Pill Bottles

I stopped by the drugstore today, and much of it looked like this:

The Rite-Aid chain is coming out of bankruptcy, and, according to one the employees, is still working to rebuild trust with vendors, who'd been burned when the company was not doing well.

Although it seemed that they still had good relationships with some vendors...

To be sure, I don't drink, but even if I did, the drugstore would not be the first place I thought of to buy booze. After all, there are grocery stores for that. But, apparently, enough people were going to Rite-Aid to buy their alcohol that they saw a need to remain in good standing with their suppliers. Enough so that many of their locations seem to be liquor stores with a sideline in pharmaceuticals. But not much else. It's difficult to even find much in the way of toothpaste in many Rite-Aid stores.

Maybe they will turn around, and become a strong company again. But I'm not confident, given what I see.

Lights

A crowd, preparing to celebrate the lighting of the town's Christmas tree, in one of the next suburbs over from me.
 

Penny Dreadful

While I'm on the topic of generative automation tools, I've been noticing a lot of GAT "artwork" on LinkedIn recently. Another think that I've been noticing, albeit less frequently, are people questioning the climate of anxiety over "A.I." reducing employment.

To be sure, the problem with generative automation tools and employment isn't the automation. It's people. Recall this picture that I posted yesterday:

High-octane nightmare fuel.

If you didn't before, take a look at the vaguely Asian-looking woman in the lower right-hand corner of the picture. That can't possibly be the correct number of hands.

Would you imagine that most organizations would pay a professional to create an image for them to use as an invitation to a holiday party that had such obvious errors in it? Or buy a stock photo that was this poorly put together?

When the request of a generative automation system is for "cheerful holiday party," and it returns "Lovecraftian body horror in ugly Christmas sweaters," and the response is: "Meh. Good enough. Ship it," it shouldn't be a surprise that people are afraid for their livelihoods. Because the message being sent is that obvious trash is fine, so long as it's quick and cheap.

And this wasn't the only example of bad art that I found in a cursory scroll through my feed on LinkedIn. Consider this example from Salesforce:

It wasn't worth having someone spend an hour or two to clean this up before using it to advertise a new service? Or to put out a memo saying "Generative artwork needs approval for quality before public posting." I get that "AgentForce" is an automated agent service, but if the agents are as competent at whatever they're supposed to do as the software that created this artwork, it's a hard pass from me.

But I'm sure that they're receiving a decent number of signups. Because they're likely promising that it will be inexpensive. And if inexpensive is more valuable than "borderline competent," then people are going to lose out.

Hours and Hours

Or, it could help eliminate about one job in eighty...

For starters, I swear I don't understand this whole holding up a whiteboard thing. It's an open invitation for someone to come along, Photoshop out whatever message was originally written on the whiteboard, and paste in their own message. As I'm sure was done here.

But more to the point, when I saw this advertisement on LinkedIn, the first thing that popped into my head was: "Just how big is the labor force in the United States, anyway?" And a helpful outfit called Statista informed me that as of October, there were 133.89 million full-time workers in the country. This leaves out part-time workers, and I'll use that to justify rounding up to 134 million people. And spread across that many people, 78 million hours doesn't go very far. In fact, it's just shy of 35 minutes a person.

And, having been in the workforce for as long as I have, for so many different employers over the years, I can tell you that there an awful lot of ways to give a lot of people 35 minutes back over the course of a week... no real need for technological hype there.

But I think that companies feel the need to make it clear to everyone that they've embraced the new thing that's going around and are keeping up with the times. But generative automation isn't magic. It can't even manage to make a decent Christmas party illustration reliably:

Don't even get me started on that guy's hat...

So I have a sneaking suspicion that a good portion of that time savings is going to come from people simply taking whatever garbage the "A.I." spits out and going with it. After all, this picture came from an invitation to the Christmas party of a local professional organization. If a cheesy stock photograph of a bunch of laughing young people in stereotypical Christmas sweaters is going to break the budget, maybe someone needs to figure out where all of the dues money is going.

Color me dubious, therefore that this time savings, if it materializes at all, is going to work out like it's being made out to.

On the Water

 A sailboat, out on Puget Sound on a sunny Sunday. The Olympic Mountains are in the background, obscured slightly by the haze that tends to appear after a couple of days without rain.