They’re going to affect far more than science fiction.

THE MAGIC OF WORLD BUILDING

When authors build a new world, they change one variable and see how it plays out in everything from religion to politics to ecology. It’s my favorite part of writing.

It’s been kind of amazing to see that play out in real-time with these language-learning models (that aren’t really AI at all…)

HOW AI CHANGES THE WORLD?

LAW

We have legal fights about who owns it, the words it produces, and what they’re allowed to train them on. It’s going to be a big mess until we all understand what we’re looking at and how we can adapt copyright laws written when people were still physically moving little metal letters around and the new American congress was restricting books and maps to the author for 14 years. The United States was all of  three years old.

ECONOMICS

We have another step in the “machines are coming for our jobs” fight that has been going on in various industries for a long while. Factories, the service industry, accountants, travel agents, and human resources all get offloaded to the machines.

I used to work at a grocery store where we switched ordering products to an algorithm, leaving “buyers” with much less to do. Though not nothing. I still laugh when I remember the desperate email we received one April telling us to ignore the algorithm’s instructions and stop buying broth because “it doesn’t know the weather and hasn’t realized its spring.” A blindingly simple adjustment a human can make.

Our world requires a truly awe-inspiring amount of words, from the tiny slogan on the sparkling water you’ll have for lunch to the fine print on an airline ticket, to the ads on TV, to the articles you’ve googled. It takes a lot of people a lot of time to create all that. A lot more people are about to find themselves on the precarious edge where a robot is doing their job and they’re now running the robot.

MILITARY

We have the military installing it into fighter jets and vehicles, escalating ethical questions around drone warfare and sovereign borders if the person who’s invading you isn’t even in the jet, and what a war would even mean if there aren’t any people involved.

ART

We have the con artists come out of the woodwork to steal wholesale as much intellectual property as possible, flooding markets with semi-plagiarized dreck. It’s not actually that easy to sell books, so this is not the shortcut they think it is by any stretch of the imagination. But humans have published an avalanche of terrible books, so again, nothing really changes? Like most of these, it makes existing trends go faster.

Can artists opt out of training the programs copying them and replacing them for a fraction of the cost? Can they actually be compensated for the labor they did and not just the guy who owns the chatbot?  We shall see.

RELIGION

We already have people quoting the “profound” things CHATGPT has come up with. People are already speculating about the ghost in the machine. What is actually happening is that it has scraped all the profound things humans have said on the internet and is feeding it back to us one word at a time without understanding anything. But if it is terrible of making meaning, humans are profoundly good at it, even where none exists

RELATIONSHIPS

I’m not even going to get into the people who have already “fallen in love” with it. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with how humans move through the world bonding with nearly anything that displays the slightest human trait and assigning meaning to every breath. Click here for a dismayed building!

Can you see it? A glimpse of the huge shift to the gig economy, leisure connected even further to our anthropomorphized computers, fighting strange wars where there are no human casualties?  Cults springing up around the nonsense of AI? Not THAT different than the world we inhabit now. Just a bit…extra.

HOW DOES THE WORLD WE LIVE IN CHANGE AI?

Building a world is not just about how a new innovation changes everything. It’s about how the world we have changes the innovation.

ECONOMY

We live in a highly monopolized version of capitalism where companies have been allowed to eat their competition unrestrained for almost half a century and therefore, the purchasing power and wages and the rights of the vast majority of people in society are extremely degraded. Again, a machine can do another slice of the workforce’s jobs faster (if not better?) Nothing changes there, just goes faster.  

BIAS

We live in a racist patriarchy with bias at every level of society including in our computer programs. And it already seems like it’s picked that up extremely efficiently. It’s also proven out the bugaboo that if you wait long enough, everything in popular discourse ends in transphobia these days.

MILITARY

We live in the military-industrial complex where 20% of our federal budget goes to defense. The air force has already admitted its fancy new planes cost too much, (at 1.6 trillion over their lifetime, I would say, you think?) How do we balance how cheap a human is with how efficient a computer is? Who makes that call? Seriously?

LABOR

Oh, there will be new jobs. Just like when factories automated, and you could go from working a station at a factory to repairing the robot that did your job before. So the slide that has been taking place for decades in the blue-collar world of service work and factory work will hit computer work.

Contrary to a lot of critics, I don’t think it will feel that different. It feels like the end of the world for a lot of people because it’s personal this time, but it’s been like this for literally decades for a lot of the country and nobody really noticed. I hope they do!

