Tag Archives: AI

Open software, open apps

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In 2 years, who is going to pay Adobe or Microsoft for a fleet of software tools that they can get for free? Who is going to pay an app subscription when we can ask a swarm of AI agents to build us our own personal app that meets more needs than a purchasable one?

Will Adobe and Microsoft be modern versions of Blockbuster video stores, losing out to another model of delivery? With the difference being that the Netflix replacement will be open sourced and free.

Now, any and all software can easily be reversed engineered and cleverly replicated without infringement on Copyright Laws. This fundamentally undermines software/app by subscription companies.

And I’ll emphasize that this is happening now! This is a massive disruption to the status quo. Large, successful companies will see profits plummet. Companies relying on subscriptions for software will lose a significant number of end users and subscribers.

What happens to our world when open software and open apps take over? We are about to find out!

See: Someone Just Rebuilt Adobe for Free, and Claude Can Run Them All (7 apps tested) – Jay E | RoboNuggets

AI Insights

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I recently got some insight on my AI insights from an AI.

I decided to ask ChatGPT:

I’ve written a fair bit about AI, see tags: https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/
and https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/tag/ai/, please share with me:
1. What is a prediction I most likely will get right.
2. Where am I missing the mark?
3. What’s the most uniquely insightful idea that I’ve shared? 

Here is ChatGPT‘S response… and I find it quite insightful:

I enjoyed thinking about this because your AI writing has a recognizable worldview. It isn’t a collection of disconnected opinions—there are a handful of core principles that recur across many posts. 

What follows isn’t a prediction of whether you’ll be “right” or “wrong.” It’s my best assessment of which ideas I think are most robust, and where I think your model of the future could be incomplete.

1. The prediction you’re most likely to get right

Your prediction that AI’s greatest near-term impact will come from amplifying ordinary people—not from becoming an autonomous supervillain.

This idea appears repeatedly in your writing.

Rather than worrying primarily about “AI takes over the world,” you focus on AI enabling:

  • bioterrorism,
  • industrial-scale scams,
  • personalized fraud,
  • cybercrime,
  • misinformation,
  • one malicious individual having disproportionate power.

I think history is already bending in your direction.

Technology almost always scales existing human intent before it replaces humans.

The printing press spread propaganda before democracy.
The internet scaled fraud before education.
Social media amplified outrage before civic engagement.

I suspect AI will follow the same pattern.

I think twenty years from now people may look back and realize that “AI as force multiplier for humans” was a more important story than “AI replacing humans.”

That feels like one of your strongest forecasts. 

2. Where I think you’re missing the mark

Interestingly, I don’t think you’re too pessimistic.

I think you’re not pessimistic enough about adaptation.

Your writing often assumes exponential technological improvement translates fairly directly into exponential societal disruption.

Technology often is exponential.

Institutions rarely are.

People aren’t either.

For example:

Autonomous driving may become technically solved long before regulators, insurers, unions, municipalities, and consumers allow full replacement.

Likewise, AI lawyers, teachers, doctors and programmers may become technically capable years before society reorganizes around that capability.

You’ve written about the “frog in the pot.”

I wonder if there’s another metaphor:

society as a giant flywheel.

The flywheel eventually turns—but much more slowly than the engine powering it.

A second place I think you’re underestimating something:

Humans don’t optimize as much as economists think they do.

Many of your work-related predictions assume organizations will aggressively replace humans because it’s economically rational.

Sometimes they will.

But humans also buy:

  • trust,
  • relationships,
  • status,
  • ritual,
  • authenticity.

Coffee shops still exist despite home espresso machines.

Live concerts thrive despite Spotify.

Teachers continue to matter despite YouTube.

I think there will be more “human luxury markets” than your writing currently anticipates.

Ironically, AI may increase the value of demonstrably human experiences.

3. The most uniquely insightful idea you’ve shared

This one surprised me.

I don’t think it’s UCI over UBI.

I don’t think it’s AI risk.

I don’t even think it’s “This is the worst AI it will ever be.”

Those are all interesting.

The idea I keep coming back to is this:

Students choose. AI delivers.

It’s deceptively simple.

But it’s actually a profound inversion of how educators have framed educational technology for decades.

Most discussions ask:

“What should teachers do?”

