What’s scarier? Finding out that your checking and 401K are managed by decades old COBOL programming? Or that AI will replace it almost overnight?

Photo above - official headshot of Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. He predicted in his blog yesterday (once again) that his Claude AI system will soon write all the software code on planet Earth. Is Dario the Elon Musk of AI?

Full disclosure: I used to work at a money center bank. (Call center operations). Very labor intensive. The only thing MORE expensive/labor intensive was the IT (Information Technology) department. Millions and millions of bucks annually to repair and sustain ancient COBOL software written nearly a generation ago.

COBOL is expensive to repair and maintain that some bank and wall street IT departments gave up. They offshored this job to outfits in India and Pakistan. This is cheaper, but those coders typically disappear forever 15 seconds after the job is done. They left behind minimal documentation about their work. Anyone who sat through an end-user requirements or test review meeting where half the participants are on teleconference from Karachi and Mumba knows the pain of this. (What the eff did he say again? No, turning the volume up DOESNT help. It makes it worse)

Anthropic announced it can do away with all that. Just turn the coding over to Claude AI. Software update cycles will shrink from years to a few weeks. Most of those offshore contractors never get hired. This seems like it SHOULD be a win-win, right?

People who own IBM stock apparently think so. In the midst of yesterday’s snow bomb cyclone there was a blizzard of Wall Street sell orders for IBM. Share prices dropped the most in 25 years within just a few hours. Because IBM consultants and programmers are apparently part of the secret sauce that keeps this ancient tuna and mac casserole edible. And Claude is going to fix everything.

And maybe it can. Maybe AI will actually be able to build viable defenses against all the programming flaws that bedevil money management. Hackers, ransomware, DDOS attacks, wallet thefts, identity spoofing, bogus orders. Maybe these will all be fixed by a couple of chips in a little black Anthropic box, and we can kick back and watch Netflix.

Except the little black cable box already under my TV can’t even get real time closed captioning right. AI can't legally or competently drive a car. The last time it tried (with Tesla) self driving software had 4X as many accidents as human drivers.

According to various surveys, It takes a dedicated team of human software engineers LONGER to finalize AI generated code than it would have to make it from scratch with just humans. But the silver lining is that there are fewer humans involved, from start to finish).

Let's imagine the future. Your nearby ATM doesn't work. The bank website is down. How long will it take human repairmen to take apart AI Cobol code and find out what’s happening? There may not be consultants or contractors who have ANY IDEA what the AI bots wrote, and which lines of code failed.

I don’t predict that AI will be a complete failure forever at writing code. Just that selling your IBM stock because of some Anthropic press release on a snow day is probably an overreaction.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

IBM shares plunge as Anthropic touts COBOL modernization | Financial Post

How Google and AI are Killing Travel Blogs Like Mine

I just finished reading this blog post by Amanda Williams, a travel blogger of 15 years, on the impact of Google's "helpful content" algo changes and AI on her ability to financial sustain herself.

And man- I might sound dumb here, but I totally had not connected the dots re: how AI will absolutely destroy ad revenue for creators-- specifically creators that produce written content. 

Ad placement is driven by site visitors, and AI totally bypasses the need for a site visit. Instead, it harvests the information from blogs like Amanda's and puts it in a neat list along with the content of 10 other bloggers so a person trying to find the top sites to visit in Paris never needs to even visit the site. 

This is a problem in that, bloggers like Amanda have to switch strategies-- she now needs a new means of making money to continue producing trustworthy travel content. That might be creating a substack with individual subscribers, creating courses, etc. But her content likely won't be publicly available in the future, non-harvestable by AI... and that's a problem too in that AI's knowledge sources are going to get worse and worse. 

Also, I just can't imagine that the 1:1 subscriber model won't be a losing game for soooo many great writers/creators. It's very different to be a person creating content that people are willing to pay for month over month, especially in niche fields like travel, instead of being paid by relevant brands through ads. 

What do y'all think?

Can someone actually have any Teal if they score 0% Orange, Amber, Red, and Magenta? Going through the scores of the Better Political Conversations quiz is fascinating. (reference: https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/we0q1pq/run)

Now, this very well could have been someone running an experiment to test the scoring, or to try to get a sense of a friend or family member, but they did give a name where a lot of people leave that blank.

Their scores are:
Teal 55%
Green 45%
Orange 0%
Amber 0%
Red 0%
Magenta 0%

Is it at all possible that someone could select every single response at Orange, Amber, Red, and Magenta as False, wrong, or just doesn’t make sense and have any actual Teal?

Also interesting, I got an email from someone who thinks of himself as primarily Orange, but was surprised that his quiz results came out 0% Orange. He referenced his Meyers-Briggs results as a reference in support. Utterly fascinated, I’ve asked him to let me know what correlation he sees between the Integral levels and Meyers-Briggs, and I’ve asked him what statements at Orange would have had his quiz results come out accurate for him.

Each time I make a significant edit in the content of the project I make a note of the change in the google sheet where I’m keeping track of scores. Here are the averages of the currently 75 scores:

Amber 26%
Green 25%
Teal 21%
Red 12%
Orange 11%
Magenta 5%

One blatant pattern I’m seeing is that high Green scores ALWAYS pair with a high score in Amber, and that people who have that pairing always score exceedingly low in Red and quite low in Orange.