They say nostalgia is the pain of an old wound. What do you call the pain of a wound that hasn’t come yet?
Especially if it’s being anticipated WAY prematurely. Someday, in the far future, this utopian/dystopian world might come to be. Probably will. But really, in reality, no time soon.
Let’s take the world of software. Has AI really conquered it? I see no evidence for that proposition. Where are the new killer apps? The new categories of computerized logic that serve a useful purpose and didn’t exist before? Where are all the software engineers collecting unemployment checks because they have been replaced by machines?
Let’s take every other field of human endeavor. Every year, the end is declared to be nigh by the end of the following one. Every year, the horizon recedes yet again.
The world always has a job for the guy waving a placard that warns about the coming oblivion, whether caused by atomic bombs, or AI, or lotus leaves, for that matter. It’s too bourgeois and boring to just keep keeping on. It’s much more romantic to gaze at the hills and predict the tragedy that soon will come.
Yes, emotionally I'm closer to your take than my post, but it's worth having written it. As I say, I have hope and reality - the ultimate wall - is yet to fold
Your writing is consistently gutsy. I really liked your letting it all hang out to us*. Disordered thoughts are the order of the day. It takes time to wrap your head around something this big.
His guest, Trevor Warmedahl went out expecting to find concrete, repeatable ways to make cheese, that Trevor could share with his audience. Said audience would then allow him to keep traveling the world, and sharing how cheese is made in these diverse and exotic locales.
This is analagous to how we think that we will use AI: the world is this quantifiable place, whose meaning and value can be extracted and propogated.
He found reality to be far more subtle and untameable.
And at the very least, his travels have identified places we can retreat to if AI succeeds in blowing the global fuse (in whatever ways that it does so).
* And a bit of brotherly advice: you are wise not to let your girlfriend know the magnitude of what is eating you up. In the event that it doesn't end up being disastrous (AI's impact that is), it would be good not to driver her off. You will find a way through this. I have complete confidence in you.
Your writing resonates with me deeply, you are not alone and know that I am too looking for a foothold as we slowly see and experience the world as crumbling at our feet.
Maybe instead of trying to walk on solid ground we need to learn to swim?
Although our resources, knowledge and skill are disproportionally distributed let’s find ways to help ourselves and then help others. Teaching one another the skills, continue sharing the knowledge and the network, in order to fight another day!
Your contrasts, fascinated, watching my fingers elongate as I reach into the Black Hole as I stand at the event horizon, yet feel the crumbling of my perch as I try to reach better firmament, symbolizing the excitement and precarity of this moment. As I participate in the AI course I'm subscribed to, awed by the "this changes everything" refinements of agentic calls, I am in the world differently. Ordinary experiences form increasingly refined AI question loops formed from "new eyes" of an auyahuasca informed psychologist who has spent a career using EEG training to transformationally expand individual horizons across the entire range of human experience. Now we get to ask ever more refined questions to an expanding universe, eager to reply. Indeed, What Hath AI Wrought?
Liu is losing the craft he loved. I'm on the other side of the same coin. I never had the chance to be a trained musician, and now I make music because I can. I live in a world I don't like, embracing a technology and a phone I wish didn't exist, knowing that the best I can do as an author is contribute to the flooding of the music offer and the devaluation of the single song, now that it's perceived as something anyone can make with two prompts. The democratization of song-making gives someone new ways to express himself. It also overwhelms the market with replaceable tunes. I keep making them anyway, because if I don't, someone else will. Your Alps will still be standing when all these songs are forgotten, mine included.
I wondered, reading "Perhaps my aspirations are hopelessly romantic..." that maybe your pragmatism isn't rooted in some idealism? The people actually working with AI seem infected by the idea that AI is something like a second coming, but realising that what they too often end up is actually closer to the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Passing doubts off as depressed passive nihilism is only going make things work. Is that rubbing off?
With humanity's track record for pulling the rabbit out of the hat again and again and the ineptitude of people and institutions to implement IT for 70 years (and still going), I think, paraphrasing Churchill, is that only thing to fear is fear itself. Not that what will come won't involve pain, but the when most of the pain is over, people will see the new bosses are still the old bosses.
Your point about unevenly distributed change helps move the conversation beyond a single “AI is changing everything” story. In ordinary workplaces, two people can use the same tools and still inhabit very different realities: one may be exploring unfamiliar work, while another is simply being asked to absorb a larger queue at greater speed.
I keep wondering how organisations can make room to name those differences instead of treating adoption as one shared experience.
Your writing is usually great and this piece is no exception. However, I think some therapy might be in order…
Haha and then I will share this with my therapist and she, too, will need therapy and so on forever
Haha haha haha. And so on forever.
Our song from AP Calculus, spring of 1983: "And we will all go down together" by Billy Joel. It's a very cheery tune.
They say nostalgia is the pain of an old wound. What do you call the pain of a wound that hasn’t come yet?
Especially if it’s being anticipated WAY prematurely. Someday, in the far future, this utopian/dystopian world might come to be. Probably will. But really, in reality, no time soon.
Let’s take the world of software. Has AI really conquered it? I see no evidence for that proposition. Where are the new killer apps? The new categories of computerized logic that serve a useful purpose and didn’t exist before? Where are all the software engineers collecting unemployment checks because they have been replaced by machines?