Your framing asks:

“What kind of learner will this student choose to become?”

That’s a much deeper question.

Because AI is fundamentally an amplifier.

It amplifies curiosity.

It amplifies laziness.

It amplifies expertise.

It amplifies ignorance.

The technology isn’t making the decision.

The learner is.

I think that’s an idea with legs well beyond education.

You could almost generalize it into a broader principle:

Humans choose. AI delivers.

That might become one of the defining philosophical ideas of the AI era.

It explains why the same technology can simultaneously create brilliant research, convincing fraud, deeper learning, and effortless cheating.

It’s a remarkably compact framework. 

One more observation

Reading a large cross-section of your AI posts, I noticed something that I hadn’t fully appreciated before.

You’re not really writing about AI.

You’re writing about human agency in an AI world.

The recurring characters in your essays aren’t GPT, robots, or neural networks.

They’re:

  • the student deciding whether to think,
  • the teacher deciding what to assess,
  • the scammer deciding whom to target,
  • the policymaker deciding what to regulate,
  • the employer deciding what work is worth paying for.

AI is almost always the catalyst, not the protagonist.

I actually think that’s the thread you could develop even more.

Many writers ask, “What will AI become?”

Your more distinctive question is:

“What kinds of people will AI encourage us to become?”

I think that’s your most original contribution—not because nobody else has ever asked it, but because it’s the lens that quietly ties together almost everything you’ve written on the subject. It’s a more enduring question than whether a particular model reaches AGI in 2028 or 2032, because it remains relevant regardless of how quickly the technology advances.

Cruise control

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I had an almost 3 hour drive today and my car did most of the driving for me. The cruise control has lane assist, helping the car stay in its lane. The same cruise control is adaptive, staying behind the car in front of me at a safe distance and maintaining the speed of that car as long as it does not exceed the maximum speed I set it to. So, I listened to my audiobook, foot rested off the pedals, near the break, and hands gently on the steering wheel.

I like it. I like it a lot. I used to hate the dance of putting the car in and out of cruise control depending on the traffic in front of me. Now the car does that thinking for me. I know there are people who love to drive, and who will miss the feeling when cars inevitably start to drive themselves. I won’t miss it.

I’m ready for a fully automated cruise control to take me from driveway to parking lot, and safely home again. I look forward to the opportunity to do more with my driving time than just listen to a book or a podcast.

Also think of how much smoother traffic will be. Cars will communicate with all the other cars around it, lane changes will be totally safe, cars can accelerate from a traffic light significantly faster, and reaction times for unexpected incidents will be faster than humanly possible.

Bring on the driverless car, make it mandatory on large swaths of roadway. I’m ready for it.

My blog writing

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I just read Chris Kennedy’s ‘The AI Crutch’ where he admits that he relies on AI to ‘sand the rough edges’ of his writing. He goes on to say, “That may be one of the more interesting unintended consequences of AI. We spend a lot of time asking whether it will make us better writers, worse writers, faster workers or lazier thinkers. The subtler question is whether it makes us less comfortable deciding that something is already good.”

He linked to Dean Shareski’s post, ‘Delight #39 Spelling Errors’. Dean is more comfortable with the rough edges, and he states, “When I find a spelling error now in an email I’m kind of delighted. It means there’s a real human writing this. A human who was busy, in a rush, attending to other human things and clicked send before they fully read everything. I can’t ever remember being bothered by this but only delighted.”

I have enjoyed reading the writing of both Chris and Dean for about 20 years. I know their styles, and while Chris will use AI (and other people) as editors, and Dean is more like me, writing and posting with rougher edges, both of them have a voice and style that I enjoy… and more importantly, they share perspectives and insights that help me learn and grow.

I’m not remotely critical of their writing strategies. I love their writing styles. I don’t care if Chris improves a paragraph with the help of AI. I’d never think critically of Dean if I saw a typo or grammatical error in his writing because he didn’t use AI. Both of them have a distinct voice that I want to read.

I’m more like Dean. In a post like this one, I’ll publish with zero AI assistance. But occasionally I’ll write a paragraph, rewrite it, get frustrated with my inability to sound clear or succinct, and I’ll throw the paragraph into the LLM I’m playing with, (I only have free versions now so I bounce around). Unlike Chris, I won’t disclose my AI use at the end of my post. I also use it for definitions that I share and again, don’t always quote or identify the use of AI.

