All posts tagged: hopeless

Sitting in a jail cell, alone and hopeless, a man’s life is suddenly changed : NPR

Sitting in a jail cell, alone and hopeless, a man’s life is suddenly changed : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

Jay (not pictured) found himself alone and hopeless in a jail cell when a fellow inmate’s unexpected words of comfort changed his life. Irkham Khalid/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Irkham Khalid/Getty Images When Jay was 22 years old, he was a self-described loner. In this story, he is being identified by his nickname to allow himself to speak candidly about the following experience and his mental health. He says the few people he did hang out with at the time had questionable morals.  ”I chose my friends poorly, and your friends have a tendency to rub off on you. And so I started making poor decisions,” Jay said. One evening, when he and his friends were out drinking, someone suggested they should try to break into the chemistry building on his college campus. Most of the group shrugged the suggestion off, deeming it impossible, but Jay was convinced he could pull it off. “The next night I made a plan of how to do it, and I did it,” Jay remembered. “And I didn’t …

AI Is Turning Workplaces Into Hopeless Gridlock

AI Is Turning Workplaces Into Hopeless Gridlock

Published by José Betancourt

CEOs have eagerly grabbed onto AI as a tool to make offices more efficient, and often to reduce headcount via brutal layoffs. There’s a problem, though: the workers who remain often say they now have to fix a flood of error-ridden AI-generated “workslop” that’s burdening them, paradoxically, with more work than ever. All this pointless busywork to correct AI-generated output results in hidden costs for companies that embrace the tech, according to The Guardian. One recent survey of 1,150 desk jockeys found that the 40 percent had encountered workslop — defined as “AI-generated content that looks good, but lacks substance” — in the course of their duties, forcing them to waste 3.4 hours per month dealing with it. At scale, that’s significant: all those hours wasted tally up to an estimated $8.1 million of lost productivity for a workplace with 10,000 workers. The hypothesis is supported by previous research that found that computer programmers become slower when using AI. A widely-cited MIT study found that 95 percent companies that deployed AI don’t see any added …

The ‘Hopeless Labor’ of Writing

The ‘Hopeless Labor’ of Writing

Published by Sam Flores

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. ChatGPT and food-delivery droids came to my campus at roughly the same time, in the 2022–23 academic year. My response—cranky, tweedy—was hopelessly on brand for a history professor. The chatbot and the droid appeared to be in league, robotic species on the vanguard of civilizational collapse. Both were premised on the idea of frictionless ease, liberating their users from outmoded toils. Because you couldn’t kick the chatbot, I had to resist the urge to kick the droids. I felt new and sudden sympathy with those English weavers who tried to smash the machines. I’d like to think that my grievance was rooted in something beyond my own impending irrelevance. The product of too many years of humanities education, I wanted to defend the foundational exercise of writing. Going back to the late 19th century, writing instruction in the humanities has been premised on the idea of writing as both a craft and an art: a …

Cameron Norrie falls to Alexander Zverev to end hopeless British charge at Australian Open

Cameron Norrie falls to Alexander Zverev to end hopeless British charge at Australian Open

Published by Sam Flores

Never one to go quietly, Norrie mounted a spirited rearguard. He snatched the second set off the back of one unplayably fast return of serve, which whistled straight through Zverev’s forehand swish without any contact being made. But Norrie had already spent nine sets and almost seven hours on the court in reaching this third-round appointment. His puppyish enthusiasm for chasing every ball down gradually faded as Zverev ground out a 7-5, 4-6, 6-3, 6-1 victory in an economical 2hr 46min. It would have been even quicker, but for regular pauses to clean up the mess left by the seagulls which kept flying over the court. “I thought the level was really good,” said Norrie. “First three sets, very good. There was maybe a slight dip in that third set, but it was kind of constant pressure, I thought, in all departments of the game. “He was serving well, returning well, forehand, backhand, moving, and I had to really take a lot of risks to hang with him. “And I think I can take a …