I folded myself back into the routine of work. I hadn’t billed a full 40 hours since last July, eight months. What did Lily mean when she said she disassociated? I sometimes got flickers of that and liked it. It gave me the feeling I could be liberated from my own mind. Slipped through the bars, waving from the other side. Like that time in a conference room at work, I floated out and saw myself from the other side like a window washer on a skyscraper: me looking in at me. Was that the appeal for ketamine users, to experience that brief freedom, life after death, sloughing off this mortal coil? Was the coil the brain, the body? Both? You could divest some control by letting go.

I had to update my resume and include a paragraph summary of my accomplishments and refer to myself in the third person. Intensely awkward. Most people suck at marketing themselves, me included. I had to pan out and imagine what they wanted and position myself in that light. It was the same techniques I used to do the actual work, a kind of Russian doll nesting exercise of using the thing I was selling to sell myself as the person who could do it.

I clicked send, slapped the laptop shut, checked my phone and saw it hadn’t sent, reopened my laptop and the message had vanished. Had to do it all over again. Wondered if that meant something on a cosmic level but said fuck it and battered my way through.

Bill Pearse has been working in tech since 2016 as a writer, consultant, and client delivery manager for a Bellevue, WA-based business consulting agency.

It goes on from there. I see them on the other side of the screen wincing. Everyone knows this is bullshit. Wasn’t it Caesar who referred to himself in the third person?

Caesar’s use of the third person is thought to have been a way to portray himself as a detached and objective narrator, as well as to project an image of authority and importance.

They were now advertising for AI content lead jobs where part of the job was to oversee “self-updating systems.” That’s right: agents and machines. Self-improving based on reinforcement learning with human feedback, aka RLHF as they say on social. Who says that?! What the hell were we becoming?

I knew the kind of work I did, content marketing, was on the chopping block. The irony was how it would end: me using my human talents to market my replacement. I hadn’t really worked for six months. But I got a small gig to write a series of four blog posts for Microsoft showing the vision of generative and now agentic AI. I remember first stumbling over that word agentic, thinking it was bullshit. But you really can build or use off-the-shelf agents now for a number of autonomous or semi-autonomous tasks. Few people understand this, they wince.

Let me tell you how it works and how you can get started today…

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Technology

Tags: AI, Creative Nonfiction, Technology