A spontaneous bud mutation that yields little to no pith. Well… not in this case.
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In 1976 in Valencia, Venezuela, oddly not the home of the Valencia orange, a navel orange tree spontaneously mutated and presented a unique fruit. The new strain was seedless, sweet, and easily separated from the rind. We know it as a Cara Cara Navel Orange. Its progenitor was the Washington Navel. Which, I suppose, is probably grown in the Mandarin neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida. You can’t tell the orange players without a scorecard.
With an anthropological botany lesson out of the way, let’s go back to when the bank I worked for lent me a progenitor (I’m going to be using this word all day) to Motorola’s StarTAC cellular phone. It’s important to say, “cellular” here because that was the cause of a lot of anxiety back in the early 90s.
Back then, people worried that holding a cellular phone to your ear would cause brain cancer. It did not and, if you choose to believe papers from the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration, “The evidence to date suggests that cell phone use does not cause brain or other kinds of cancer in humans.”
Fast forward a few years. Social media was cresting. If you knew someone, you followed or friended them on some social platform. That caused us to create new worries. People started to believe that prolonged exposure to social media would cause depression and contribute to… ah… short term… um… not remembering… eh… the details of… argh…
Anyway, it’s worth mentioning this before diving into the latest associative worry.
Today’s tech is new AI. And, today’s new worry is that unscrupulous places we go will capture what we type, say, draw, and video to train a set an AI that will replace us.
You know. I’m just going to say it. There must have been something nice being a sailor and pulling into a port city in the 1800s and only worrying about getting diseases from things you actually paid to touch.
Cara, an app for sharing pictures that won’t be gobbled up by AI launched last October. In its first six months, it amassed 40,000 users. Then, last weekend, Meta announced they would use any pictures on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to train its new AI. Well, that caused a stir among people who share pictures on social media that aren’t snaps of your lunch. This week, more than 600,000 people fled to Cara. Lest their pictures teach Meta how to draw things.
You can’t post pictures made by AI on Cara. Somehow it can tell. And, Cara uses a technology called Glaze to obfuscate pictures if an AI tries to learn how to mimic an artist’s unique style.
This is only one reason to worry about AI.
Yesterday was Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. It’s the event where Apple debuts their latest ideas to a packed house of nerds and a massive online audience of nerd wannabes.
This year, the biggest applause was for the iPad getting a calculator. But only slightly less well-applauded was this, “Apple will integrate Siri with OpenAI.”
You know. I’m just going to say it. We don’t need AI. We need calculators. We all forgot our Casio calculator watches in 1987 and need to know if $2.94 per oz of Frosted Flakes is really a good deal. Those watches were the progenitors of the smart things we use all the time.
“Well,” I wrote breathlessly, that prompted worried outrage from the peanut gallery following along on X.
“If there’s no AI opt-out, I’m never updating again. And never buying a new Apple device. Keeping the old ones,” Justine Bateman. You may fondly recall Justine as the “it” girl when she played Mallory on Family Ties back when all we had to worry about was getting cancer from smoking and asbestos. You may struggle to recall that Justine was an outspoken critique of AI taking creative jobs during the Actor’s Strike last summer.
That’s only two strikes. Pictures and everything we iMessage to our friends. Fortunately, work is safe. Or is it?
“Mwahahahaha,” manically like as if Mephistopheles were doing it.
Damn, I wish I hadn’t said Fortune. Because this high hard one sure looks like it’s going to be strike three and it comes from Fortune.
You know when you call an operator to help you with something at a big company and the pre-recording says something akin to, “This call may be used for training purposes.”? Of course you do. Amazon has been using all those calls to train its customer service AI. You see, why have armies of Devs in customer service in a remote call center in a remote country and pay them next-to-nothing when you can have AI Daves and Hals in customer service layered on top of a Nvidia AI machine floating on a water-cooling system in the Antarctic Ocean and pay them absolutely nothing? It’s just good business.
Nah. Worry for nothing. Clicks for free. Come on, you were already humming it.
But…Amazon is collecting conversations and text threads between Amazon employees in call centers and virtual offices from the U.S. to Costa Rica to India. Are current employees unknowingly training an AI replacement under the guise of a new software tool that management is forcing them to use? How far off is complete automation of their roles?
Thirty years from now when the ideas progenetating in our resting brains are being harvested while we exist in a statis somewhere in Matrix-like hive while a dude named Neo zooms by in a tentacled submarine are we going to believe what we read The New YorkAIr, founded in 2025, the leading source of features journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry for sophisticated AIs that, “The evidence to date suggests that AI use does not cause job loss or otherwise subjugate humans.”
It’s like these AIs exist to serve man. But do they? Presented for your consideration in the unCharles zone.
Oh, come on. If you can’t have some fun as AI destroys our lives when can you?