Apparently my 3D slicer app had a management restructure overnight.
When I sat down with my morning coffee, ready to start work, a new AI assistant had appeared out of nowhere! I hadn’t turned it on in the app, it just turned up, ready to take over the place. And I couldn’t turn it of
It was apparently intended to optimise my workflow, but what it actually optimized was the amount of time that it took me to find the settings to turn it off. I eventually logged into ChatGPT and got the information there.
It’s not that I hate artificial intelligence, I don’t, and I actually use it to complete a number of different tasks most days. It’s meant to be my assistant, not my boss, and I certainly don’t intend to let it think for me.
It said that it had “sliced” my file, and that it was ready to print.
Great, I thought, and proceeded to tell it to proceed, but it wouldn’t budge? Why? Because it couldn’t “see” the printer bed to check that it didn’t have any obstructions. Of course you can’t see, you haven’t got eyes, I muttered to myself. (That’s Dougspeak for “there’s no camera attached”).
The point is that I could see that there was no obstruction, and I didn’t need a bot to tell me that. I wouldn’t have worried about it if there was a checkbox for me to confirm that there was no obstruction. What struck me is that it seemed to be intended to take me out of the equation.
I was printing a filament reel, and it didn’t need to be pretty, just functional. If I made a mistake and wrecked it, I’d learn something new when I fixed it. That’s how humans have learned for millennia. I won’t name the company, though there was quite a row on Reddit when people were venting their frustrations.
Never lose your ability to think, don’t let machines rule.