No Static At All

In business school I took a course called “Marketing High-Tech Products.” We studied Empire of the Air, the Ken Burns film, which documented how American culture was shaped by radio, and how a few extraordinary, ambitious, often troubled men were the force behind its emergence. Highly intelligent misfits like Edwin Howard Armstrong, who discovered that audio signals could be represented by modulating the frequency of a carrier wave, thus inventing FM radio. Alongside his scientific prowess, Armstrong had an odd fascination with climbing to the top of antennae towers – a hobby made more poignant when, one winter’s night in 1954, he exited a window in his apartment on East 52^nd Street and dropped 13 floors to his death.

 

One of the lessons of that class was that the better technology – in this case FM, far superior to AM as far as sound quality and broadcast range – sometimes isn’t the one that wins in the market.  Technical, commercial, and most of all human factors often conspire to promote inferior platforms.  Armstrong’s long-standing feud with David Sarnoff, the President of RCA and a key figure behind the dominance of AM radio at the time, was believed to have contributed to his suicide.

 

The other lesson was how radio transformed electrified human communication from one-to-one (e.g., a telephone or telegram) to one-to-all.  “For the first time in history,” said Jason Robards in the film’s voice-over, “one person with a microphone could speak to many, influence them, perhaps change their lives.”  Television would take this even further, introducing visuals into the equation. 

 

I took this class in 2005, as “Web 2.0” was just getting off the ground and people were gushing about “user-generated content.”  “The Facebook” had launched the year before, but “social media” as a term and a concept hadn’t yet taken hold of American culture.  The first iPhone wouldn’t come out for a couple more years.  Still, in class that day, there was excitement around how this evolution was about to reach its pinnacle: an age in which technology would enable all-to-all communication. Thanks to these platforms, everyone would be able to engage with everyone.  Mass communication would be democratized.  Information would be fully transparent and accessible.  Human relationships would strengthen.  The world would be a better place.

 

Not so much, it turns out.  By pretty much any measure, social media – turbocharged by ubiquitous smart phones, capital markets, and another small cohort of highly intelligent yet flawed young men – has generated far more harm than good. It has increased depression, anxiety, body-dissatisfaction, and insomnia, especially among young people. It has enabled the rise of surveillance capitalism, which has moved swiftly beyond advertising efficiencies into the realm of social control and economic oppression. It has played an active role in real-world violence. It has encouraged humans to communicate in ways that are performative, impersonal, knee-jerk reactive, and hostile. It has eroded human relationships and the essential societal foundation of common truths.

 

I figure you know all this already. The question is what are we supposed to do now? 

 

A few years ago, my father was cleaning out his basement, and he asked me to come pick up some of my old boxes. Inside one of them, I stumbled across a pile of letters I had received when I was in college.  Sifting through them, I was amazed to find more than 200 letters and cards: from my closest friends, but also from people I wasn’t that close to; from my parents and grandparents and aunts; from former coaches; from old flames and would-be lovers; from people I hadn’t thought about for 35 years, but to whom at some point I had gone through the trouble of writing. 

 

Many of these letters were mundane, but a surprising number were interesting and thoughtful and real.  They were asynchronous, they were thought through and mulled over, sometimes they were agonizingly waited for and torn open with anticipation.  At the time, this was one of the primary ways we formed, maintained, strengthened (and in some cases severed) human relationships. For a while, email took up this mantle, and group chats still help keep a lot of people connected in a positive way. But I can’t remember the last time I sent someone a truly thoughtful or important email. 

 

Is it silly to think we could start writing letters again?  Does it take too much time and effort?  Is it too much of a hassle to find a stamp and schlep to the post office?  

 

I would like to find out at least.  I’ve made a list of 52 people, and I will write at least one letter per week for the next year. If you wouldn’t mind getting a letter from me, please send me your mailing address. (If I already have your address, and/or if your last name is “Snow,” you’re already on the hook.)  Of course you’re welcome to write me back, but please don’t feel obligated to. If this inspires you to write to someone else, even better.