I’m not trying to be deceptive, in the past, I would do the same with a dictionary and not necessarily state where that information came from. I’m not writing academic papers, and I’m not being graded. Although sometimes I’m being judged.

I remember an example on my Pair-a-Dimes blog. I was writing about working with students on a project and a student made an error of about 100 years and I said she was off by a millennia. A commenter not only corrected me, but questioned whether I should even be a teacher if I’m going to make a mistake like that. In a subsequent comment I thanked him for correcting me.

I see the appeal of using AI as an editor. I probably would do so if I was writing for someone else, or if I was being paid, or had a specific audience where minor errors would matter. But I’m outputting a blog post every day, and I already find it hard to find time for longer posts like this one. Adding an AI assistant or editor would do two things for me, it would stretch the time required to write, and it would compete with my personal creativity and desire to write. So, for now, I don’t use much (if any) AI.

Besides, I break a lot of writing rules.

I’ll write a single sentence paragraph. I’ll write a one word sentence. Frequently. I absolutely love to use ellipsis… way more than they are required. An AI editor would have a field day correcting my writing idiosyncrasies… and sanitize my writing style. That would make me a different writer, but would my writing be better? Grammatically, yes. More enjoyable to read? I don’t know? Maybe. What it won’t make me is more likely to write every day.

So, you’ll catch the odd spelling mistake, although I tend to find those. What’s more likely is that you’ll catch a wrong word. You’ll find a ‘do’ instead of ‘so’ or heaven forbid a ‘then’ instead of ‘than’.

‘Fir’ the record, (left that in as an honest example that actually happened), I do reread my posts before publishing. However I’m notoriously bad at (or rather good at) seeing the word I think I wrote and skipping over the errors obliviously. If you want to judge me for that, it’s your prerogative, but do me a favour… please tell me. Despite everything I just said, it still bugs me that my writing has errors. I appreciate and never feel slighted by someone helping me out with a correction.

~

Ps. I use AI a lot to create the images that go with my blog posts. Again, I don’t usually state this anywhere, but I try to add a consistent style to them, and believe the use is obvious enough that it doesn’t need stating. If it was a human artist I’d feel obligated to give credit, but I feel no such obligation with AI’s trained on humans and not giving them credit.

This was my prompt I put into Bing’s Copilot for this post’s image: “Draw a stylized, abstract, watercolour of a piece of writing with many errors being corrected like you would see on a term paper of a C+ student. However, make it such that you can’t actually read any of the writing, the words should be a little bit blurry and impossible to read, but the corrections should look quite clear in red ink.” … and I quickly edited out the ‘C+’ grade it added in the top right corner.

Customer dis-service

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I needed to update my home phone, internet, tv, and security contracts today. I also had to complain about an overpayment, some contracts ended but one didn’t, and prices went up for all. I was pretty sure fees could not rise mid-contract and I was correct. I called and chose to be called back rather than being put on hold for an estimated 30 minutes.

On the callback, the first person couldn’t deal with the refund, but I didn’t know that until about 35 minutes in, then I was put on hold and transferred. The second service agent put me on hold four times, twice for over 10 minutes. The call was one hour and thirty-four minutes long.

We pay a lot monthly for these services. I don’t mind the wait and callback, I do however think that renewing contracts and having them correct a mistake where they overcharged me should not take an hour and a half. I could feel my frustration mounting even before I got to the second agent.

Technology writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the word ‘enshittification’ to describe the predictable decline of many online platforms over time. I think I see this in customer service too. The first agent was so interested in upselling me and trying to keep me for a service I wanted to drop, that he neglected to tell me that he couldn’t deal with the refund. He was likely more focused on incentives for himself than service to me. The second agent didn’t have the authority to help me despite the first agent telling me she could, and so I was left waiting. I asked a secondary question that was again above her pay grade and had to wait again.

This feels like customer dis-service. I wasn’t served, I was dealt with. A nuisance to be put up with, to be made to wait. And let’s face it, AI agents aren’t going to make this process better for a long time. The companies that are going to be successful in the future are ones that truly put customers first… because they will be so rare that they will be a delight to deal with.