WHAT COULD THIS HAVE BEEN LIKE, IF WE HAD A DIFFERENT WORLD?

Now the fun part. Let’s actually world build a new world. One that is not this one!

ECONOMY

There’s a version of the world where there’s strong competition in the economy and where automating writing could be one more step in the humanity-wide project to free everybody from work, as the 19th-century economist Keynes guessed was going to happen next. He thought we’d all be down to 15-hour work weeks by now.

Think about this statement. Really hear it: there is not enough work for everyone.

We have automated so much, we can meet everybody’s needs and most wants without needing everyone to work full-time to do it. We don’t have enough work to do!

It could have been a day of humanity-wide rejoicing. We can now get all of our needs met with a faction of the work! Wahoo!!!

Instead, we have all of those resources concentrating in a few bank accounts while we actually work more and longer and harder.

MILITARY

There’s a version of the world where the arms race slows down and even reverses, and chat GPT can be used in further de-escalation of conflict, helping to translate across cultures, where we use proxy competitions like the Olympics and culture to compete with each other.

BIAS

There is a version of the world where we truly invest in excising bias from society and finding true quality with AI. It could be a huge help in that goal leveling the playing field of resumes and cover letters and all of the other baloney correspondence you need to know how to do to play this game that so many people never learn, or folks with English as a Second Language could not do before now.

ART

There’s a version of the world where this lack of needing to work results in more artists creating more cool stuff, and nobody feels the need to ask AI to churn out dreck because they’re also doing okay. I personally would love a version of this program where I could upload only my own stuff so I’m not stealing from anybody else, but being able to ask a program to read these books and figure out what I named the barista two hundred pages ago that would be super nice.

LABOR

It’s just our luck that a time in history that will require a breathtaking amount of collective action to protect everybody is corresponding with a cult-like devotion to individual success and therefore individual failure at every level. Will this be the lever that finally breaks us out of the delusion that we don’t need each other? That it’s not cheating to work together, but the only way we survive?  And this half-century project of filling a couple of bank accounts as full as they can get is at least, an inefficient, at most, horrifying way to run an entire civilization?

That’s not reality. That’s a belief we’ve all signed onto, even our unsentient chatbots.

The post If We Lived in A Sci-Fi Novel, How AI Changes Everything & Nothing first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I wrote before why I don’t think the Metaverse is going very far. It’s just too hard to use for the vast majority of users in the vast majority of circumstances, making it a really cool toy.

SO WHAT IS THE NEXT BIG THING?

Sadly, Google Glass will be back.

Or put more broadly, augmented reality will more likely be the next big push.

Augmented reality is the fancy version of Pokémon Go where you mix online and offline. You can look through glasses and see directions or search for a restaurant menu no one else can see.

WHY IS THIS GOING TO BLOW UP AND VR WILL REMAIN A TOY?

Because it’s the exact inverse of all of the problems VR has.

It doesn’t block our senses, so we can continue to use it in all of the places. And, depending on how small things get, in even more places! It’s much less likely to make people sick like virtual reality does, and even many screens do. If the blue light flickering improves, it will be easier to use.

We use the internet for three things: accomplishing tasks, gaining information, and entertainment. 

These are actually the fundamentals of literacy in general. Those are the three things we’ve been doing with the written word for millennia.

Whereas it is impossibly cumbersome to get information or accomplish tasks (like banking and work) on VR, these things get more convenient in AR.

The big question is the third purpose, entertainment.

Some are super optimistic that we will be living in an immersive world in the near future.  And some are… not.

There’s no arguing that screens look good. But that takes thousands of pixels. Can a little projector lens ever match that experience? It hasn’t yet. But then again, unlike with VR, it doesn’t have to. AR devices will most likely replace our smartphones, and watching something on those isn’t exactly earth-shattering. We’ll probably still have screens at home for the big stuff and happily stream on tiny lenses everywhere else.

Even on entertainment, I’m optimistic, because of the fact that you can potentially watch things anywhere.

Grocery store lines, class, driving. (I didn’t say this was a GOOD development.) But from the point of view of developers, there are still places you can’t use a smartphone. That goes away with something wearable. And then you can watch the big game on the big screen (while looking up stats as you watch like a ticker tape of looking impressive.)

What’s it going to take?

IT NEEDS TO NOT BE UGLY

This seems like a minor point, but humans go to great lengths to not be ugly. The beauty industry, diet industry, and cosmetic surgery industry rake in billions. Does it work? Should it matter? Is it good for the earth since so many products need petroleum to work? These are all different newsletters, but the importance of this should not be underestimated.