 

This may seem no more than a quaint exercise in nostalgia, and I’m not naïve enough to believe that mailing a few letters will inspire a magical awakening of goodwill and kinship and The Soul of America Will Be Saved.  But consider for a moment the fact that the United States Postal Service is in real danger of being dismantled by profiteers who would like to arrange things so that your interactions with other humans are mediated only by them. Imagine for a moment that x.com were the only means of communicating with faraway family members, or accessing your medical records, or filing your taxes, or voting.  While I still can, I will write some letters, because I suspect it beats doomscrolling. And I’m sure it beats doing nothing.

 

The Content Generation

Why you should embrace generative AI, and why you should resist it.

The boardroom soap opera of the past week seemed an appropriate punctuation to a year in which generative artificial intelligence went from esoteric CompSci topic to something we all needed to be concerned about.  Like a handful of pebbles thrown into a pond, the launch of ChatGPT, barely a year ago, created ripples which continue to expand and overlap. “Knowledge workers,” who for years looked on complacently as digital automation put checkout clerks and assembly line workers and travel agents out of a job, suddenly confronted a future in which they too could be replaced by machines. CFOs salivated over OPEX savings that would come from swapping out messy, inefficient humans with computers. Luddites and other contrarians split semantic hairs, chortling over ChatGPT’s mistakes, and arguing that these models were no closer to “general intelligence” than your smartphone’s auto-fill function. Money poured in. The rest of us kept ourselves entertained asking ChatGPT to write poems and break up with our boyfriends.

I come neither to bury GenAI nor to praise it.  Like any technology, GenAI is neither inherently evil nor inherently good. Scoffing at it or ignoring it won't make it go away. Deifying it, despite OpenAI’s lofty mission statement, will not bring about the betterment of humanity.

Granted, there is a lot to worry about.  I won’t even touch the hypothesis that a paperclip-maximizing AI will wind up annihilating humanity. The doomers may be right in the end, but humans seem to be perfectly capable of coming up with ways to annihilate themselves without the aid of a large language model. I do worry about the stuff that GenAI models make up as they respond to a prompt. The term “hallucinations” -- evoking dreams and psychedelia -- is deceptively benign; “lies” is more appropriate. In 2024, citizens of many countries including the US will elect their next leaders amidst a swamp of artificial words and images indistinguishable from real ones, and I think we’re in for some seriously ugly scenes. 

And yet, retreating to our pencil-and-paper sanctuaries and refusing to engage isn't a good answer. Your job will (or already does) involve interacting with AI at some level. GenAI models will make your life easier, especially by automating certain repetitive tasks. Working alongside a GenAI, if you do so skillfully, will liberate you from a whole lot of drudgery – think writing meeting minutes, summarizing long documents, cleaning out emails, etc. Rather than doing your job for you, GenAI can actually enhance the work that you’re doing. To paraphrase medical futurist Bertalan Meskó: professionals will not be replaced by GenAI, but professionals who know how to use GenAI will replace those who don’t.

Amid all the chatter, I think it’s beneficial to consider a question that I don’t hear very often when generative AI is discussed: What do humans lose when they stop writing? What happens to them when they no longer devote time and energy to the practice of composition, when they delegate that activity to a machine? 

Content generation is among the lowest-hanging fruit for companies looking to improve their P&Ls using GenAI. Without a doubt, ChatGPT can churn out, adapt, and optimize mountains of text a lot more efficiently than you or I can. The marginal cost of producing another unit of content approaches zero. And a funny thing starts to happen. Words, and the ideas they signify, become reduced to units of economic output: manufactured, ingested, excreted. The relationship between the source of the content and its consumer becomes purely transactional. More than that: the “reader” becomes nothing more than a vessel through which content passes as supply and demand curves seek equilibrium. 

I get a similar feeling sometimes when I think about money. My salary, direct-deposited into my bank account while I sleep, effortlessly sluices through me on its way to my creditors, thanks to the “auto pay” function I’ve set up. I have forfeited my agency, like we’ve forfeited many things, for the sake of convenience. We get out of bed each morning to keep feeding the machine.  

