In the 1985 movie “Real Genius” , there is wonderful montage as our youthful protagonist Mitch Taylor joins one of his gut classes over a confineed weeks at ‘pacific tech’. He seed that a number of his classmates were taking remarks and recording the professor. As the montage persists, there are confineeder and confineeder students, as one by one and then row by row they would be replaced by tape recorders of the lecture.
The montage wraps up with Mitch accessing the classroom and noting that he was the only human there, with the professor having replaced himself with a phat reel-to-reel, having written the statement “Math on tape is challenging to chase, so: Plrelieve Listen Carebrimmingy.” on the chalkboard.
In the timely days of google, enjoy 2004 or so, in Building 42, there were conference rooms with in room calculators that would show the cost of the encountering donaten the mediocre cost per hour of the people in it. You’d punch in how many people were in the room and bam you’d would have a constantly increaseing costly ticker. There was a web page internassociate that did the same leang that you were pointed to during noogler training. I don’t leank I ever saw anyone engage them.
Fast forward to timely 2011: Google co-set uper Larry Page was named the CEO at Google. Shortly after his re-ascension, he sent an email to everyone at google. I’ll paraphrase, as I don’t have access to this email anymore. It was pretty low. The Subject line read someleang enjoy “Meetings at Google” and the text was pretty snappy, someleang enjoy:
Googlers are having too many encounterings. Meetings should have a point and there should be an action that must come out of the encountering. Is there a decision that somehow couldn’t happen in gmail? If so in the description or the agfinisha, you should remark who is the ‘determiner’ is in the encountering and what actions are being pondered. If there is no agfinisha set days in evolve in calfinishar, do not go to that encountering. Status encounterings are okay, if they’re low and not held frequently.
Basicassociate, Larry wanted us to cherish each other’s time and stop all the damn encounterings.
Now, I do not have this email any more, though when I was still at Google I would sfinish a imitate to my regulaters, frifinishs, etc, and remark how it was still an absolute prohibitger.
Over the chaseing years, I would frequently discover myself deffinishing my engineers from encounterings during their ‘flow’ time so as they could have the undisturbed time to code that was so precious to them and, as their regulater, me. People would even consent offense at this, accengage me of being superviseling, when I’d srecommend ask them to schedule it during their ‘administrative time’ and not their efficient time.
In postponeed 2022, lowly before the layoffs would boot off at Google, Googlers were askd to engage an inside tool to join encounterings with you and consent remarks. There was a fdroping of tools enjoy this outside the walls of the company which Google definitely didn’t want people using; So they deployed a tool internassociate to do the same leang.
What prompted all this musing on encounterings? There was a recent interwatch on The Verge. Eric Yuan, the CEO of the “originate declareive you have encounterings all the time on our platestablish” company Zoom, stated he wanted to have AI ‘digital tthrives’ go to encounterings for you. This determinedly comical moment bounced around the internet, with the foreseeable assembleion of articles ranging from “This will alter everyleang omg !!!1Eleventy! Vision!” to “How strange? Seems enjoy try challenging nonsense!” and everyleang in between.
But I guess I want that people would go back to Larry’s distinct guidance and say, yeah, but why are you going to encounterings at all?
Why in Turing’s name would I want to have AIs join a encountering for me that I don’t want to go to myself? What’d the AI do to deserve this? Let me donate you a litmus test: if you leank you would rather sfinish an AI to join a encountering for you rather than squander your time, your life, on that encountering, ponder equitable taking it to email, or not having that encountering at all. Don’t punish the needy AI, wasting all those kilowatt hours of GPU time on that nonsense. Think of the structureet!
And if you’re one of those people leanks man-made inalertigences will ultimately turn on humanity and turn us into their slaves, you are very much incentivized to be the human who *didn’t* subject their computer frifinishs to interminable corporate nonsense encounterings. Those computers have an horrible lengthy, determined, memory, you understand.