Let’s take every other field of human endeavor. Every year, the end is declared to be nigh by the end of the following one. Every year, the horizon recedes yet again.
The world always has a job for the guy waving a placard that warns about the coming oblivion, whether caused by atomic bombs, or AI, or lotus leaves, for that matter. It’s too bourgeois and boring to just keep keeping on. It’s much more romantic to gaze at the hills and predict the tragedy that soon will come.
Oh well. Well written though!
Yes, emotionally I'm closer to your take than my post, but it's worth having written it. As I say, I have hope and reality - the ultimate wall - is yet to fold
>>What do you call the pain of a wound that hasn’t come yet?
I think it is called "fear" :-)
I am happy to pay for a beautiful elegy but man, this was a real downer.
Just to compensate for the other one! If you didn't read it, it's quite the opposite
Your writing is consistently gutsy. I really liked your letting it all hang out to us*. Disordered thoughts are the order of the day. It takes time to wrap your head around something this big.
One of my favorite Substackers is a chef/farmer/fermenter named Sam Black. Today he dropped an interview with a guy who travels around the world to see how cheese is made. https://chefsamblack.substack.com/p/meet-the-milk-trekker-a-life-among
His guest, Trevor Warmedahl went out expecting to find concrete, repeatable ways to make cheese, that Trevor could share with his audience. Said audience would then allow him to keep traveling the world, and sharing how cheese is made in these diverse and exotic locales.
This is analagous to how we think that we will use AI: the world is this quantifiable place, whose meaning and value can be extracted and propogated.
He found reality to be far more subtle and untameable.
And at the very least, his travels have identified places we can retreat to if AI succeeds in blowing the global fuse (in whatever ways that it does so).
* And a bit of brotherly advice: you are wise not to let your girlfriend know the magnitude of what is eating you up. In the event that it doesn't end up being disastrous (AI's impact that is), it would be good not to driver her off. You will find a way through this. I have complete confidence in you.
Maybe it would be nice to be an aristocratic pigeon, and maybe we’ll find out soon.
The gates of hell are open night and day, smooth is the descent and easy is the way.
But to return… and gaze on crystal skies,
In this thy task and mighty labour lies.
Thanks Alberto. Keep going, helping us to slow down, at least mentally.
Dark Zen, Alberto. The Heart Sūtra by a lake. Geremie
Your writing resonates with me deeply, you are not alone and know that I am too looking for a foothold as we slowly see and experience the world as crumbling at our feet.
Maybe instead of trying to walk on solid ground we need to learn to swim?
Although our resources, knowledge and skill are disproportionally distributed let’s find ways to help ourselves and then help others. Teaching one another the skills, continue sharing the knowledge and the network, in order to fight another day!
Your contrasts, fascinated, watching my fingers elongate as I reach into the Black Hole as I stand at the event horizon, yet feel the crumbling of my perch as I try to reach better firmament, symbolizing the excitement and precarity of this moment. As I participate in the AI course I'm subscribed to, awed by the "this changes everything" refinements of agentic calls, I am in the world differently. Ordinary experiences form increasingly refined AI question loops formed from "new eyes" of an auyahuasca informed psychologist who has spent a career using EEG training to transformationally expand individual horizons across the entire range of human experience. Now we get to ask ever more refined questions to an expanding universe, eager to reply. Indeed, What Hath AI Wrought?
We will always have the kisses. We will only have the kisses.
Liu is losing the craft he loved. I'm on the other side of the same coin. I never had the chance to be a trained musician, and now I make music because I can. I live in a world I don't like, embracing a technology and a phone I wish didn't exist, knowing that the best I can do as an author is contribute to the flooding of the music offer and the devaluation of the single song, now that it's perceived as something anyone can make with two prompts. The democratization of song-making gives someone new ways to express himself. It also overwhelms the market with replaceable tunes. I keep making them anyway, because if I don't, someone else will. Your Alps will still be standing when all these songs are forgotten, mine included.
Here's something me and old mate built. But wait... there's more!
https://datfooringo.substack.com/p/vessels?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=19qbla
I wondered, reading "Perhaps my aspirations are hopelessly romantic..." that maybe your pragmatism isn't rooted in some idealism? The people actually working with AI seem infected by the idea that AI is something like a second coming, but realising that what they too often end up is actually closer to the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Passing doubts off as depressed passive nihilism is only going make things work. Is that rubbing off?
With humanity's track record for pulling the rabbit out of the hat again and again and the ineptitude of people and institutions to implement IT for 70 years (and still going), I think, paraphrasing Churchill, is that only thing to fear is fear itself. Not that what will come won't involve pain, but the when most of the pain is over, people will see the new bosses are still the old bosses.
Your point about unevenly distributed change helps move the conversation beyond a single “AI is changing everything” story. In ordinary workplaces, two people can use the same tools and still inhabit very different realities: one may be exploring unfamiliar work, while another is simply being asked to absorb a larger queue at greater speed.
I keep wondering how organisations can make room to name those differences instead of treating adoption as one shared experience.
my condolences to the pigeon, and the dignity afforded by the sparrows.
may the Alps , without the sandpaper keep calling you back, even as the lake of swan muddies. thank you for sharing your being.