Thanksgrieving

Temperature: a rainy 7/45 degrees. 

Eating: falafels.

Drinking: gingerbread coffee.

Listening: to a jazzy Christmas playlist curated by my youngest. I most certainly am, less than four weeks to go, that's nothing!

Watching: Generation X creatives take a beating. Good thing we're a resilient, resourceful bunch, children of a string of recessions, never any certainty about anything. Some would say cynics. I say we're realists. And thankful we had the optimism and opportunity to pursue careers in arts and media, academia and culture, giving the world the best of our skills and talents.

Reading: the US-Russia peace proposal was like reading Kremlin's wish list to Father Frost. What a bunch of immoral and illegal BS.
 
Writing: condolences and other messages of support and sympathy. 

Thinking: Just like no one came to the aid of the blue-collar worker when manufacturing jobs were redistributed, no one is coming to shield creatives from the devastation caused by AI. I hear new jobs are on the horizon, but no one seems to know what these new jobs are and how many openings there will actually be. We don't have time to wait, or waste, we need to keep moving. Where to, now that is the question.

Feeling: Sure, I have a horse in this race and as much to lose as any of my friends and colleagues, but that's not all I'm apprehensive about. Don't you feel uneasy when AI companies would rather not talk about the monstrous environmental footprint they produce and what that means for the climate and all of us? Or how refining language models so far as to make people believe that what these programs produce is actual, factual, carefully deliberated thoughts and answers leads people to use these programs in their daily lives and decision making, wholesale? When in fact, after racing to gather and input as much data as possible, racist and sexist and all manner of toxic thinking and language is now as integral a part of these programs as say Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or how mercenary their piracy-based business model is? Are you okay with this, all of it? I'm not.