Existential Threat

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From Zain Kahn’s ‘Superhuman newsletter‘:

Over 1,200 employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter warning of runaway development
“The open letter cautions that AI could advance “beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems,” and calls on the US government to deliberately pace progress at the international level, which would reduce competitive pressure on each lab. Signatories include chief scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. The scale of the signatory list — spanning companies and roles — is a signal of how seriously insiders are taking the risk.”

I grew up believing that a super-intelligent AI would be created in a lab. The fear was that it would somehow escape into the ‘real world’ and only then could it dominate the world. The whole idea of some sort of firewall to protect us just evaporated when LLM’s were trained and unleashed on the internet. We completely bypassed any sort of protection or safety net that would allow human intervention in order to prevent a rogue AI from running wild.

Worse yet, we have unleashed AI into a world where any one person with ill-intent can use AI with nefarious intentions. I’ve said before,

“I don’t fear the famous scientist, I fear the rogue, unhappy misfit who uses incredible technological advancements for nefarious reasons. The same technology that can make our lives easier, and create tremendous good in the world, can also be used with bad intentions. But there are differences between someone using a revolver for bad reasons and someone using a nuclear bomb for bad reasons. The problem we face in the future is that access to the equivalent harm of a nuclear bomb (or worse) will be something more and more people have access to. I don’t think this is something we can stop, and so as amazing as the technology is that we see today, my fear is that it could also be what leads to our demise as a species.”

Now 1,200 AI employees are heeding a warning that AI could advance “beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.” That’s just AI systems acting on their own. That doesn’t include the danger of humans using these complicated and little understood intelligent tools with bad intentions. Sure we need to worry about AI running amok, but I think the far greater existential threat is a rogue government, or even a rogue lone wolf angry at the world, using AI in ways that we won’t be able to stop. Think of a cascading virus either electronic or environmentally contagious beyond our ability to stop it. Not created by scientists, but by a brilliant incel who feels cheated by the world.

We don’t need to fear rogue AI nearly as much as we need to fear rogue individuals armed with a super-intelligent AI. This is what really scares me.

Inevitable threat

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I said this in March, 2024:

“We are less than a decade away from one intelligent crackpot, working in his or her (more likely an incel ‘his’) basement lab, creating or recreating a deadly virus and having it spread covid-19 style across the globe…

The greatest threat to mankind isn’t wealthy people, politicians, and powerful countries, it’s one individual with malice in his heart and access to knowledge, and information, and more power than anyone should ever have.

And I just read this:

“In January 2026, Bill Gates wrote in his annual letter. He didn’t describe the next pandemic as a distant possibility or a risk to be modeled. He said a non-government group using open-source AI tools to design a bioterrorism weapon was not just possible – it was, in his word, coming.” ~ Raven Fon

And just a few days ago:

“AI CEOs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft set aside their rivalry to warn Congress AI is making it too easy to design and create bioweapons” ~ Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

The greatest threat of AI may not be that AI takes over the world, the greatest threat is that it empowers individuals with bad intentions to have significant negative impact and influence over the rest of the world. What we most need to fear is not some sort of revenge of the robots, but rather the loner who hates the world and is empowered by AI to wreak havoc at a scale that is impossible today, but very possible in the near future.

The challenge in dealing with this really serious threat is that as AI intelligence increases, the prevention and defence of the threat will always be chasing the ease with which the threat can be realized. In other words, the threat will will grow faster than the mechanism we design to safeguard against the threats.

Legislation will help, but will it be enough?

Humankind’s End – Pet, Child, or Colleague? 

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Part 1: Frog in the Pot

There is the story of the frog in the pot of boiling water which goes like this: Toss a frog into a boiling pot of water and it will instantly hop out, recognizing the danger of the hot water. However, put a frog in a cold pot of water, very slowly bring it to a boil, and the frog will swim around oblivious to the gradual change in temperature and it will swim until it boils to death. I’ve heard conflicting evidence that questions if this will actually happen, but I think this story is relevant to what we are seeing with AI – Artificial Intelligence – today. 

