Would You Rather

An over-examination of AI-automated tasks

Today I was uncharacteristically enraptured by a GitHub Copilot demo. It’s only because as I was watching all the agentic things happen, I was wondering about the woman presenting, and what she really thought of AI doing her whole job for her.

I am not an engineer, but I know many of them, and I take it to mean you really like what you do for work. Don’t we all! 😐 But you know what I mean, SWEs in particular are really into what they do, and they have all these fun names and codes and inside jokes to prove it. So I’m watching this person run a slew of jobs, tasks, terminals, etc., and she’s clearly very good at demoing, but also clearly very good at her regular job, which AI was knocking out of the park as a service, even the fun parts.

I’ve written about this ad nauseam, so has everyone else, that we can’t let AI turn our brains to mush, we have to keep exercising our minds and not let AI do the mental gymnastics for us, and I really do find it confounding when I encounter someone who wants to hand certain things over to AI. During this demo I started thinking about “would you rather” questions, going off on a tangent that, should I ever bump into this coworker and tell her about it, she’d say, I think you were distracted from the message.

Regardless, I’m really very curious about this. I think our preference for doing one thing over the other; our distinct personalities that see one person saying “not for me” and the other “yes in a heartbeat” in certain conditions is great, sort of the whole point of living, and yet, now we’re being told for the most part that we don’t have to do any, or either, of these things. For example: I don’t want to be a software engineer, and in the not-so-distant past, I didn’t have to worry about it, because I wasn’t one. I didn’t have to be. I would rather be a writer. But now, it’s not really a choice. You have to know how to do everything, because AI knows how to do everything, so why wouldn’t you?

So, I’ve put together a little personality test for you, so we can go back to having fun and being ourselves for a moment:

Would you rather build a bookshelf from raw lumber or reorganize your book collection by the Dewey decimal system?

If the lumber, you enjoy the satisfaction of a faintly dangerous, physical task. You want sawdust in your hair, and you’ve watched exactly enough instructional videos to build something semi-stable with lots of character.

If the books, you confuse organizing the work with doing the work. You’ll spend a weekend making any collection findable by a method no guest will ever once require, and you experience alphabetization as a spa treatment.

Would you rather be forced to memorize a long poem or to perform complex mental math?

If the poem, you mutter to yourself on walks. You like to carry beautiful things around. The truth is that you would love to do the reading at the funeral, and you’re a little ashamed of how much you’d love to do that.

If the mental math, you enjoy being useful in public. You always end up splitting the check, and you always complain about being the one who splits the check, but actually this is the moment you live for, this precise moment.

Would you rather plan a 14-day trip down to the train transfers or be plopped down someplace with no plan and a notebook?

If the plan, you live for color-coded documents. You have more fun planning a vacation than going on vacation. You’ve said the words “don’t worry, I’ve left room for spontaneity on Thursday” out loud, to another person, in earnest.

If the notebook, you’ve decided that being lost is a personality. You've missed three trains and called that day the best one of the trip. You carry a private hope that you will be pick-pocketed where you don’t speak the language, because it’s romantic.

Would you rather train for a marathon or learn to do a standing backflip?

If the marathon, you trust any suffering you can put on a schedule. You’ve called 6am the best part of the day to someone who did not ask, and you wear a watch that grades your sleep and finds it wanting.

If the backflip, you have declined to become an adult. You’ve sprained something at a party you didn’t even want to attend, and you’ve rewatched the slow-motion of your own failed attempts more than you’ll admit.

Would you rather learn to identify birds by their call or learn enough tarot to unsettle your friends?

If the birds, you have shushed a friend on a hike. You love a private database that nobody requested and nobody can use. Your idea of a devastating flex is being correct about whether that racket up the street is a lawnmower or weed wacker.

If the tarot, you’d rather be interesting than trustworthy. You’re after the effect of seeing a stranger’s eyes grow wide at The Tower. You have always suspected you'd make a convincing fraud, and you're right.

There’s nothing to add up here, this quiz just proves that you have a flavor, that there’s some category of laborious nonsense you’d be reluctant to surrender even though surrendering it would technically free up your Saturday, and that you felt, somewhere in there, a small flinch at the idea of it being done for you.

So as GitHub Copilot started to do a refactor, or hunt bugs, at scale, in the background, for this demo-er, I had questions. I knew this to be the equivalent of slashing an essay with a red pen or thinking of the perfect metaphor, which I personally hesitate to give up in the face of AI. But, maybe she and others are relieved not to be doing these things anymore, and I’m projecting. Maybe that’s the future I was actually asking for when I asked for boring, where the fun isn’t exactly automated but gets evacuated to safer ground, and people are nerding out on their own time when it can’t be monetized🤞I couldn’t tell whether I was watching a loss or a simple rearrangement, whether we’ve given away the best part of the work or finally got to keep it, whether “neither” is ever an acceptable answer to would you rather.