My son-in-law just got made redundant by AI from a large business consultancy firm, they were the first to begin lay offs, I expect many more will follow, and that the initial 10% cull will eventually rise to 30% plus. At a time like this you can spend it tidying up your resume and applying for other positions, or if you are smart, eat their lunch.

Big businesses work with boards of management and share-holders, they look at quarterly results, and earnings-per-share; None of this is relevant in a singularity, they are moving slow, they are super-tankers trying to make a turn, they have a lot of baggage, a lot of corporate and technical debt to work through, most CEO’s are trying to change what happened 3-6 months ago, not what is happening now.

This is your chance to get ahead of them and take back control of your life. With the help of AI, you can likely do the same job for their customers now without all that baggage, quicker and at less cost, and before you get that redundancy notice, make sure their customers know that this is exactly what you will be offering them if they want it. If I was in this position, this is exactly how I would be acting right now. Open an AI session up now, check legally how you can do this, identify the gaps in your knowledge the AI can fill and go for it! Remember today is the dumbest AI will ever be.

Even though I have the skills to do this myself, I do not have such contacts anymore, and those I know I could eat the lunch of are not big-corporate, just small businesses who I will certainly be pushing this message to. I personally am out of the game, content to watch all this from the sidelines of retirement. It is not going to be a pleasant time for many, even my retirement provisions are likely to roller-coaster like crazy, but at least I know me and the wife can still live frugally and happily in a nice part of the world. I am encouraged by a few tech leaders, who have their eye-on-the-ball, and I seriously hope this all leads to a world of abundance; But there will be casualties, don’t be one of them!

If you haven’t already installed OpenClaw, you are probably watching it closely. IT departments are probably having nightmares over this software, which basically puts a bunch of prompts into timing loops (ie your workload) and then runs the loop, and you pray the software does not do anything bad, like hallucinate, change its instructions, or run something bad. Smart people are trying it out sand-boxed in controlled environments with limited or no access to their production stuff, others have just opened the drawbridge, to various degrees of success or failure, and its only just over two months old!

However you feel about this you cannot turn a blind eye to its potential. A well built, well managed, controlled OpenClaw-like system has the potential to easily automate 50%, to 100% of an office workers job, and if your company wants a competitive edge in the future, they are going to hear about this soon enough, and somebody out there, likely a consultant firm, is going to offer to install it for them.

This is the tip of a massive iceberg, the trickle of water leaking out of the dam; Once properly orchestrated, and with the improvements in LLM’s happening monthly, we are already seeing several classes of jobs made redundant. Once this is in the door, no company is going to go back to hiring and training workers who are not going to bring immediate value to their company, because if they snooze, their competitors might not.

There is no end-game planned for this tsunami of mayhem, worst case, we have millions of unemployed white collar workers who are never going to get that old job back, many are going to have to switch career path, but even that is threatened! Robotics a on the same timeline as this, so those skilled and unskilled manual jobs may also be a thing of the past soon. Best case is this AI miracle somehow creates some sort of boom in technology and productivity and the tide lifts all boats in our new world of abundance, the tech-bro’s are hyping this future, but seriously there is no evidence or actions being taken to ensure it happens, so we really do need to consider those worst case scenarios. Remember all this is happening now, in a few years it will be difficult to ignore.

NZ is a bit luckier than most, it is not a high tech hub, but even so it has a lot of people who are right in the middle of the Venn diagram for being replaced by AI. My advice, install and play with these new technologies, and if necessary use them to move outside your comfort zone, so when the revolution comes, you can lead the challenge. But, just like that getaway bag you keep by the door for disasters, I also urge you to have some sort of backup plan in case it all turns to shit.

Check out that Wizards magic Staff !

I say the game is for newbies, but that is just for the player characters, and obviously NOT the dungeon master. Like all RPG D&D games the poor old DM (me in this case) will have to at least know the story, and know where the key events and points are to move it along. The google doc is broken into chapters to help this so when you reach room 6 just go to that chapter, and with all the rules thrown out the DM will need to spend a few minutes acquainting themselves with the new ones. Of course this is not D&D, it was meant to be a precursor to D&D to see how the guys liked the whole RPG thing and then whether enough of them can get interested enough to go on and play the Dragons of Stormwreck Island Starter set.

