So in 1987, Apple made a concept video.
In the video, a guy—an academic—saunters into work, boots up his iPad, and starts talking to an AI.
He has a ton of message notifications.
He also gets a few appointments and is expected to remember them himself. The appointments are pretty big deals but they’re completely last minute shocks to him, like having to prepare a lecture that he’s supposed to have in a few hours or getting a cake for a family gathering.
For his actual work, the lecture, he throws something together in three seconds with the LLM and mooches off a friend, asks her to come do the lecture. Actual thinking: nadita. I’m not denying that an LLM like he has could help him come up with some great insights and ideas, that’s not one of the problems with LLMs, they can be great (and the “What was his name, Fleming something” and the LLM understanding that certainly rings true to a lot of us). But that’s not what he’s doing. He’s just pasting some maps together…
And he’s tasked to do the remembering part while the LLM does the thinking.
He does spare a few seconds to make light of the “nice” climate change driven desertification and completely glosses over the human toll. He’s got the cushiest tenure on the cinder, apparently. Power he uses to try to place all of climate change blame on the same global south it’s ravaging.
And all the while he’s trying to think about this lecture he’s getting new messages, new calls, and he’s just as bad himself, having sent a ““please call me” (without even saying why)” message to his fish-with-a-bicycle colleague. Or rather, having asked the bot to do that.
All of this because his own scheduling has utterly collapsed. He’s scrambling with last-minute cake cop-outs and giving phoned-in lectures (both figurative and literally).
It’s like he is the secretary, and failing at it, while the robot is the professor. And the robot is the son, too, since it’s the robot who gets to talk to the guy’s mom for him. Human connection delegated to AI. A mom who’s only calling to remind him to get the cake that the robot has already reminded him about twice and that he’s gonna forget anyway.
So constant digital interruptions, colliding double-booked appointments, no awareness of last-minute deadlines, phoned in lectures, and using tech to isolate rather than to connect. All in a world driven to the brink by fires and drought. I’ll say one thing for 1987 Apple: they did make a cyberpunk video that’s more of a warning than a utopia.
A warning I bet many of us wish we would’ve heeded.
The one piece of tech I wish I could send back to the grim darkness of the far future where there is only slop, to the 2010-as-viewed-from-1987? That’d be the life-changing magic of GTD:
And best of all:
A clear idea of what to do sorted by where to do it, driven by the projects and areas and values that really matter instead of what’s just latest and loudest.
This wonderful technology is a system that can use fancy apps or just scraps of paper. Either way, that’d free him to use his science-fiction wonder computer to do some real work instead of drowning him in noise.