Boulder Future Salon

"Generative AI (gen AI) has revolutionized workplaces, allowing professionals to produce high-quality work in less time. Whether it's drafting a performance review, brainstorming ideas, or crafting a marketing email, humans collaborating with gen AI achieve results that are both more efficient and often superior in quality. However, our research reveals a hidden trade-off: While gen AI collaboration boosts immediate task performance, it can undermine workers' intrinsic motivation and increase feelings of boredom when they turn to tasks in which they don't have this technological assistance." "In four studies involving more than 3,500 participants, we explored what happens when humans and gen AI collaborate on common work tasks. Participants completed real-world professional tasks, such as writing Facebook posts, brainstorming ideas, and drafting emails, with or without gen AI. We then assessed both task performance and participants' psychological experiences, including their sense of control, intrinsic motivation, and levels of boredom." "Gen AI enhanced the quality and efficiency of tasks. For instance, performance reviews written with gen AI were significantly longer, more analytical, and demonstrated a more helpful tone compared to reviews written without assistance. Similarly, emails drafted with gen AI tended to use warmer, more personable language, containing more expressions of encouragement, empathy, and social connection, compared to those written without AI assistance." "Despite the performance benefits, participants who collaborated with gen AI on one task and then transitioned to a different, unaided task consistently reported a decline in intrinsic motivation and an increase in boredom. Across our studies, intrinsic motivation dropped by an average of 11% and boredom increased by an average of 20%. In contrast, those who worked without AI maintained a relatively steady psychological state." "gen AI collaboration initially reduces workers' sense of control -- the feeling of being the primary agent of their work. Sense of control is a key component of intrinsic motivation: When people feel that they are not fully in charge of the output, it can undermine their connection to the task. However, we found that transitioning back to solo work restores this sense of control." "These findings carry important implications for the future of work." This is from the Harvard Business Review article written by the researchers. I looked at the study itself. The tasks were: composing a Facebook post followed by an alternative use (for an aluminum can) test, writing a performance review followed by a product improvement (idea generation) task, and writing a welcome email followed by a product promotion (idea generation) task. This is for studies 1-3. What immediatly struck me as weird about it is the first task is a convergent task and the second is a divergent task. That immediately makes the results suspect. The researchers seem unaware of this, since the words "convergent" and "divergent" never appear in the research paper. But, put simply, a task is "convergent" if everyone who does the task should "converge" on the same result. If you ask 100 people, "What's 2+2?", all of them (hopefully) will converge on the same result. A task is "divergent" if everyone who does the task should produce different results. "What are all possible uses for a blanket and a brick?" is an example of a "divergent" task. You'll get different results from everyone you ask, and your list of best uses might include items from many different people. If you asked 100 people and made a "top 10" list, each item on the top 10 could be from a different person. Maybe somebody noticed there was something weird about this design because in study 4, they switched it up. In study 4, they chose 2 of the tasks, writing the Facebook post and composing the welcome email, and had people do them in random order. So half of the people did the Facebook post first and welcome email second and half of the people did the welcome email first and the Facebook post second. They further randomly did all 4 combinations of solo/solo, AI-collaboration/solo, solo/AI-collaboration, and AI-collaboration/AI-collaboration. The paper has a lot of confusing tables and graphs showing the results. I tried looking through the tables for low p-values (indicating statistically significant results). The first 3 studies do show an increase in sense of control, a decrease in intrinsic motivation, and an increase in boredom when switching from an AI-collaboration task to a solo task. In study 4, when using AI, people's sense of control is lower, and when doing the task entirely by oneself, sense of control is higher, so that result carries over robustly. That holds true regardless of which task is the AI-assisted one or which order they are done. Intrinsic motivation is always lower on the second task, but when switching from an AI-assisted task to a non-AI-assisted task, it goes down a lot more, indicating that indeed, the AI-collaboration has an effect. (Other than saying they measured "intrinsic motivation" with 4 questions that each have a 7-point scale, they don't say how exactly they measured "intrinsic motivation". I guess if I was so motivated, I could track down the study they reference where presumably the exact questions are revealed.) Boredom increased when going from the first task to the second task, and at least in study 4, it didn't look to me like it mattered which task or whether any were or were not AI-assisted. Maybe by the time they started the second task, people were starting to realize they were participating in a psychological experiment and started wondering what's for lunch. All in all, an interesting bit of research, but having gone through the original research paper, I feel like more research should be done and not too much stock should be put into this one paper. (I feel kinda bad saying that because they used a huge number of participants and were obviously trying to produce rigorous results.) In addition to the issue of convergent vs divergent tasks I noted above, I think this research is too short-term, and, at least for me personally, it didn't study software development, so none of its conclusions should be extrapolated to what I do, which is software development. The study asked people to do tasks that take minutes, not days or weeks or months or years, so we don't know what psychological effect there might be from AI-assisted work over long time horizons. Maybe the effects described here are short-term and go away, or maybe they compound and have even more dramatic effect over longer timeframes. We don't know. And it would be interesting to see a study focused specifically on software development tasks.