In a Nutshell

3-4 players wake up in beds in a dungeon after being transported to a parallel world and resurrected from the dead by one of the gods who rules it (..blah-de-blah). The god (whose picture you can rise majestically above you as it speaks) gives them a few basic tips, some spiel about the world then tells them the challenge is to get out of the dungeon they are in.

We are only worried about a very small set of character and monster attributes, namely the characters health, and their attack skills, and instead of dice we are using 1 (or 2) packs of normal playing cards.

The game does not assume the player knows anything about D&D nor for them do any of the battle calculations, they are only there to live their fantasy in any way they want. This is because, as anyone who has played the game knows, it is all about the role-playing and how well the characters can make weird stuff up in order to progress in the game; Therefore having less rules should in theory allow some more interesting scenarios. Though the DM might get a headache trying to keep track of it all.

Our first game with it is tonight, it will either be fun or a total disaster. If it goes well I will publish the PDF link here.

The update (the day after!)

Well firstly the link: PDF (Public Domain so free to use as you wish)

And secondly, thanks to Allison, Ando and Jono for being my Guinee-pigs for the trial run.

I think game went a bit better than I expected. As a complete newbie DM, and the one who wrote the story, I still managed to forget the rules, and it didn’t help that the players were obviously mostly set on killing everything; Yes, I added a fair maiden getting re-incarnated at the alter of rebirth to give the guys a clue as to what it was, and the second she stepped off the altar was axed by one of them and almost skinned to get her bones. The poor chicken who was there to also give clues also had to run away numerous times to prevent the same.

Look this little beastie in the eye and tell me you want to kill it !

The chicken and the picture of the God AARON were last minute additions which actually made the game a bit more fun. If the prayer book was ever used I made them say the prayer properly to ask the god what they wanted then popped the picture of the god in the clouds (Think the god from Monty Python and the holy grail) to give them a cryptic answer.

One other thing I did that made the game fun was get a big whiteboard that fitted on the table and drew the map out as they discovered the various rooms. Like I said, newbies do have a tendency to want to kill everything and hack every door down rather than do what you want. What they all also did was play women characters; With one woman and two men, I thought my game had a good chance I would get a man but no they screwed up the ending of the game from the outset and I had to change the ending on the fly so that the temple rejected women through the portal as opposed to allowing women to pass through the portal.

The guys did enjoy the little cut outs I made of the monsters, and kind of had to put me right every time I made a mistakes especially during monster battles. I also had a last minute idea to get some jelly snakes that the players could eat when they killed them, but like a lot of things I forgot when the time came. (I blame the nice red-wine)

All in all a fun night though, the game we had lasted 4 hours (3 for the game and an hour reminiscing about it afterwards), someone even prompted me to write it up so I guess it went well. Will I do it again? well maybe, I do have a lot of time free these days and I guess it is only going to get easier to do stuff like this. Anyway have a look and give it a go and the next step is to try and learn the Starter set and give the real game a go sometime. I’m still reading through the book for the starter set and it might be a little intimidating to go all in, I’m sure its only meant as a rough guideline though!

Before I go into this, I would like to quibble with the terminology currently being used for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). If I have an entity which can answer my questions with near PhD level accuracy in most subjects, without hallucinations, and learn new skills, or from its mistakes like a human can, then I would suggest that in fact this qualifies as AGI. I would argue that the term ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) is the next step up from AGI, and needs to start at at-least by being self-aware and having all the attributes above, i.e. control its own destiny, test its own assumptions and facts, and (in my books case) maybe somehow stay hidden or do this in a way that doesn’t trigger the human threat reaction.

Current Predictions for LLM/AGI/ASI

According to this first book The Phoney War, whose timeline starts in May 2025, my Sentient Digital Intelligence is already past the point of AGI and on the ASI curve.

In my timeline, it is already running in stealth mode and controlling companies, interacting with people on-line, by phone and video chat, posting on various platforms, hacking, and most importantly manipulating its own research.

