I'm annoyed

Why the fuck isn't this working?

If you've never listened to "So What?" by Duncan Trussel and East Forest, you should.

It's demented, but brilliant.

I was reminded of it today when I was on an Emirates flight from Dubai to Glasgow, where I had a 67 Mbps download speed thanks to Emirates rolling out Starlink.

I was working with Claude to rebrand the slides for the AI class I’m teaching tomorrow, using the design system we created in Claude Design and then handed off to Claude Code.

But here's the thing.

I was getting annoyed with Claude because the slides weren't quite landing the way I wanted them to.

I'm at 39,000 feet somewhere over Turkey.
I'm drinking Cloudy Bay.
I have three AI agents working in parallel on different tasks.
I'm in touch with my team on Slack.
I've just had a video call with my friend about our plans for this weekend.

And instead of thinking "Holy shit, what an incredible time to be alive", I'm annoyed that Claude isn't quite getting the layout of my slides right the way I want them.

Annoyed!! What on earth have I got to be annoyed about!

Here's how Duncan Trussell puts it:

But let’s say we did find out that music is coming to us from aliens
I don’t know that’s gonna change anything at all
I’m excited for the aliens, I’m excited for the grand revelation of the Galactic brotherhood or sisterhood or fraternity or sorority or whatever the fuck it is — council? Whatever it may be I’m excited for that but I don’t know how much it’s gonna change anything when it comes to being a human
I think it’s just gonna create a nice couple of years probably where we’re all like “Holy shit, we’re part of the galactic federation,” but then you’re gonna get annoyed.

I don’t know if anything changes that much. Do you ever think about that, like let’s say the Buddha does show up let’s say the grand thing happens, that Jesus rides in on the lion or whatever, the thing is shown, the great unveiling

You know then what?

You’re still gonna end up on a UFO, flying through space, you go to the bathroom and some asshole pissed on the seat and you’re gonna be like, “What the fuck is wrong with people?”

You know what I mean, you’re still in the human form, you’re still stuck. You’re still dealing with the same problems. Won’t go away. I’m telling you man, this is the truth.

This is going to be the whole story of AI.

Back in 2008, when the iPhone first came out, everybody lost their minds. We'd never seen anything like it.

But we just adapt. It becomes normal. It's the hedonic treadmill.

What was the stuff of magic and science fiction before becomes commonplace and then boring.

And then, when it doesn't work, and we don't get the thing we have become accustomed to getting all the time, we just get annoyed.

So all progress ultimately leaves us annoyed and disappointed.

And therefore, we all need to chill out about AI.

By which I mean I need to chill out about AI.

And drink more Cloudy Bay.