Machines and the small cogs

Dario Amodei published Machines of Loving Grace in which he outlines a pretty grandiose vision of how AI could improve Our collective lives. Most people I know are using AI only when strictly required and, as we know, sentiment is incredibly bad at the moment, so in the same spirit as the Dario piece I feel a small, optimistic view is sorely needed; I wanted to explore a similar idea on a smaller scale.

I used to buy Humble Bundles every time they came up so through that and other means I amassed a relatively large digital book library. I’m using Grimmory now, and just connecting Codex to it made it so that I could discuss what books I should read next, what would work for my current blogpost and improve metadata. This was genuinely something that I would have spent an incredible amount of time on, fiddling with metadata sources and filling in ISBNs manually, and I would have probably thrown in the towel and just gone back to the folder setup.

Having a tough day at work, describing a problem to an AI assistant and having them create a shelf in my library with the books I would need to deepen my knowledge in a coherent order genuinely felt like the magic moment, the raison d’être for the models themselves.

Having Claude Code debug and resurrect my favorite legacy remote - the Nanoleaf dodecahedron remote, delightful - to have it control my lights through home assistant directly is incredible. I would have done it myself and did do a lot of similar projects, but having the idea and the general shape of it is now often enough to have at least a small prototype to see if the project is interesting rather than spend two months and then decide that the battery dies too quickly for it to be anything more than a silly gimmick.

And then the curiosity about things I would never be able to google directly, a homunculus that can do the boring work while I focus on other stuff, never diverting my focus when not necessary.

Claude, sorry, why did that automation not fire? I used to call for my moto assistant to do small things around the house and be amazed when I could turn a light on with only my voice, and look where we’re at now. Is that sensor actually ever catching rain? I’m pretty sure it’s raining We were promised helpful assistants in Siri, Google Home and Alexa and in a roundabout way, we’re almost there. Hey, I wonder why that speaker cuts out every 2/3 minutes, could you check logs? Yeah, that device uses an outdated Cast SDK, it’s a known bug, I see you have Music Assistant installed, I can try to work around it if you’d like

This is still gated behind a pretty deep understanding of the internals of the system. I can benefit from the future now because I was already able to do this by myself, and the Machine is a force multiplier.

It’s a bit of a contradiction: the people that could do it then, can do it faster now. But this is the worst it will be from here; it will one day be easy enough that buying that smart speaker means this is handled for you.

Can you imagine a person taking their first steps working out at home because they’re scared of looking like they - correctly - have never done that before, asking their assistant to watch their form or teach them an exercise? Building enough confidence to face the outside world.

Someone that suffers from executive dysfunction can plan their day in the morning and receive small nudges to keep focused and do the next task, with much more warmth and no shame so that they might get to bedtime without feeling like the day was wasted.

I imagine this as a kinder world, an assistant that helps you with the small neuroses and idiosyncrasies implicit in any of us. So that life is a little easier and the environment around us more legible.

I cannot wait for the day that incredible intelligence becomes too cheap to meter in the same way that I anxiously wait for energy to be, and have the gift of insight over the world around us be bountiful, curiosity rewarded with answers rather than gated behind a lot of menial work.

The good timeline.