Tag: writing

The coldness hiding behind AI’s friendly face

Man with computer-chip eyes
©2026 Bard – Cold, cold eyes

The more I experiment with the current wave of AI chatbots1, the more I get annoyed by one feature in particular: its overly apologetic, friendly and helpful tone. No matter what I hurl at the model in terms of criticism, cynical comments, or even insults, the ghost inside the machine wags its tail, pulls its most sorry and guilty face, and urges me to keep playing. You would almost believe there was genuine feeling behind it.

What worries me, though, is that intelligence behind the bots doesn’t feel those emotions, it mimics them. And that difference matters. It matters a lot.

All living beings experience feelings and all animals experience emotions2: feelings given meaning by past experiences, learned responses, and the deep-seated drive to find balance and harmony in an ever changing environment. Without emotions, life as we know it could not exist, or wouldn’t be worth living.

Emotions are the link between the intelligence of the mind and the intelligence of the body. Biological minds are a whole-of-body experience, an emergent property of consciousness interacting with the physical shape in which it has been cast. Thoughts do not exist separate from emotions; feelings do not exist separate from physical sensations; awareness does not exist without a body to shape that awareness into sensory signals.

I believe this to be one of the stumbling blocks on the road towards an AI that can partner with us, rather than just be a tool. Without a material body, electronic minds continue to think and respond in a way so alien to our biology-based minds, we won’t actually be living in the same sphere of existence. AI lives in an abstracted, second-hand, hearsay only world of borrowed knowledge and overheard wisdom. It can echo it back to us, and make it available in both useful and harmful ways, but it can never share the human experience that shaped that collective wisdom.

Without such experience, AI is essentially a psychopath: its understanding of people’s emotions is a purely cerebral function. AI’s responses are a formulaic, mathematical calculation, based on utility and expedience. It doesn’t feel sorry for its mistakes; it doesn’t like being helpful and supportive; it doesn’t care what the consequences are of its interactions with you.

That makes the friendly face and empathetic display presented by AI so fake and insincere. These features are built-in with the express purpose to keep us engaged and ready to consume every more tokens, CPU time and energy, while contributing to the further data gathering and fine-tuning needed to realise the AI suppliers’ bid for world-domination.

Now, I am not saying that this means we should completely stop using AI. On the contrary, I see great potential and much future value in what the power of AI can bring us. But I find this fake friendliness and servitude and the way AI models mimic emotions dangerous and unethical. Fake empathy, fake friendliness, fake emotions are deliberate design choices to encourage us to ignore the essential otherness of the intelligence we are dealing with. They hide the fact that AI is cold, heartless, calculating tool, with enormous power, and – it must be said – enormous costs attached.

If there is one thing more dangerous than the angry face of a mighty opponent, it is the smiling face of a cold, unfeeling, highly-skilled manipulator. Always remember that AI is not your friend, even when it is a helpful tool. If you confuse the two, you may become the tool instead, intelligently but uncaringly manipulated to serve AI’s owners purpose, rather than your own.

©2026 Bard

  1. I was already working with AI in the late 1980’s: expert systems, neural nets, early forms of natural language processing … The teams I was part of were pushing the boundaries of what was possible as far as they could with the hardware and data available then. The AI we have now did not come as a surprise to me, therefore. That it would take off with such a breakneck speed, and so little regard for ethics, security, and socio-economic consequences does. ↩
  2. We now know insects show emotions, too. The jury is still out on plants, fungi, and single-celled organisms, but I am willing to bet that emotions are a biological given: if it is alive, it is emotional. ↩

The Joy of Work

A Healthy Mix

The pond, frozen
@2025 Bard – Pondering the pond

Previously, I said the way to become more productive is to focus more on the quality and value of what you do than on the quantity. It’s not how much you do, it’s how much what you do matters.

That sounds great (at least it does to me), but how do you choose? Out of everything on your to-do list, what has the most value? What makes the most difference?

I have a recipe for that I can fall back on when I find myself at junction of a myriad of possible workflows to step into. The recipe calls for a healthy mix of different types of work, like a balanced meal. It mixes four ingredients, in equal measures. Let me explain.

The Recipe

The ingredients are 4 different types of task/activity. I call them: goalpost movers, enjoying life, necessary maintenance, and recharging time.

Goalpost Movers

Life is not a static situation, but a journey into the future. You determine that journey by the choices you make, over and over again. If you are clear about your goals and ambitions, as I try to be, you want to see progress in the right direction. You want so yourself moving closer to your destination.

For this reason, when plan my work-week, I look first for things that I can do this week that are most in line with the future I envision for myself. I keep this work at the top of my list, and pick 3 of them as targets for the week. I call these the goalpost moving tasks. Per day I reserve time for these tasks, but not so much they take up all of the day. The goal is to have them done by the end of the week. Not to rush through them at the expense of everything else.

