Knowledge Worker
Of all the creative work I've done, I think I'm most proud of this.
Last month, I performed a 30-minute show called “Knowledge Worker” for the incredible audience at Gene Kim’s ETLS in Las Vegas.
The show included 7 songs about the past, present, and future of “knowledge work” - or, more specifically, how it’s affecting us, the humans between keyboard and chair. I poured everything I’ve been thinking and feeling about AI for the last 2+ years into this show, and I feel a great sense of peace at having said what I meant to say.
Here, for your enjoyment, are the songs (with a bit of “liner note” commentary provided in between).
1. Hype Train
They say that if you can get an audience to laugh with you, they’ll be willing to cry with you. “Hype Train” is an intentionally light, silly song to start the show.
I used to try to get audiences to sing along with some of my songs. I have learned that tech people would die of starvation before they will open their mouths to sing in public. About the most I can get you all to do is clap along.
2. AGI (Artificial God Incarnate)
I had a lot of fun writing the backing tracks for this song. The “Gregorian chant” backup singing was recorded at Heartwise Records in Seattle with the help of some incredible session musicians and producer Eric Munch.
A number of people came up after the show to ask “What musical genre was that one, anyway?”
I have no idea. If you figure it out, let me know.
3. What’s Left for Me? (The AI Existential Crisis Song)
When ChatGPT first came out, I think a lot of us went through about 5 stages of grief:
Shock (how is a language model this good? what the actual ***?)
Denial (it’ll never be as good at writing code / words / etc as me. look at these hallucinations! silly model)
Anger (how dare they train their models on my creative work?)
Depression (what’s left for me? Who even am I)
Acceptance (this is the new world, AI isn’t going away, let’s figure out what that means for us)
I wrote “What’s Left for Me?” when I was personally on stage 4. I’m not saying I’m still there, but I think the thoughts in this song are ones that most of us have to grapple with at some point.
4. Meet The Models
Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Llama act as “spokesmodels” in this song for the weird new world we live in. This song is very difficult to perform because it has to go fast enough to overwhelm you with a torrent of words, just like LLMs do.
5. The RTO Tango
At this point in the show we moved on to talking about what’s left for us humans to do in an AI world: for example, how weird it is that we think we can get value from AI when we can’t even figure out where our human employees should be working.
The RTO Tango is lovingly dedicated to Andy Jassy.
6. The Re-Org Rag
I perform this song at pretty much every live show I do, and I guess I’ll keep doing so until it stops being relevant. Maybe next quarter. Surely.
7. Legacy Land
We closed with a song that I first performed last year during the developer keynote at Google Cloud Next. The point still stands: AI is exciting, but as long as we keep being human, we’re going to have our work cut out for us for a long time to come.
Links and notes
I will be at AWS re:Invent this year for the first time since 2018. I have some availability to partner, so if your company wants a ridiculous musical performance at your party, just let me know.
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