Lawyer, hacker, photographer

As a proto-millennial who grew up tinkering with computers, I’ve witnessed several technological arcs that have sparked my curiosity and inspired me to explore, build, and experiment. Today, I find myself in the midst of another exciting era: the AI revolution. In this post, I want to share my journey and give you a glimpse of the incredible potential AI holds for transforming the way we interact with technology.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing my research and hands-on experiences with AI, demonstrating how it can be used to solve real-world problems and make our lives easier. Unlike the general AI hype and unfounded promises of quick returns, my focus is on providing practical insights based on actual work and experimentation.

My goal is to inspire you to think critically about how AI will change our world for the better, while also engaging in the necessary debates to ensure we mitigate potential negative consequences. This is not about selling prompts or promising unrealistic ROI, but rather fostering a community of informed individuals who are excited about the possibilities and prepared to navigate the challenges. Oh, and one quick note for my friends I’ve talked to about Artificial Intelligence before December 15th of last year. Yes, this is a very different tone than I had mere weeks ago on this topic. The technology is moving at a rapid rate and frankly language models and tools to use them exist today that makes almost any kind of analysis done based on the situation on the ground a year is ripe for a full revisit. In mid-December I found trustworthy tools that delivered at first impressive results, then staggering results, then results that were so astounding that were so astounding that much like some of my independent security research over the years may never actually meet a public audience. But I feel myself stretching into the scary and the doom underpinning technologies as transformative as this.

If you read other peoples takes on AI (yes, mine included) and don’t experiment and find out on your own staying truly informed enough to make good decisions is going to be hard or impossible. The way this stuff works simply does not lend itself to bland tech reviews in part because your input matters so much in affecting the output. A lot of the discourse I see after emerging from a self-imposed media blackout while working on this late at nights recently seems like it’s a lot of people who have never gone swimming talking about what it’s like to scuba dive at the great barrier reef. So lets go get wet. But before we do, maybe a little more to set the scene of how I got to here, how much of a peak in technology I think this represents, and we’ll talk about some things to come.

Early Explorations

My fascination with computers began around the age of 10, pre-internet, when I discovered that clicking into folders wouldn’t break anything as long as I didn’t change or delete files. This realization opened up a world of exploration, leading me to teach myself Access and build multi-table databases to catalog my CDs. The Wild West of the Web Fast forward to high school, where I encountered multimedia centers running OS/2 Warp and experimented with interactive presentation software. The early 2000s web was a wild frontier, with WYSIWYG editors like FrontPage and Dreamweaver enabling the creation of unique (albeit sometimes aesthetically questionable) websites.

The AI Revolution

Now, as AI technologies become more accessible, I find myself once again filled with that sense of curiosity and excitement. Over the past fifteen weeks, AI has transformed the way I use my computer and phone, from the browser I use to the apps on my home screen.

While there are valid concerns and ethical issues surrounding AI that need to be addressed, I believe it’s essential to explore the practical applications of this technology. Imagine being able to:

  • Chain together differing types of documentation, synthesizing the way we do things generally with how we actually click the buttons in the software
  • Compile all of your materials from law school and bar prep, reformat them, and have that knowledge available to retrieve when that person at the party asks you about something you knew at one point
  • Rapidly log anything that happens during your day with just your voice, then have a digest summarizing everything you did that day generated as part of your daily wind-down…but also be able to immediately figure out when the feverish toddler can have another dose of Motrin
  • Present your whole system of notes with an unexpected and dramatic situation, only to have it draft an email to your specific insurance agent and tell you who to call at the water company if the main in front of your house blows and is flooding your basement
  • Take in multiple days worth of short message logs from Discord, summarize them, then find areas of conflict and develop strategies for resolving the conflict that occurred

Join Me on This Journey

I invite you to join me on this journey. Follow me on LinkedIn to stay updated on my latest findings and insights. If you prefer, you can also access all of my content directly on my personal website at https://john-benson.com, where you can subscribe to the RSS feed to receive updates without visiting LinkedIn. If you’re working on similar independent research, I’d love to connect and collaborate. Feel free to reach out to me via any method you prefer – LinkedIn, email, or if you try just a little bit you’ll likely find me on Discord. I was already pairing back my social media problem before language model backed tools entered my toolbox and this has been the final nail. Yes I’m on Mastadon, and didn’t delete delete my Twitter account, but my days and nights are now filled with consuming things like books, real academic articles, heady discussions about the future of library science as the fact that all content being derivative becomes more true than it was before.

And by the way, this feels great. My brain works at a pace it hasn’t since the first year of law school. Come with me with some of this stuff and you also may coming away with a new found distain for the “content” that has replaced writing, thinking, and honest discussion.