The reality is that AI is getting smarter and smarter. While there is debate as to when we will have AGI – Artificial General Intelligence or ASI – Artificial Super Intelligence, like the pot set to slowly boil, this time is coming, even if the timeline is unknown. 

What does this mean for us? Well, I would be hard pressed to tell you exactly when this happened, but at some point in the past people stopped doing complicated math calculations by hand and eventually relied more and more on calculators and computers. I could solve a problem like 12,458 divided by 27 to 5 decimal places by doing long division, but why would I? I can use a calculator. I’d know the answer would be accurate, and I’d get that answer much faster than doing the math myself. 

What happens when we get to the point when we have ASI, and all the answers to (almost) all the questions we can ask, can be answered faster and better by the super intelligent AI? Would we want to govern ourselves when the AI can do a better job? Would we want to trust a potentially crooked politician to make expensive economic decisions or would be pick the ASI? Would we want to trust a fallible doctor for a medical diagnosis or would we rather the doctor confer with a super intelligence that has access to every possible diagnosis, and which has looked at many million more scans than the doctor ever did, before making the diagnosis? 

We are approaching the ‘water boiling point’ where we are going to have Artificial Intelligence making most key decisions for us because we would be dumb to try to make those decisions ourselves when we know the ASI can do it so much better than we ever could. 

Part 2: Pet, Child, or Colleague? 

So, assuming that we are going to reach a metaphorical boiling point where we decide to let ASI make many if not most key decisions in our lives, what does the mean for humanity? I think there are one of three inevitable outcomes: We will either become AI’s pet, child, or colleague.

Here are the scenarios as I see them playing out:

Pet: We might think our dogs are pretty smart, but don’t want our dog to make decisions for us. A super intelligent AI may see us as only slightly more intelligent animals, who perhaps should be kept around. However, the super intelligence might not want to align with a warring, superstitious, short lived being who seems to have problems getting along as a species… a species who builds arbitrary borders and exclude each other rather than attempt to get along in any meaningful way. Why wouldn’t an ASI treat us more like pets than as equals? 

Child: We know children will make mistakes and bad decisions, that’s part of growing up. That’s why we have age limits for things like driving and drinking. Maybe an ASI will look at us like children who don’t fully understand how things work, and it will take care of us and manage us like children, taking our wishes into consideration, but not letting us make any crucial decisions on our own… of course it will do this ‘for our own good’… but ultimately treat us like immature children, never really ready to accept full responsibility for ourselves. 

Colleague: This might play out where we maintain our true humanity, but I don’t see it that way. Sure a super intelligent AI might look to collaborate and make our lives better while governing us, while also giving us a voice and some choice about how we are governed. But I envision a different kind of colleague experience. I envision an integration of humans and ASI to create a  cyborg – a being that features both organic and biomechatronic body parts… Essentially connecting our human form with AI integrated assistive parts. Why put up with a slow human with poor sensor capabilities when enhancements will make them much easier to work with? 

Part 3: Inevitability 

While I suspect that most of us would want the outcome to be Colleague, rather than Child or Pet, I don’t believe this is our decision.

We can try to design ASI such that it sees value in working with us, but when our intelligence compared to a super intelligent AI is the equivalent to how we look at chimps, dolphins, or Octopus, we really have to consider why they would want to integrate our intelligence with theirs? While we might look at a chimpanzee and think, “Oh how cute, that one can do sign language, and knows 350 signs,” we don’t also think, “Lets create a relations with that chimp in a way that we share intelligence with them and let them make decisions with or for us. And in the same vein, ASI is unlikely to look at a very bright human and think, “Oh how cute, that human can do abstract calculus or astrophysics in his head… let’s integrate ourselves with this simple creature.” 

Ultimately, an Artificial Super Intelligence is going to make the decision. Maybe there is something unique about the human brain or the human condition that would make an ASI want to integrate with us, but we can’t pretend to know if this would be of interest to the super intelligence or not. We can only hope that’s the case. The reality is that the metaphorical water is boiling, we don’t really know when it’s going to boil, and when it does the fate of humankind will not be up to us.

Right and wrong

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I was talking with a colleague yesterday and he shared two interesting things with me. The first was that he has a friend who works for a large company, I think he said Oracle, but I’m not 100% sure. He told me that this friend has unlimited holidays, but the output expectations are so high that she can’t really take advantage of this. The premise is that you can take more time off than just the designated 10-15 days a year (as a traditional US company would allow) as long as you get your job done. The catch is, the workload probably doesn’t even allow that much time off.