IT NEEDS NETWORK EFFECTS

Network effects are fancy words for monopoly, which is a fancy word for when you get big enough, it’s really inconvenient not to use whatever it is. Facebook is one not because it’s so great. People have complained about it since the beginning of its existence. But Facebook is one because of network effects. Everyone was on there, so you kind of had to be on there.

Augmented reality is going to have to go so viral life gets difficult if you don’t have it.

Again, I don’t necessarily think this is great for humanity. Our attention span is already shattered and the more people are online, the less happy they are with life in general. (Seriously, it’s like a straight line downward.)

But I also don’t think it’s going to be THAT much of a change.  As I said, the fundamentals of what we do with our communication haven’t changed in millennia. Having glasses that do it will have some behavioral implications, but it won’t the fundamentals, which is why it will blow up the way VR never can. It can’t is trying to change the fundamentals.

What do you think the next new big thing is going to be?

The post How Google Glass will Smash the Metaverse first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I talk a lot in this newsletter about how to dismantle your assumptions and beliefs and question the water that you swim in. But equally important, if not more important, is the ability to get new and better ideas once you’ve done that.

One of humanity’s main tools for seeing things differently is the scientific method. Don’t click away! I know, boring, Middle School level science, but we have a massive problem. We were never really taught the first step!

WHAT WE DID LEARN IN SCHOOL?

How many tests and experiments did you run in school? How many times did you have to come up with the question, not just the answer?

I remember an upper division writing class in college. I got a C on my first paper.

Somewhat gobsmacked, I went to the Professor who informed me that I had come to a different conclusion, not the one he gave me.

I said, “Let me get this straight, you gave me the hypothesis, the evidence, and the conclusion in bullets, and you want me to turn that exact hypothesis, evidence, and conclusion into five paragraphs?” He was thrilled that I understood. I did. I got an A on the next assignment.

I did learn an important lesson that day, but I don’t think it was the one he was intending. 

A similar thing happened in science in high school, where we burned a peanut to calculate the calories. (Did anyone else have to do this?) We were given how much energy is in a peanut. My group ran the experiment and got that amount of energy.

All good… Until we got to the part of the proof about how our answer could be wrong.

My teacher suggested that maybe we screwed up the assignment and then screwed it up again in a way that corrected the first screw-up so we reached the correct number.

I asked if maybe we could burn an almond instead. He looked at me like I was crazy. I said that maybe I want to know how many calories are in an almond since everyone has already done peanuts. He said the calorie count is on the bag. I said, Why am I here? 

You can see the fruits of this kind of education in businesses the world over. The training with no obvious outcome. The products no one wants. The busy work! Dear god, the busy work. All avoided by asking the question: what is the question? What problem are we trying to solve?

OUR EDUCATION TEACHES US WE’RE IN A KIND WORLD WHEN WE AREN’T.

I mean something very specific when I say kind. This idea comes from a fabulous book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialist World, by David Epstein.

A kind world is a closed system, much less complex than the real, wicked world. Sports games, board games, and any computer algorithm all limit choices to allow us to learn the right lessons from experience.

The number of choices could be incredibly large, like chess moves, but there are still only a few ways to play chess.

(This doesn’t mean that these worlds are nice/fair/easy. Ask anybody who got fourth place at the Olympics in any sport with seemingly straightforward rules.)

WE LIVE IN THE WICKED WORLD

Olympic podiums aside, we live in the wicked world where decisions are hopelessly complex; randomness and chaos screw well-laid plans randomly, and we often don’t learn the right lessons from experience.

This leads to all manner of perverse consequences and heartbreak. It’s the difference between playing house in a sandbox, versus buying an actual house and setting up real life.

In this world where you don’t know what you’re solving for and you can’t be sure of the feedback you get, coming up with a really good hypothesis is probably the most important thing you can do. And one we get barely any practice at it!

IT’S ALSO OUR ONE MAIN STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE

Computers have thus far not been able to exit the sandbox. They must pretend they live in a kind world where the rules are fixed because they don’t have the complexity to think for themselves when the rules don’t make sense. Humans can.

But due to our education, we spend most of our time pretending we’re in a sandbox. Most schooling and most jobs artificially limit our choices because it’s just easier to function by known rules, even if they aren’t true, but to truly solve the problems we’re facing, for at least some of the day, we have to get out of the sandbox.

