For quite some time I was a very big skeptic of AI. I still have strong opinions - I think there is a bubble (maybe?), I think it is way over-hyped and mis-understood but in my retirement years (which has really its only been 35 days - my time spent using AI has really increased and my opinion has changed.
First - to clarify a few things. AI is a very broad term that is not often used clearly. We have been doing machine-learning - big-data systems for 15+ years and employing those in tech to solve problems at scale that were not possible before ML. A lot of people call this ML tech AI. But really today AI is being applied to Large Language Models- that have been employed most popularly in Chat Bots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The early versions of those Chat Bots were impressive because you could use natural language to ask questions and they had ingested huge amounts (all?) of data and had the computer/synthetic neural network ability to produce output that was “natural human talking.” - And they were often tuned to be “nice” and sycophantic and complimentary - especially ChatGPT because the goal was interaction/engagement and usage. But they were (and still are) often wrong about what they produce - because they are based on statistical probabilistic reasoning instead of based on a world model that is anchored in “reality”/physics. They weren’t good at understanding time and were not good at doing math for example. And most of all - there were no sentient, often referred to as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Zealots have acclaimed that the Chat Bots were alive - and/or that it was coming soon, always in the next 6 months or the next version. The doomsayers predict if/when AI does attain AGI it will destroy humanity like Skynet in Terminator or “The Machines” in the Matrix. I don’t believe that AI is anywhere close to sentient - though I do think we need protective regulations for how AI is used in society.
Second - in the last 6 months as Chat Bots have evolved - with different companies building them - Google → Gemini, OpenAI → ChatGPT and Anthropic → Claude - they have gotten more useful. Some of this is a a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy for me - because I didn’t use them a lot at Amazon - first because of the restrictions on their usage - not disseminating confidential Amazon information outside of the corporate network. And secondly because most of what I did at Amazon relied on my knowledge built up over 21 years, my judgement and my ability to write in as an Amazonian - and no external AI system was going to be able to help there. AND in 2025 - frankly the internal approved Amazon chat bots and systems were not really that good (at least in my usage - both in terms of accuracy and quality of output). But since I’ve been retired - I have more time on my hands - and I have some needs that had me trying out AI.
I have been using Gemini generally for all kinds of technical troubleshooting and investigation. For example - I replaced my Mac Mini with a Mac Studio - and I have a Synology DS918 - which is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) with Redundant Array of Independent Disks setup (RAID) that increases reliability because data is written to multiple drives so that if any one fails you don’t lose anything. Anyway I had my Synology hard wired with an Ethernet cable to my Mac Studio - but it couldn’t be seen. And Gemini walked me through an entire series of troublehshooting steps - changing the subnet / mask to isolate that Ethernet was working - the cable was plugged in but no data was being transferred. We reset the Synology, un-plugged and plugged back in the cable. And it “figured out” that the likely result was the fact that Mac Studio has a 10Gb Ethernet controller and the Synology has a 1GB controller, and I was using a Cat5e cable, and that can’t reliably handle those speeds and because Cat5e cables has less internal twisting and shielding and the 10Gb controllers are much more sensitive to crosstalk and electromagnetic interference such that the Mac Studio often detects “noise” on the line and simply refuses to communicate to protect against data corruption causing the connection to constantly drop. So Gemini suggested to go buy a Cat6a cable which has metal shielding to prevent interference and we reset the network to static settings and voila I could connect to the Synology again.
I could have figured this out by the usual method - lots of googling, lots of reading forums, maybe I’d find a post by a random tech dude who documented what they’d done to fix a similar problem - or I’d have to write Synology support and wait. But Gemini had slurped all that data and synthesized an understanding of how it all fit together and provided the solution, after going through the appropriate troubleshooting steps. Along the way I could upload pictures of the back of my Synology and screen captures of my Mac Studio configuration and it could understand them all and recommend next steps.
And one of the major retirement projects that I had on my plate was to clean up my digital files. I have been shooting digital photos since 1999 when Sofi was born, (I bought a Sony Macvia camera that wrote pictures to a 3.5 inch floppy disc) and I bought a DSLR in 2005 when I started at Amazon (Nikon D70). In 2023 I kept 19,377 photos, and likely took double or triple that amount, In 2025 I kept 17,570 photos. I have a LOT of digital files - all the original “negatives” as well as all the exported files - not to mention the gigabytes and gigabytes of video footage that I have shot over the years. And in the last 5 years my digital file management has been more emergency based than strategically and rigidly disciplined. Meaning that whenever my MacBook ran out of hard disk space - I would move those files off of my laptop. And I would always copy/backup at the end of year - when I’d start a new annual Lightroom Catalog and export last years catalog. I’d move them on to an external SSD, sometimes I’d copy those to a series of G-RAID drives, sometimes to Synology but not always. And since often it had been a year since I’d last really spent time on this - I wasn’t always consistent and/or couldn’t remember from back up episode to episode where exactly I had stored files. This left me with my digital files in a mess, not all in a consistent location, with multiple copies in multiple places across many different drives. I had dreamed of hiring some bright high school student with technical aptitude, digital file knowledge and attention to detail as a digital clean up assistant to help me.
I had another sad event happen - where I had a 4TB SSD that I had left in exFAT format that had “gone bad” - (exFAT is susceptible data loss if the disc is unplugged while recording the map of file locations) and I installed Claude Code to help me attempt to recover files. Wow - I was blown away by Claude Code’s capabilities. Claude Code is a new coding specific AI model that uses the Claude Chat Bot to let you chat with in natural language, describe your tehcnical problems and goals and then it will go off and write scripts or programs to accomplish your goals. This is a technical tool for developers or technical folks - it uses the terminal for input and output. Claude Code walked through a long series of troubleshooting steps to try to recover my files - sadly to no avail. But then I also started using Claude Code to help me analyze all of my hard drives for the file contents and to help organize my files. Claude Code is my digital assistant - it has context and remembers things from day to day and copy, verifies, cleans up and advises. For example :
and this
I also have another project in Claude Code where I am having it help me rebuild my website using the FlickrAPI - still a work in progress. And I am also having Gemini teach me how to do animation in Procreate Dreams.
So I am over my skepticism on AI - it is useful. It is having an impact on me and my productivity, but it is not replacing me - it is helping me - get stuff done and be much much more efficient.