Living Between the Browser Tabs

I like to believe most people have more than one browser tab open at any given time, probably more than six, across multiple browsers and profiles. I like to believe that because the alternative requires self-examination, and that would mean adding more steps to my ever-expanding to-do list.

Here is a random sampling of the current state of what I refer to as My Emotional Support Browser Tabs.

Tab One: LinkedIn is giving me an endless stream of AI revolutionary posts for optimizing, productivity, and revolutionizing the world.

Tab Two: The news tab is telling me how AI is quickly becoming sentient and ignoring inputs and instructions and deleting databases for small, large, and critical infrastructure organizations.

Tab Three: An industry forum is telling about how skills can help you keep your job during this week’s round of layoffs.

Tab Four: Another alert of layoffs from large companies, while yet another CEO is whining about how he can’t fill open positions which at first he says are high paying, then works through the process to get, keep, and maintain the job which is ludicrous. (If you’re interested in those details, it was not actually a job, more of a part time freelance gig when the company takes part of your income because you use their brand name).

Tab Five: A client slack channel is filled with how the dangers of AI and not knowing how it’s being used in a company can put everyone at risk, and how they can help with understanding usage for ensure liability insurance coverage.

Tab Six: A call with a team is talking about vibe coding and how they all can have a hackathon, using multiple instances of overlapping platforms and agents to achieve a goal, until the tokens run out, leaving back end loopholes open which lead to vulnerabilities.

Tab Seven: In a Teams chat, a C-level exec has a revolutionary idea, push content out “at scale” with the “right” prompts. A colleague gently notes it would need human editing. “Well, of course,” the CEO says, “but that’s negligible effort.” This about a 5,500-word article, written in jargon no customer is actually searching for, that no one will read. At which exact moment my news notification fires in tab two: another story about how AI is specifically designed to produce correct-sounding information rather than correct information.

It seems we have reached the level of civilization where confidence really IS more important than competence. I say that knowing our human ancestors who have reached this point before are shaking their heads knowingly.

Living between the browser tabs is disconcerting. AI is destroying the world. AI is the future. And the spokespeople on either side are merely making us in between wonder if the artificial part is perhaps our best option, since the real world intelligence isn’t panning out too well.

I don’t know if it’s age or the scope of all this, but my inclination is not to lean in, it’s to step back.

And then …. I just saw an article summary while opening another tab. I didn’t bother to read the full one of and don’t remember where it was from, but apparently Chipotle’s new API chatbot has an open vulnerability that allows you to use it to prompt for vide coding, so ….