folks who dread talking to and dealing with people who welcome AI being a buffer between them and the people and processes that actually make business go around. The outcomes reminded me of other points in my life where people I know and deepended upon decided to checkout of the world.
AI reminds me of how people use legal and illegal drugs to deal with the world around them. I can see a througline from my drug use in the 1990s to the AI realm today. I don’t like to use the word addiction, because that isn’t what I think is happening here. Some of us are just predisposed by nature or environment, or both to opt for checking out of this world in these exciting yet damaging ways. I see AI as next generation drug. A hellava drug. It’s some damaging shit. If you aren’t grounded and have loved ones who will ground you, you can really lose yourself in this shit. Don’t get me wrong. I love working with Claude. And that is the problem. My grounding in the real world is what whispers in my ear that we’ve been here before, and this isn’t new, but it is at a scale and scope that is different.
This shit is going to fuck a lot of people up. I can tell. People without books, music, art, and healthy human connections and relationships are going to struggle. If you don’t have a strong sense of yourself in the physical world, you are going to lose the signal for yourself in the digital world. I feel for kids who are immersed in this from day one. I am thankful I have the worldly experience that I have to help me navigate, yet I still struggle to pull myself away. I get captivated by working in the Claude mines. After stepping back I am going to immerse myself at this intersection of our physical and digital reality for the summer. I’m not putting Claude down entirely, but turning the volume from 80 or 90 down to 10 or 20, so that I can think deeply about things while still get my work down and engage with the market.