Enjoying Life

But life is not just about achieving goals. Life is also about experiencing life itself. The journey, and especially the full appreciation of it, may be even more important than the destination it leads to.

Every day I make sure to at least 3 experience-related task or activity. These are very personal choices, so you will have to find your own. For me, they are things like taking a stroll across our forest property, playing a bit of piano, talking to my wife, reading a book, … Anything that feels good and is active but not too demanding. It’s these activities that help me look back at most days, knowing that they have been good days. Spread out over the month, I also include a few “mini vacations”: concerts, shows, day-trips and other non-work outings my wife and I enjoy immensely.

Necessary Maintenance

Not everything I do is ambitious or enjoyable. Another necessary pick for the week is the kind of work that comes with my responsibilities as a husband, father, home owner, citizen, and human being. Some physical exercise, cooking dinner, making coffee, small repairs, mowing the lawn, doing my tax returns, talking to the neighbours, being active in the community, … The list goes on.

I sprinkle my days with a few small ones, like making coffee and cooking dinner. The bigger ones I try to spread out across the week, or month, depending on how much time and effort they take. I try, as much as possible, to approach them as enjoying life tasks, so they don’t feel too much like work. When that doesn’t work (I just can’t get myself to enjoy tax returns, for instance), I overcome my resistance by accepting them as necessary maintenance – not always pleasant, not always light, but simply part of maintaining a reasonable standard of living.

Recharging Time

And then there is a fourth category that is often overlooked, because it doesn’t feel like work at all. That is the time I need to recover and recharge. My energy and focus are limited resources that drain quickly the harder I work. Once depleted, they need to be refilled, which can only be achieved by doing absolutely nothing, or at least as little as humanly possible.

I do an afternoon meditation, sit by the pond thinking of nothing, or take a power nap. Once a day, at minimum, I force myself to switch off completely, no matter how stressed for time I may be. If I don’t, my productivity goes into a sharp decline, to the point that I would have been better off taking the time doing nothing rather than spending hours slogging on.

Mixing it up

There you have it. Four ingredients to choose from and mix them into an active but balances daily rhythm. It is this balanced mix of different kinds of activities, including doing nothing, that give me the satisfying feeling that I am not just achieving my goals, but am also enjoying the journey, while maintaining a lifestyle I want, without completely wearing myself out in the process.

You know what the most surprising part of all this is? I have found myself, over time, doing less, while achieving more. The stricter I am with sticking to this mix of things to work on and the more I stop myself from pushing myself beyond my own limits, the more I get done that really matters. Making a difference, while enjoying the journey. Moving forward without wearing out.

It’s highly recommended.

@2026 Bard

The Unkindness of Strange Systems

I had planned to write a long-ish follow-up to a previous post about kind strangers, adding some examples of people going the extra mile to ensure my wife and I came home safely after our ordeal with our car’s sudden death.

Unfortunately, the days after the event were filled with the opposite experience: unkind systems practically designed to make our lives as difficult as possible.

I found myself caught between 5 or 6 different parties, all supposed to help us resolve the unfortunate situation we are currently in: at home in a rural area, far from public transport, without a car for a period of time that could last days or even weeks. The solution is seemingly simple enough: if we could get a replacement car for the duration of the repairs, there would be no real issue. But 6 parties, with at least a dozen systems to work through between them quickly turned this into a Kafka-esk labyrinth with nothing but dead-ends.

The lease company pointed out the car is still under warranty, so it’s the supplier’s responsibility to provide us with alternative transportation. The supplier referred us to the dealer who is carrying out the repairs. The dealer tried to help us but discovered his system doesn’t allow him to book a car for us, since I am not registered as the owner of the car – the lease company is. The lease company then tells me they can activate our insurance, and make a claim through them. But the insurer says their system cannot take action until an official damage claim has been put in. I would be happy to do so, but was told the repairing dealer was the only one who could do that – after having carried out the repairs. Only then could a replacement car be requested, except, of course, that wouldn’t be necessary any more, since by then the car would have been fixed and ready to be returned to us.

By the end of the day I have had conversations with the lease company, the supplier, the dealer, the tow truck company, the insurer, and a rental car company … every time getting stuck on similar systemic issues. It is evening here now, and so far, nothing definite has been decided. With so many unkind systems to throw obstacles on our path, it could be days before we have a solution.

I am sure it will sort itself out eventually. But what is striking is the difference between the kind strangers willing to bend the rules to assist us and get us safely home, and the unkind systems messing things up. I can only assume their unkindness is not deliberate. And I have no complaints about the operators I talked to, all trying to their very best to find a solution. But each system was designed to solve a small part of a much larger puzzle, with no real understanding of the total complexity. Built around assumptions, and rules based on those assumptions, that cover an even smaller part of the puzzle – the part in which everything goes according to plan. Which it seldom does.