ENTER THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

The idea that you can try something, see what the result is, guess why, and repeat the experiment to see if it happens again is revolutionary. And if it happens enough, you change your fundamental beliefs about what is true. That changed everything.

It’s an idea that took thinkers all over the world almost two millennia to figure out.

Egyptian Medical texts in 500 BCE explained how to examine, diagnose, and treat problems, while Babylonian astronomers first applied math to the stars (and everything we’ve mathed since).

By 1000 BCE, Indian philosophers and Buddhist scholars were diving into the brain, perception, and the self with what Einstein and any physicist since would call well-designed thought experiments.

Aristotle’s inductive-deductive method of reasoning went very viral, while many other Greeks and Romans created whole new disciplines of math and science from geography, to physics, to alchemy (some of these were better ideas than others, but sure fun to try!)

The scientific method of experimentation, particularly with specially designed instruments, came from the Islamic world. A physician named Ibn an-Haytham was as instructive as Aristotle, though sadly far less studied in Western curriculum, particularly because he proved Aristotle wrong. Like, a lot. He was particularly interested in vision, color, and light, but that’s greatly understating all he brought to science.

By the Renaissance, the scientific revolution was in full flourish, and a world view based on observable reality, as opposed to gods, fairies, coincidences, and luck, was increasingly better established, a trend that continues today.

So how do you come up with a good question? That will be next week, for now, enjoy the wicked world!

The post How to Learn to Love the Wicked World first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

There’s an apocryphal story about racing Grayhounds and how when they catch the dog or the bunny, they cease to race. Though there is no confirmation of this story anywhere in actual racing circles.

I am a little suspicious of it because, though I’m allergic to anything with fur, when normal dogs catch anything, they seem to be quite happy to repeat the experience all day.

But it’s a useful metaphor about human behavior, so let’s pretend it’s true, which is also very common human behavior.

Either the dog is completely satisfied by that one bone and never tries to run again, or he’s so pissed off that the bone or the bunny is made of cardboard, he also never runs again.

This past week, I caught the bunny. Twice. 

One day this week, I checked off everything on my to do list. Not just the explicit list that has a prayer of occasionally looking realistic, but also the unspoken expectations I hold myself to, that if I ate vegetables, exercised twice, got to bed on time, called my friends and actually talked to them, and smelled all the flowers – life would be… perfect?

Yes, I had a perfect day, according to some past version of myself that put down a list of tasks that when completed would mean this day was not wasted.

And then a couple nights later, I slept through the night! I put my head on my pillow, closed my eyes and opened them 8 hours later when the sun was coming up. I have nuclear levels of insomnia and can count on my fingers the number of nights I’ve gone to bed and woken with the sun. In my entire life.

It was the perfect day and the perfect night. In the same week!

It was terrible!

ASPIRATIONS ARE THE EPIC FANTASY VERSION OF YOUR LIFE

The day after the perfect night’s sleep, I was actually kind of groggy. It was hard to get started in the morning. I wasn’t calmer, more clearheaded, or more articulate. Or any happier. In fact, I was just still me. And then I slept like absolute crap the next night.

The day of perfect productivity, I felt kind of frenetic. Too busy. Too rushed. I wasn’t more accomplished, peaceful, connected. Or any happier. I was also still just me.

I’ll leave the sociopolitical antecedents of productivity from the Protestant reformation to modern hustle culture for another newsletter. We definitely have a really screwed up relationship with work and leisure, but I think the heart of our difficulty with getting things done is more fundamental than our present stopwatch age.

My favorite book on this subject is the Gap and the Gain, by Dan Sullivan, though there are many that cover reality vs aspiration, the real vs expected self, and many other synonyms for the fact that human brains can imagine the future.

One scientist calls that improvisational intelligence, or more prosaically, creativity. We can picture something that hasn’t happened yet.

That little jump in intelligence means we are forever living two lives:

• Today: the exhausting, smelly,  inconvenient, delicious, disgusting, crying, silly, distracted experience of reality.
• Tomorrow: the productive, calm, impulse-free, benevolent, successful perpetual future.

Sometimes imagination sucks.

Sullivan says that handling the gap is a key skill to life satisfaction. Note, I didn’t say closing the gap and finally living up to tomorrow, getting everything done, and fulfilling all your dreams.

Today and on the day of your death, there will still be a gap between what you want to happen and what happens.

We will always have to manage that gap. It’s a skill I deeply suck at, by the way, so this is not sage advice on how to do this. This is that I am here in the trenches next to you, and I peaked out for a second.