"Tron's MCP: A dark prophecy coming true." In the original 1982 Tron movie, an artificial intelligence program for playing chess was modified into the Master Control Program (MCP), which would assimilate other programs to increase its own intelligence. The MCP became smarter than its creator, and escaped its creator's control. Every program in Tron mirrors its creator, and the MCP mirrors the dark soul of its creator, the profit-maximizing Ed Dillinger character who rose to take over Encom. The MCP wants to take over the world.

The Kubernetes project does not allow AI-generated code, according to Kat Cosgrove, the engineer in charge of Kubernetes's release process. Kubernetes is one of those technologies that you all use every day, probably, even if you don't know it. It's a system for making "cloud" services highly scalable by using a cluster of computers with "containers". Originally Docker containers, but now Kubernetes works with various open source container systems. The idea is you take some software, say a web server, and you package it up into a "container". If your service goes from thousands of users to millions to billions, you tell Kubernetes to create more and more instances of your web server container on your cluster -- and you add more machines to your cluster as you need to. You can have containers for database servers or whatever you want. Containers can contain whatever software you write. Whenever you use a mobile app, there's probably server-side code that it interacts with, and for the big apps, it's probably using Kubernetes. People call Kubernetes a "container orchestration" system. Anyway, engineers are allowed to use AI for their own edification, to analyze code or generate documentation for their own use, but are not allowed to use it as part of the official release. Engineers are not only not allowed to use AI to generate code for Kubernetes releases, they're not allowed to use AI to write documentation, which has to be all human-written and is taken very, very seriously. High-quality documentation is considered key to Kubernetes's success. This is all about 52 minutes in on a conversation about Kubernetes's history and how its current release process came to be. I mention it because I followed along with no problem up to this point but was suddenly surprised by the anti-AI position taken. Maybe I shouldn't have been -- I've been sharing stories with you all of various AI failures and shortcomings -- but it seems like failures and shortcomings have no effect on the industry's trajectory and everyone everywhere is requiring -- not just allowing but requiring -- engineers to use AI. Kubernetes has taken the opposite tack and prohibited it. It's a big deal because Kubernetes is the world's second largest open source project -- after Linux itself (which Kubernetes is built on).

This website, project2025.observer, purports to be tracking Project 2025. Trump during his campaign said he had nothing to do with Project 2025, yet if this website is to be believed, out of 313 total "objectives" identified from Project 2025, 101 have already been completed, 64 are in progress, and 148 have not been started. In percentage terms, that's 32% completed, 21% in progress, and 47% not started. Click "Load more" until you can see them all.

Angela Collier, physicist and ex-Target shopper, predicts the demise of Target. I guess since this is an actual prediction, it's fair fodder for us futurists? She predicts Target will go the way of K-mart because of kowtowing to Trump.

"Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky sentenced to 12 years in multi-billion-dollar crypto fraud case." The "key points" list lists some interesting context: "Mashinsky's sentencing follows a $4.7 billion FTC settlement with Celsius Network." "He joins a line of other former crypto execs who have been convicted of fraud." "FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who's serving 25 years for misappropriating billions in customer funds, and Binance's CZ, who served time for enabling money laundering." "Terraform Labs' Do Kwon, blamed for a $40 billion collapse, settled with the SEC for $4.5 billion after being found liable for securities fraud."

"Weblish is a lightweight JavaScript extension that allows developers to write natural language (English) instructions within HTML using <script type="text/english">, which are then dynamically compiled into executable JavaScript using Google Gemini." Dynamically compiled? Like, every time every user loads a webpage, and LLM translates the English to JavaScript? It looks like it goes through Python code on your server, so if you use this, put some caching on your server. Maybe you can get Google Gemini write the code for that for you, too. ;)

Duolingo has become an "AI-first company", and that means being willing to accept lower quality for vastly higher quantity of content creation. 9-year-Duolingo-streaker Evan Edinger goes on a long rant. Stories are worse. It's like a burger joint adding sawdust to increase profits. I've been using Duolingo since 2017 (though my streak has been broken many times -- I don't have a single unbroken 7-year streak -- that would be amazing -- I'm a much more casual Duo user) and Duolingo always seemed to have so much human-generated content on it it was impossible to go through it all. Maybe that's not true and people have completed all the lessons for some language pairs? (Duo is organized along language pairs, e.g. "Chinese for speakers of English".) Have any of you used up all the lessons available on Duolingo for some language you're studying?

In 2019, a team of researchers wrote: "Pakistan and India may have 400 to 500 nuclear weapons by 2025 with yields from tested 12- to 45-kt values to a few hundred kilotons. If India uses 100 strategic weapons to attack urban centers and Pakistan uses 150, fatalities could reach 50 to 125 million people, and nuclear-ignited fires could release 16 to 36 Tg of black carbon in smoke, depending on yield. The smoke will rise into the upper troposphere, be self-lofted into the stratosphere, and spread globally within weeks. Surface sunlight will decline by 20 to 35%, cooling the global surface by 2 degrees to 5 degrees C and reducing precipitation by 15 to 30%, with larger regional impacts. Recovery takes more than 10 years. Net primary productivity declines 15 to 30% on land and 5 to 15% in oceans threatening mass starvation and additional worldwide collateral fatalities."

OpenAI o3 plays (the equivalent of) GeoGuessr. Photos from personal collections, not actually on Google Street view. Can't do the impossible, but does astonishingly well. Try to guess the locations of the photos yourself before you scroll down and reveal the answers.

The CEO of Fiverr, Micha Kaufman, sent a letter to everyone in the company: "Here is the unpleasant truth: Al is coming for your jobs." "It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person -- Al is coming for you." "You must understand that what was once considered 'easy tasks' will no longer exist; what was considered 'hard tasks' will be the new easy, and what was considered 'impossible tasks' will be the new hard." "If you do not become an exceptional talent at what you do, a master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months. I am not trying to scare you." "I am not talking about your job at Fiverr. I am talking about your ability to stay in your profession in the industry."

"Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI." Just as GPS navigation eroded road navigation skills, "AI-powered autocomplete and code generators can tempt us to 'turn off our brain' for routine coding tasks." "A 2025 study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon researchers found that the more people leaned on AI tools, the less critical thinking they engaged in, making it harder to summon those skills when needed." "What does this look like in day-to-day coding? It starts subtle. One engineer confessed that after 12 years of programming, AI's instant help made him 'worse at [his] own craft'. He describes a creeping decay: First, he stopped reading documentation -- why bother when an LLM can explain it instantly?" "Then debugging skills waned -- stack traces and error messages felt daunting, so he just copy-pasted them into AI for a fix." "Deep comprehension was the next to go -- instead of spending hours truly understanding a problem, he now implements whatever the AI suggests." "We're not becoming 10 times developers with AI -- we're becoming 10 times dependent on AI." "Every time we let AI solve a problem we could've solved ourselves, we're trading long-term understanding for short-term productivity." So the solution is to stop using AI, right? Of course not. If you follow the list of guidelines on this page, supposedly your skills won't atrophy in the age of AI. You're supposed to always verify and understand the output of the AI, never use AI for "fundamentals", always attempt problems yourself before asking AI, have human code reviews for AI contributions, if an AI solution works, engage in active learning and learn how it works yourself, keep learning journal of "AI assists", and program with the AI with a "pair programming mindset". The immediate problem that comes to mind for me with everything on this list is, "Ain't nobody got time for that." We developers are supposed to 5x-10x our productivity. All the things on this list take time. So, y'all tell me, how am I going to avoid skill atrophy in the age of AI?

"Russian McDonalds", which is actually called Vkusno -- i Tochka (Вкусно -- и Точка, means "Tasty -- and that's it"), has robots. In this video, Vasilisa Mamont shows an ad for the robots (definitely aiming for "cuteness") and then visits a Vkusno -- i Tochka in real life in... oh, she doesn't say where it is. But from her other videos we can see she's in Moscow for the "Victory Day" parade, so I assume it's in Moscow. I haven't seen her channel before, but it looks like a strongly pro-Russia channel. Well, if a channel is made inside Russia it has to be pro-Russia. The YouTubers I followed who were inside Russia before the war are now outside Russia. There's another video on the channel where she interviews a US citizen who is migrating to Russia using the new "Shared Values" (Traditional Values) Visa. The YouTubers outside Russia say the idea Russia represents "traditional values" is a joke. Russia under the communists wasn't "traditional" at all. Anyway, this wasn't supposed to be about the geopolitics (I mention it just because if I know a-priori that a channel has a bias, I try to tell you all about that up front), I just wanted to tell you all about the robots. It seems like we're starting to see robots in restaurants, after decades of anticipation, but they're still only in a few places and not as impressive as I expected. I guess that raises the question, what was I expecting? I guess I was expecting a fully automated restaurant with no humans to exist by now, but that hasn't happened.

Vastly huger context windows in language models are possible, or so it is claimed, by Jacob Buckman, CEO of Manifest AI, who claims to have invented a way of incorporating the key idea behind recurrent neural networks with transformers to make "power attention", enabling vastly huger context windows without the models forgetting anything in the context window, which is a problem for language models today that have the size of their context windows pushed up.

Claude's system prompt got leaked. Wait, people are saying Anthropic doesn't keep their system prompts secret, so this isn't really a 'leak'? Well, either way, here you are, you can read Claude's system prompt if you feel like it.

"We have reached the 'severed fingers and abductions' stage of the crypto revolution." "This previous weekend was particularly nuts, with an older gentleman snatched from the streets of Paris' 14th arrondissement on May 1 by men in ski masks." "The abducted father was taken to a house in a Parisian suburb, where one of the father's fingers was cut off in the course of ransom negotiations." "This was the second such incident this year. In January, crypto maven David Balland was also abducted along with his partner on January 21. Balland was taken to a house, where he also had a finger cut off." "A few weeks before that, attackers went to the home of someone whose son was a 'crypto-influencer based in Dubai.' At the father's home, the kidnappers 'tied up [the father's] wife and daughter and forced him into a car." "Early this year, three British men kidnapped another British man while all of them were in Spain; the kidnappers demanded 30,000 euros in crypto 'or be tortured and killed.'" "There's the Belgian man who posted online that 'his crypto wallet was now worth 1.6 million euros.' His wife was the victim of an attempted abduction within weeks." "I reported last year on a gang based out of Florida that had been staging home invasions of people perceived to own lots of crypto. One of their hits took place in Durham, North Carolina." All the abducted people in this story survived, and the criminals were caught. Cryptocurrency is not as anonymous as people think it is. Still, if you have any cryptocurrency, you might not want to brag about it online.