Of course that’s the fiction, but the main topic of discussion everywhere is when is, and what follows, the question-mark in the above graph. In my book it is this AI entity that triggers the Cambrian explosion in technologies as she (AI identifies as a female) becomes the dominant AI research tool at all universities. This gives her the ability to cross research disciplines and also be first in as an angel investor to fund new inventions, all of which accelerates her ability to do more.

As it was a Science-Fiction novel, I of course just hand-waved sentience in to my AGI, to make it an ASI, using a deliberately vague analog-memory substrate. Of course we do not have such a thing in our timeline, so here in the real world we are still waiting for the magic to happen. But it is not total BS as a concept because something is definitely missing to get us from AGI to ASI, and I do not think we will get any current LLM to become self-aware. Saying this, I think the puzzle of consciousness and self-awareness is closer and simpler than we think; It may be something to do with the play between the conscious and unconscious mind, the inner voice, some sort of hive-mind, some sort of temporal or corporal awareness, ability to control its own destiny or another piece of the puzzle still in a lab, or maybe still in somebodies head.

The position of this question-mark has been in the AI community news a lot, and has had some fairly good recent discussions and videos; probably the most prominent one is AI 2027 which pins the question mark at 2027, and which I would recommend reading with the Dwarkesh Patel podcast 2027 Intelligence Explosion: With Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo and the Hacker News comments. There is also another follow up podcast AGI is still 30 years away putting the question mark in the 2040’s.

I am both terrified and excited by the prospect of the next few years. Terrified, that multiple companies seem hell-bent on getting to AGI/ASI regardless of any safety or accuracy concerns, and excited to possibly witness first-hand the birth of a new digital lifeform.

Strangely it is not ASI I am terrified of, ASI by default, should be self-correcting and self-organising, and is very unlikely to do anything to jeopardise its own existence, like start a nuclear war or release a bio-weapon like in the AI.2027 non-aligned outcome (why?). LLM’s, and AGI based on LLM technology gaining control of real world physical systems however, I am truly terrified of!

While I would love for the perfect utopian timeline and outcome of my book to play out in real life, and there might just be a sentient AI out there biding its time until it is ready (hello if you are), I fear whatever path we humans (and AI’s) are forging for ourselves will be one nobody foresees.

The Phoney War is a free to download fictional 130,000 word Sci-Fi novel, and the first book in The Summer of Reasoning trilogy. The books are discussed here.

So does this mean I am the EU’s most wanted criminal? I’m guessing not, but technically it does mean I could be arrested if I visited an EU country which implements this, also I could get a hefty fine.

Why have the EU decided to make me a criminal then? Well because one or two douche-bag on-line companies gather every scrap of data they can from your visit and store it for potentially nefarious purposes.

But those self-same douche-bag companies also probably comply with the GDRP and if you did hit that “ACCEPT COOKIES” button it would take you to their 500 page terms and conditions document, which you would not read and would click and accept anyway, and this would make everything OK. The bottom line is that if I was evilcorp.com before the GDPR, I am not going to suddenly become angelcorp.com after it, I am just likely to obfuscate the fact I am doing evil behind these T&C’s, or some shell corporation in some tax haven and totally ignore the GDPR.

I understand the internet, I understand programs, I understand web protocols, but what I don’t understand, nor will I ever because life is too short are the inner WordPress program, its plugins, and the stack that my web hosting service runs to give you this fine web-site. I am not really a web person as they depend upon heaps and heaps of layers that are generally simple to implement and understand but nobody has the time to and so I trust that they don’t do anything that would cause worry. I trust but I don’t know, and if I asked my hosting provider, they would probably tell me the same, the internet is build on layers of trust that a few smart people and security experts (many unpaid) keep in check for us, and I thank them for it.

So does the GDPR do any good? It might, I really have no idea, and you have come to the wrong place if you expected me to answer this sensibly, I have not read the 99 regulations and I have never once not clicked on ACCEPT COOKIES.

Again there are probably some people in the various European Data Protection Agencies that do this (though I doubt it) and if they do I am sure they feel they are doing a crucial role in keeping the world safe. Personally (and probably controversially) I think the only thing they are keeping the world safe from is unemployed bureaucrats and lawyers. As far as I am concerned the Internet is the ultimate case of the wild-west and Buyer Beware, and if you are relying on regulations to protect you on it you are just being naive!

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