Don’t assume!

I surf a Zeitgeist, not roll along with it!

The zeiteist is my medium, not my destination.

I’ve been here before.

So don’t dare assume I’m tinkering with AI or treating it like some clever intelligent buddy.

Let me explain.

When the Amiga arrived, I wasn’t simply buying a computer. I was already exploring what computers could become. While others were still waiting for the computer age to arrive, I was sampling sound, making video, animating, storing absurd quantities of data and discovering what happened when you pushed the technology somewhere its manufacturers probably hadn’t intended.

Then the computer age arrived.

Suddenly everybody had a computer.

And that was the curious bit.

The people who had only just acquired the technology appeared, from the outside, to be entering the future.

I’d already been living in it.

I think something similar is happening again.

AI happens to be today’s extraordinary new medium. But I am not particularly interested in following the AI zeitgeist, any more than I was interested in following the computer zeitgeist.

I’m interested in what becomes possible when you use the thing everyone has just discovered to continue something you’ve been building for decades.