DARK THOUGHTS ABOUT SAM ALTMAN

 I can't imagine it is just me whose thoughts are not infrequently invaded by an overwhelming urge to fight Sam Altman. Of course he's not the only one responsible for the "AI revolution", but he bears more responsibility than most. He's the poster boy at the tech conferences, he's the one throwing casual suggestions around about how to deal with the upcoming economic and social meltdown that will be caused when AI comes for virtually everybody's jobs, particularly in the developing world. We're even supposed to care about which board Sam is sitting on, at which multi-billion dollar tech company. Poor Sam, my heart bleeds, as I'm busy going through bags of recycling on the street to see if I can find any aluminium cans to sell for scrap (not literally, but it's certainly on my list of backup plans).

I watched the brilliant movie Oppenheimer the other night, and I couldn't help thinking of Sam when the opening quotation from the Bhagavad Gita appeared: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".

I am exaggerating, of course. I'm pretty sure Sam is one of those tech bods who does Ju Jitsu or kickboxing, and no doubt he would cane my flabby white ass. But the way AI has decimated and continues to decimate the industry I currently work in, translation, makes it hard to feel any affection for Sam, or any sympathy for his, no doubt inconvenient, corporate bed-hopping.

It started in April 2023. Roughly six months on from the launch of ChatGPT (I presume GPT stands for Gunky Pissy Toilet), the flow of work to my small but invariably humming translation company started to slow. In fact, it didn't just slow, it fell off a cliff. The graph above shows the quantity, but doesn't reflect the quality, of the jobs I received in 2023. From long annual reports and project briefs, the kind of dry, long-winded business documents that provided the bulk of my income, I was now reproducing a birth certificate here, a death certificate there (oh, the irony), the odd driving licence - documents that need the kind of complex formatting that AI (so far) is incapable of recreating.

My income has plummeted accordingly. Almost overnight. At one point, all my clients seemed to disappear at the same time, as if there had been another mass extinction event and I hadn't been paying attention. 

My largest client, a translation company based in Portugal, themselves got into trouble and consequently couldn't pay me. Out of the blue, I was left without 90% of my income for 6 weeks in the middle of the year, and then it happened again towards the end of the year. Cue two massively expensive bank loans (high interest rates mean Brazil is one of the best countries in the world if you have investments, but one of the very worst if you need to borrow), the repayments on which have only increased my outgoings at a time when my income is constantly shrinking. 

"Go back to TEFL!" I hear you cry, as not only my guitar gently weeps. Even that is not necessarily the answer, as I've calculated that, even if I could magic up throngs of eager students, I would have to teach for about 80 hours a week to make ends meet; enough to make a grown man simper - imagine me. 

Some of these tech leaders have suggested a Universal Basic Income for those, like me, whose occupations have suddenly been nuked. All very well in the rich countries, but I live in Brazil, where there are 67.8 million poor and 12.7 million extremely poor, according to recent figures from the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). Does anyone really expect the Government to put its hand in its pocket and give money to someone like me?

I have spent the last year on an increasingly frenzied dash around YouTube in an increasingly desperate attempt to find a side-hustle I can start today, for nothing, and that will earn me several hundred k a year. I am the modern-day snake oil salesmen's delight, ramping up traffic on my relentless quest for a future. 

So yes, I have to admit to having dark thoughts about fighting Sam Altman. Well, not exactly fighting him, probably just running up behind him and punching him in the back of the head.

Or summat.

Disclaimer: I am joking.