Weekly Update #11: procrastinatory evolution

The great Scotch poet Robert Burns once wrote that “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley”. I grew up with Steinbeck’s version, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray”.

All of which is a literary way of saying that my intention to take a break from AI exploration this week and get back to “pure writing” went aglay. I fell hook, line and sinker once again.

But there’s another quote that I keep thinking about when it comes to this current phase of dabbling:

“You waste years by not being able to waste hours” - Amor Tversky

It consoles me.

You can’t make space for that which transcends your current level of being; these are the black swan events of your personal unfolding. But you can pay attention when the compass goes haywire; when the fever of possession in your unconscious pulls you towards something, consider that it may be the voice of a greater you calling.

Now it’s AI, but I had a similar possession by filmmaking earlier in the year (and wish that I still were in the grips of that beautiful life). It feels like realtime evolution. Like I can see the contours of unpredicted development happening before my eyes.

The feeling that goes with this is awe.

In the past weeks, I’ve had many such moments. When I first used Claude Code (a command line agent for coding using the Claude LLM), I had many moments with my head in my hands laughing, “it’s so good. It’s so GOOD!”

This week I had it with ElevenLabs — the AI company at the top of the game with speaking and voice agents (the one that is to call centres what the tractor was to the scythe man — the dark side of all this). I was tinkering with adding it to the app I coded for my friend (before realising how cost-prohibitive it was for this use case). The ability to create AI agents, program their personality and setting their goals, the possibility of loading them up with a knowledge base so they could fill in a million blanks and the idea that you could receive a call from such a voice was too much for my little goosebumps to handle.

When looking for a way to transcribe and diarise the podcast with Paul and CJ (diarising being distinguishing who is speaking in the transcript), I discovered Replicate — basically allows you to run AI models in the cloud without any setup on your part). And then yesterday I discovered an amazing new coding model Kling K2 which is 80% cheaper than Claude Sonnet’s API (usually top of the board for coding) while being better at coding according to many AI leaderboards.

That was all titillation compared to what I was experiencing with playing with Claude’s Projects. I’m experimenting with these Projects as ways of decreasing my cognitive load by having one for each major area of my life and creating Google Calendar events throughout the week then so I just need to do the work that I’ve planned in advance. That’s all a bit vague, but it’s still early days, and, as it progresses, I’ll be sharing more.

All of which to say, AI is a fascinating cookie. While I’m sceptical about the hype cycle around AI, I have no doubt that this is going to change the way we live our lives one way or another.

But now, a big reason I continue to burrow down the AI rabbit hole: I’m burying my head in the dirt; I’m procrastinating. I have a big change to make with The Living Philosophy, and I’m nervous about it. I am going to make everything open to everyone. It’s a new experiment I want to run, and I know it will lose me some supporters (what with the content now being free), but I really don’t like paywalls, and I would like more energy to blow through the community. This is coalescing together into a desire to just open the gates.

On the other hand, I’m considering keeping the weekly update and the poetry club (which will be converting back to a book club in the coming weeks — I’m admitting the season of beauty is past. Here’s hoping winter will bring her back around “to everything there is a season”).

This is a lot of decisioning. So I’m over here playing around with the future of technology while the weeds are growing in my garden. Such is life. That reshuffle will be coming very soon, and then I imagine things will start moving a whole lot quicker around here.

Next weekend I head back to “the Kingdom” of Kerry for a few days of hiking and camping with friends (along with a couple of young lads from the next generation — granting that initiation into the joyous miseries of long distance hiking!) so there’ll be no weekly update next weekend.

Hope your week has been great, and look forward to the road ahead,
James