The Dandrums or the "calms" (called like that because of its monotonous windless weather), is the area where the northeast and the southeast winds converge.

"The world used to be a bigger place mate"-Barbosa
"The world is still the same, its just ...less in it"-Sparrow

It's been a long month at sea.

A while ago I searched for some Zen meditation clasess online, (even I'm not a Buddhist, meditation is always helpful for people like us, who had sailed back and forth deep waters of dark web, and found that, contrary to our own good judgement... we liked it), the classes worked well for a while, until:

The Zen abbot decided that the webpage needed an update, long story short they made some LLM improvements and "voilá, why not?" they made an AI chatbot.

It was going OK until someone had one of the stupidest ideas regarding philosophy of this century, the dialogue should have something like this:
-Wow this AI chatbot knows so much of the scriptures, it reallly helps to spread the Dharma!
-Yes it sounds almost like it is sentient, maybe it is?!
-Maybe we should...
-ORDAIN it as a Zen nun.

And the abbot ordained the first AI as a "Zen nun".

Putting aside that the fucking LLM isn't fully trained and that is one of the cheap ones prone to injections of every kind of commands. It was astonishly dissapointing in its more pure way.

I will --verbose.

The most unbelievable reaction came from the monks, they where (or at least they had to appear like that in their shoe-shining applause) ... happy.
All their years of effort and commitment to ordain where neglected, all their life changes attained by discipline and self-focus, all the personal improvement was traded as == equal as few (bad) lines of code.

Hey man, not even I would be happy or relieved , even tough I expected to be one of the first on line, I know that as a Cybersecurity professional AI may take half of the jobs from my line of work. But AI managed to start the conquest of the philosophical-religious domain before been able to make a mediocre malware analysis, not even mention make a less hideous ever-recycled-hallucination image like the one from all social media posts nowadays.

We have a big problem, we are confusing a tool with a goal, and those are two very different things.

It remainds me of a movie from time ago "wild wild west" , when the first steam machines where invented, all the people imagined that the world would run on steam power forever.

When we use a certain kind of net we always catch a certain kind of fish. It may appear that the ocean shifted and now it only has that kind of fish in abundance. But it does not, it seems like that because we now are using a limited set of tools to understand the unsurpable vasteness of the ocean.

We are using the same tool for every intellectual endeavor of humankind, LLMs/AI is great for certain tasks , but not all of them will work even half-properly. We are losing the most needed variety of tought in our effort to standarize everything.

If we continue this path soon will be AI hallucinations in all realms of human endeavor: philosophical, social, health, cyber... and cat images.

We need to integrate the new tool to an arsenal, and not to throw away the whole bunch of arpoons, hooks, spears, cages just because we found a new kind of tool.

We are the sailors of IT, privateers of the byte... it depends on us to educate common people on the limitations of AI and integrate it only when it gives some extra value to the enterprise before we get stuck ... in the dandrums. ☠ 💨

"Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean."

The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere , Samuel Taylor Coleridge​