Yet I still see glimmers of hope. A few months ago, I was asked to write a one-page memo summarizing a strategy presentation my team and I had put together. This could have been accomplished in a few seconds by uploading our 50-or-so slides into a GenAI model. However, the presentation was confidential, so a public model like ChatGPT wasn’t an option, and we hadn’t yet stood up an in-house model. So I spent two or three hours drafting the memo myself. And in the act of writing it – putting one sentence after another, searching for the right words and flow, crafting a few paragraphs to convey a set of ideas – something interesting happened. I became able to articulate our strategy more clearly. I found that I actually understood the story we were trying to tell much more deeply than I had beforehand.

If you've ever kept a journal, perhaps this sounds familiar. Our appreciation for experiences, situations, people, ourselves, you name it, becomes much stronger, fuller, realer, when we try to write about them. Writing helps us make sense of our world, which seems even more important at a time when the world is full of a lot of stuff that seems senseless. As Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

Writing prose, as opposed to just consuming it, also forces us to reflect at least fleetingly on the human being who’s eventually going to read it. We consider our words, not only for their accuracy, but for the impression we wish them to leave on another person. Writing is a solitary and often lonely activity, but, perhaps paradoxically, it fosters empathy. Will this speak to my audience?  What is their state of mind when they sit down to read it?  How will it “land?” All part of a delicate but critical maneuver which requires that the writer place herself inside the head of her reader.

When humans stop writing, I would argue, they become less human. Or at least they become lesser humans. They get mentally and spiritually flabby. They become Matrix-like vessels for forces that do not have their best interests in mind. They think about other people less. They succumb to powers of this world that rebel against God.

So, yeah: understand what GenAI is and what it isn’t. Get comfortable with ChatGPT. Learn to work with GenAI tools, just like you’ve learned to use a word processor.  But at the same time make sure you don’t surrender the opportunity to create prose of your own. Take the time and make the effort to work with language, to put words together, to create meaning. At the very least, it’s good for your health. At best, as George Saunders puts it, “purifying one’s prose style is a form of spiritual dedication; working with language is a beautiful and noble way to spend one’s life.”

Story Time

 

Twitter is the Lust of Dante’s Circles of Social Media. It’s still hell, but things could be a lot worse.  Amongst the trolls and doom and Capital One promotions, one does find some interesting stories and glimpses of humanity. Maybe a better metaphor is Twitter is the Marshalls of social media: it’s not a pleasant place to be, and you're going to wade through an awful lot of crap, but there are a few decent items to be found.

One such decent item is Story Club by George Saunders, which came to me courtesy of Maria Bustillos. It’s essentially an English class held on Saunders’ substack. It’s behind a paywall, but it’s great value for money if you’re a fan of the written word, and/or if you believe that engaging with stories in a thoughtful way might be an important and helpful thing to do, especially at this particular moment. We started by reading a Hemingway's “Cat in the Rain,” one paragraph at a time over the course of a week: kind of the antithesis of the Twitter experience.

There are writing exercises as well. Last week, the assignment was to write a story of 200 words (exactly 200, not 199 or 201) using only 50 unique words. So you keep a running tally of the words you’ve used, and once you get to 50, you have to start re-using words (or go back and swap out another one, but the grand total can’t exceed 50). And you're supposed to do this in only 45 minutes. Judging from the comments, many of my fellow students had the same experience I did: you hit 50 words pretty quickly (I think I was at around 90 total words), and then you find yourself in an awkward spot.  But then some interesting things happen as you wriggle free.   

My attempt:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, and I am happy to welcome you aboard on today’s flight to Oahu. Our flight time today will be only two hours, and Connie and her team are here to make your flight as pleasant as possible.

And I would like to go ahead and welcome you newlyweds aboard today! Congratulations! Time flies. I remember. A good time. A pleasant time. 

A time you would think would go on and on being good and pleasant. Right, Connie? Go ahead and remember. Our time was good and pleasant. This was our time. You think you are happy today, but I would like you to remember. You and I are right. You and I are a team. We would be happy. I am speaking here. Your captain is speaking to you. 

And to you newlyweds: your time is like this flight. Be happy here, but the hours will go and go. Hours and hours. You are here. This is possible. Today will welcome you. You have this today and you think you are happy, but remember: today is only today. Today will go. Make your today right. Go ahead.      

Have a pleasant flight. Mahalo!”