Fire and smoke: projects that wouldn't come to be

Paris-Ravenna, family holiday survival kit, 2023 in the rear view mirror

I picked up the car at Milan Malpensa. To break the routine of Christmas that always looks the same, this year I’m seeing my family for a holiday trip to Ravenna 🇮🇹. We’re going to roleplay being Italian and eat a lot of pasta.

Driving out of the terminal, I turn on Radio Italia. The host talks about the risks of intelligenza artificiale. It’s a perfect vignette of 2023, a year when we all spent so much time talking about artificial intelligence, playing with ChatGPT and worrying about the robot apocalypse.

Fire walk with me

How much substance is there behind the AI hype? We still remember blockchain, virtual reality, self-driving cars and so many other technologies that announced imminent revolutions that never came to be.

Does generative AI represent a real, lasting change? Did we just invent fire, or did we build another gadget of smoke and mirrors?

And how would we know the difference?

Projects that wouldn’t come to be

Don’t look at the tool, look at the projects it enables.

I would never build my silly little map of Space Invader mosaics in Paris without ChatGPT. Not because it wouldn’t be possible. I wouldn’t do it because it would have taken too much time.

It’s a pretty simple project. The data is in two places, we need a small pipeline to put it together, and then some more code to generate a web map based on it. How much time can it take?

In 2022, I’d guess it would take about 10 hours. If you only have a couple of hours for hobby tinkering every now and then, 10 hours is a lot. And that’s before we consider that programming always takes 2-3x times more time than estimated. (Through some dark magical property of the universe, knowing about it doesn’t allow you to make better estimations.)

With ChatGPT doing rapid prototyping, I only thought it would take two hours, so I got started right away. (It took, you guessed it, 6 hours.)

That’s the real value of AI tools today. They don’t enable you to do things that are not possible. Instead, they help you do things faster or cheaper. And because of that, you end up getting started on projects that wouldn’t happen otherwise 💫.

🎄 Family holiday survival kit

• 🧭 Yearcompass ⬆️ is a free printable booklet for end-of-year exercise. Hide from the world for a few hours, make tea and enjoy!

• 🎵 White wine in the sun : "I have all of the usual objections… (…) But I quite like the songs”. I love this sweet song about liking and not liking Christmas

• 📖 Non-violent communication : perfect book for those of us that try to be less argumentative, including when seeing family for Holidays :). No, gifting it to your problematic relatives probably won’t help – we can only work on ourselves.

Postcard from Ravenna

Night reading of the Divine Comedy in Ravenna. Will anything of what’s being written today be read in public squares 700 years later?

Hope we all get a moment of peace and reflection over the end-of-year holidays. Have a good one 💫,

– Przemek