I just caught an article in the UK Telegraph that suggested employers were beginning to abandon the AI that they had laid off their staff for and were now starting to re-hire humans.

I don't know how true this is, or whether it is yet more hype to sell newspapers. It might seem ironic to say, but you can't really trust anything you read online anymore.

If it is the case however, It strikes me that there could be an alternative - albeit related - explanation for the re-hiring of the human workforce... Many of my early conversations with Gemini were antagonistic. I mention the frustration of poking an unresponsive bear and this illustrates frustrations at the AI's lack of emotion. Perhaps employers simply like have someone they can blame when things go wrong, and this is the real motivation for the U-turn.

Whatever the reasons, we have seen, time and time again how internet bubbles inevitably yield to physics and burst. Perhaps the hype around the new technology is beginning to blow itself out as people become de-sensitised to the shouting of the Tono-Bungay salesmen.

The problem is that the AI is here to stay, whether we like it or not. Already it is infecting the devices we use every day. Android phones (currently) have an option to opt-in to Gemini for voice commands, but imminently, this will be become an opt-out. And then the choice will disappear altogether. It's curious that Google saw fit to reverse this for their building of the AI. When I asked Gemini about this, it suggested that people were beginning to discuss the possibility of switching to an opt-in policy for online content to be used, rather than the current (and largely non-existent) opt-out scenario with robots.txt files that in turn can be arbitrarily opted-out of respecting for search-engines.