For a long time I couldn’t quite fathom what all the fuss was about with electronic writing and coding assistants. Technologically—amusing. Practically—it genuinely speeds up the production of anything that can be auto-completed without loss of meaning. In other words, if we already know how to walk and know the way to the library, the assistant will run there faster than us. But if we happen to be—God forgive us—a startup founder with an unfinished liberal arts degree, the models will only compound our incompetence. We’ll now be wading into impenetrable swamps a thousand times faster than the most agile Susanin. What exactly are the people around me so enraptured by?
I’ll set aside the fact that writing and debugging complex code is an indescribable pleasure (and the word “indescribable” carries many meanings here). Yes, fortunately, before the boom of assistants with anything close to a natural flavour, I had accumulated megabytes of both code and literary texts on which I trained my page, and he now observes the minimum rules of hygiene: doesn’t plaster nested conditionals left and right, and varies texts with not-too-hackneyed metaphors instead of bullet points and emoji. I know how to solve any problem within the competence of my intellectual court’s ladies-in-waiting, so my instructions produce coherent and working code. This saves time, but damn it all, I actually enjoy the process of writing code and notes. Speeding that process up by delegation is like summoning your valet to bed the visiting countess, “Right, listen—first crack a joke or two, then smile meaningfully, drop a Dante quote at exactly the right moment, take her by the hand, lead her to the chambers, undress her, and record the readings on the quasi-peak sound level meter so I can later compute the regression against your previous attempt.”
What is there to celebrate? What to admire?
From an early age I tried not to do things that didn’t interest me; things that did interest me I pursued with dedication. I learned to sew on my grandmother’s Singer to give my jeans a flare. To cook—so I could eat well. To work with wood and metal—because nothing is more pleasant than the smell of a blank being machined on a milling cutter. To lay stoves and run electrical wiring—for those two I even bothered to get the proper certificates. That said, I can neither swim nor dance, and I’ve never jumped with a parachute: those activities simply don’t interest me. From a burning aircraft—I’d jump without hesitation; spending personal time on them by choice—no, thank you.
Whatever interests me, I invest in fully. If programmers were paid less than sewage workers, I would still keep writing code. This is entirely not a question of monetary compensation (provided I have something modest for supper and something to rest on between sundown and sunrise).
So what is it about these assistants that so captivates people, beyond the technological component?—And then it hit me. All these people seem to have always harboured a secret dream of finding themselves in a slave-owning society—and not in Uncle Tom’s or Harry’s shoes. The dream of “giving orders and watching them carried out” turns out to be still quite popular even in our enlightened age. I can do literally everything I need in daily life—from fitting a sink to sewing straps onto towels, from dolma for a dinner party to driving a car loaded with belongings from Moscow to Barcelona in a couple of days. I have no habit of asking for help on any occasion whatsoever (that is how I learned to rhyme, for instance: it struck me as inappropriate to ask Pavlik to write a couple of quatrains for my lady of that particular moment). I begin every dialogue with the artificial T9 with the word “please” and wrap up each iteration with praise. I have been compelled to learn 17 synonyms for the word “amazing.”
But I have always been the person from whose direction of travel one can easily infer where the masses are headed: simply glance at where I’m going and point the other way. Most people are delighted to have acquired a personal slave. Not terribly smart, insufficiently independent—but one to whom you can always express your most outlandish fantasy and hear in return: “You are absolutely right!” In terms of soft skills, even the most budget-tier model surpasses me by a factor of a thousand.
People are enraptured not because they can now work faster and more productively—they are glad that they can now work less. The indie-solo-entrepreneurs are overjoyed that they (ostensibly) no longer need to pay professionals. We have acquired a surrogate, junk food for the brain (first dose free). The Anthropic model’s approach currently seems like the right target-setting (b2b), but no—the true future of this business lies in b2c. Very soon people will find themselves unable to refuse a helper who never argues, always agrees, and is perpetually delighted. And who even does something uncomplicated in your stead. Once the critical mass crosses the point of no return, assistants will be packaged in cases resembling Tamagotchis and handed out at supermarkets. A subscription to such a slave will cost rather more than $20—but by all means, as Brodsky wrote on a somewhat different subject: “We’ll pin heavy brooches to our dresses, // and if anyone’s short of money, we’ll pay.”
I think that if right now someone launched a Kickstarter campaign for such a Tamagotchi—with voice recognition, naturally—the funding goal could be reached in a single day. If anyone is interested in building a profitable business (I am not)—I recommend giving it a try. The slave trade is a lucrative affair; was, is, and always will be.