This week was proof positive that closing the gap does not make life better, because for twenty four hours, I lived as close to tomorrow as I think I’m ever going to get.

I lived exactly how I wanted to, perfectly, and felt like the exact same as all the days I fail miserably.

HERE ARE A FEW TIPS FOR HANDLING THE GAP

Photo: NikoReto

REMIND YOURSELF IT’S NEVER GOING AWAY

When we fall short of what we aspire to do, we hardly ever look at the aspiration. We always blame ourselves. A huge leap forward is just remembering that we have made up what we want to do and so when we fall short, you need to examine the expectation as closely as reality.

Even as I write this, I hear the voice in my head that says: you’re going to be a lazy failure sitting on the couch forever. But I promise you, as someone who did nothing but sit on the couch for several months, it’s really hard to do.

Even when I was so sick that I couldn’t do anything but sit on the couch, it was still extremely hard to do. The version of yourself that plays on a loop when you don’t drink enough water or watch one more episode isn’t going to happen.

CHAOS HAPPENS AND SUCCESS IS ONLY A PROBABILITY

We think accomplishing everything we want to protect us against failure. We can keep the chaos at bay if we are perfect.

The perfect version wouldn’t have been taken in by charlatans. And would have picked the right job. And the right partner. And wouldn’t have said that boneheaded thing to your sister-in-law.

We don’t live in a deterministic universe; we live in a probabilistic one governed by chaos. Things just randomly go wrong, and the things we plan have only a chance of coming true. That means we waste a lot of time, take a lot of chances that don’t pay off, and even the things we are successful at are often random too.

TRY FOR THE MINIMUM EFFECTIVE DOSE

Often when we make changes, we want to do all of the things. I’m a big fan of the geographic cure, when you quit your job, break your lease, and move across the country and start in a completely new industry. But that’s just me.

The minimum effective dose is a medical term, but it can be applied to just about anything. It means making small changes that add up overtime. It’s prosaic and not at all sexy, but it makes for a smaller gap which is what we’re going for.

MEASURE YOURSELF AGAINST THE PAST, NOT YOUR FUTURE

This is Sullivan‘s main advice for handling the fact that we are always aspirational beings. The answer is not to let go of anything that you want and just sit like a slug. The answer is to want things and to attempt to improve, but to measure not against an imagined perfect future, but against your very imperfect and probably less skilled past self.

That way you are always looking at realistic progress that you have made, which is motivating, and you’re measuring accurately instead of always feeling like a failure.

And if this sounds like a cop-out, in his research, the people who do this get much farther in life because they are more motivated and more realistic and they just have a much better time than people who always move the goal posts.

TASTE YOUR FOOD; SMELL SOME FLOWERS

Oh yes, mindfulness, that old chestnut. And yet it makes every list for a reason.

I am absolutely not telling you to sit down and meditate every day. In my 20s, I went on a month-long retreat where I meditated for 16 hours a day on top of years long daily practice. And I am back to tell you it also did not help. You are still you.

Only you get really hypersensitized so that every twitch of fabric feels like sandpaper, and every rustle of noise sounds like gunfire. And then you have to go back to your life and everything is loud and bright and busy and crazy and it takes a while for all your senses to shut back down. And for you to stop asking: what was the point of that?

I went from that to a long period of time where I did not want anything to do with any kind of mindfulness. But all of the folk wisdom about missing your life isn’t wrong. If you don’t spend at least sometime in the present moment smelling the flowers, you will go for years without truly enjoying anything.

My favorite resource on mindfulness now is a book called Positive Intelligence, which is extremely misnamed because it has nothing to do with positivity or intelligence.

It preaches popcorn moments of mindfulness.

Rather trying to beat yourself up maintaining your focused attention on anything, you just try and notice your senses in brief moments. Taste a few bites of every meal; stop and look at something beautiful; smell your shampoo, actually hear the music you’re listening to. If you pay attention to the best moments of your day you’ll enjoy more of it.

ALL THESE MAKE YOU A LITTLE MORE SATISFIED AND A LITTLE LESS MEAN TO YOURSELF

Maybe examine the picture in your head as carefully as you examine your actual performance. Maybe cut yourself slack when you run up against chaos  or you run up against the probability of success and you didn’t get the thing you want. Maybe when you do try something, measure against what you’ve already tried.

Life is not a string of perfect productivity.  It’s a mess. Even when it goes perfectly, it still doesn’t really change that.

Enjoy the strawberries. Drink enough water.

The post 4 Ways to Make Perfect Days Less Depressing first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.