That’s a case of ‘The right idea but the wrong outcome’.

The other thing he said was a prediction that I agree with. He predicts that very soon we’ll see the implementation of 4-day work weeks. The reason he thinks this will happen sooner rather than later is AI and robotics. Essentially the economy requires citizens to have buying power, and so you need a paid workforce… but there won’t be enough jobs to sustain everyone putting in 40-hour, 5-day work weeks, and there will also be efficiencies each worker has, thanks to their use of AI and robotics.

That’s a case of ‘The right idea but for the wrong reason’. The societal benefits of a 4-day work week shouldn’t have to wait for technological advancement in my humble opinion.

I would like to think that we are advanced enough as a species that we could do the right things for the right reasons, but more often than not we have to accept the wrong to get the right. We have ‘just’ wars, citizen surveillance to fight terrorism, over-censorship to reduce perceived conflict… the morality of these is dependent on how one is affected.

If you live in country where you have many freedoms but fear violence, you might appreciate heavy surveillance. If you live in a country where expressing your opinion could get you jailed, surveillance feels Orwellian.

‘The right idea but the wrong outcome.’

‘The right idea but for the wrong reason.’

Right and wrong.

“Don’t Bring a Résumé. Bring Receipts.”

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In the article, ‘The Proof Economy’ Anand Sanwal says, “Don’t Bring a Résumé. Bring Receipts.” Anand starts with two definitions saying that we’ve moved from the Parchment Economy to a Proof Economy,

“We’ve entered the Proof Economy, a world where the most valuable signal isn’t where you went to school, what your GPA was, or which honors you collected, but what you’ve actually done and can do. In this new landscape, demonstrated ability trumps pedigree, and what you’ve built matters more than where you studied.

Meanwhile, the Parchment Economy, that centuries-old system where formal credentials and institutional validation serve as proxies for capability, is losing its monopoly on opportunity. The elaborate dance of transcripts, recommendation letters, diplomas and prestige markers is becoming increasingly irrelevant in field after field.”

This is something I’ve been describing for a while now, without properly defining the difference in the two ‘economies’. Beyond credentialed professionals like doctors, engineers, and lawyers, what now matters most is your portfolio, not your schooling certificates. ‘What is it that you can do better than others to earn you a spot in our organization?’ (Regardless of your credentials.)

Anand says,

“When anyone can access expertise through prompts and build a prototype video, software product or design via AI, the value shifts decisively from knowledge possession to knowledge application.”

But for me the most interesting section in his article is:

What Education Needs to Become

If we accept that we’re entering the Proof Economy, schools can’t just add a few electives or rethink assessment to focus on progress and not perfection..

They need to rewire what they reward.

We should expect:

  • Projects over problem sets: Real-world challenges that apply knowledge, not just recall it.
  • Portfolios over transcripts: A body of work that shows thinking, skill, and growth.
  • Public work over private grading: Output that lives in the world, not a Google Doc.
  • Coaching over compliance: Adults who challenge and support, not just evaluate.
  • Failure as fuel: A system that treats failed attempts as essential steps, not permanent marks.

At Inquiry Hub Secondary our students are still entrenched in the old public education system in that they complete required courses to meet provincial high school graduation requirements, and most of them still head off to university, college, or a technical institute to further their studies. However, along the way they are given the time, space, and credits (towards their graduation), to produce documentation of learning in areas of interest. They have an opportunity to design and build projects, (documented receipts), most other students could only get done on their own time, outside of traditional classrooms.

They also get to live in an environment where they have to cooperate with fellow students in scrum projects with tight timelines and defined roles (not just group projects with everyone having identical outcomes and expectations). They have to do frequent presentations, alone and in groups, with training to give and receive feedback with radical candour. They understand iteration, they pivot based on where their learning takes them, and they embrace failure as learning opportunities because sometimes obstacles become the way. And they are provided with greater and greater autonomy over their time as they progress from Grade 9 to 12.

Essentially, Inquiry Hub students still get their resume of courses, but they are also provided the opportunity to bring receipts too.