This morning while I was lying in bed the alarm on my watch went off. It is sort of an antiquated idea, a watch with an alarm, a tinny little beep beep beep with no snooze and no way to turn it off because it only makes fifteen beeps. It is just a notification that a specific moment in the twenty-four cycle of timekeeping has passed. Theoretically, it is to serve as a reminder that I should be awake, however my periods of sleep have been traversing the face of the clock like a passport stamp collector. As I do not have a sleeping partner with whom it is imperative to synchronize our biological rest periods nor to develop a mutually interdependent immune system, I have the freedom to sleep when I am tired. Therefore I am waking up at all hours, engaging in the world and the problems which my mind wants to hyper-fixate on until some duration of time has passed and I once again need to crawl under the covers and slide into the unconscious dreamwork.
For over a week now, my phone is bereft of any of the popular, ever present social media applications. Specifically because of the pattern of reaching for that technological tumor which has become a physical extension of ourselves. Should I continue to participate in this cyborg experiment, I will at least maintain some aspect of control over the inputs to my brain, therefore the most banal and tedious of data streams no longer has a place within my morning. To be clear, I have fought this battle over and over and attempted to resist even glancing at its seductive glassy screen until AFTER I have had my coffee and written in my book, but I am weak. Thus, kicking off the Meta, X, and ad nauseum from its surfaces is a workaround that means that perhaps I shall ingest something worthwhile on my way down the stairs, or as I lie in for a few more precious moments.
This morning an article by Om Malik was in my RSS Reader (NetNewsWire if you must). It was a responsive article aimed at or because of an article I read yesterday afternoon, HyperWriteAI CEO Matt Shumer wrote Something Big is Happening . I read it in my newsfeed transmitted from Fortune and pushed along the very same ecosystem of excited news readers that Om refers to in the viralness of the piece. The article this morning, and it was morning for once, was sort of in the tone of the writing was terrible but he made a good point about this being like COVID, and generally sort of resisting the either or elements of Matt's summary. Let me be frank, I enjoyed reading both pieces immensely as it gave my mind plenty to chew on.
I am an outsider. A tinkerer, a hobbyist and an artist. I dabble and play with tools, medium, and various methods of picking up, turning over, dissecting, tearing apart and reassembling concepts, ideas and even emotions. It is just something that has fascinated me to a degree since the days when we needed a cassette recorder to save computer programs onto tape. But never enough to catch me fully immersed in the pathways which would yield a professional position. Thus I have been playing with the tools that the tech industry makes available to consumers, and this includes LLMs. Starting with ChatGPT two years ago, I have been trying to find out how to plug these into actual workflows, a word I had never considered in my life but is now something that fascinates me. What Shumer's article did for me yesterday was challenge me. And I think that is the healthiest response. It challenged me in a way to step into a project that I have been piecing together for over two years on the computer and daydreaming about nearly my whole life.
I can agree that if someone tried out ChatGPT in February 2024, and that is their whole extensive knowledge of it, then they are wildly behind. I can also agree that in the last two months there has been an explosion of new tools, workflows, and methodologies of using these tools and cognitive spaces. And I can also agree that Malik is correct that we are living through something that has not reached its cyclical conclusion and thus all the noise of so called prophets and predictions of the impact this technology will have upon our society is just noise. Noise that we can not stop if we tried, because that is part of the experience of being human. We live our lives, we express ourselves in nearly every moment of those lives. Some of those expressions turn out to be actual signal which multiplies and manifests into significant portions of reality, perhaps even serving a building blocks for future humans to employ as tools for their own lives.
Once upon a time, I had a job as a book mover. Naturally this job happens in libraries. The intimacy of handling every single book in a collection, means that I have a pretty good scope on what a library looks like. If I found moments every so often to dip my toe into the stream of information passing through my hands and read a page or two, not too often that my boss would notice a slow down in productivity, I could gather some new things to think about until the next moment I dipped my metaphorical toe. In libraries like those at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, et al, the quality of water was brilliant, crisp and invigorating. In another library which was better known for its architecture, and exquisite leather bound books from the 18th century, the collection was full of muddy water. At least as far as the information contained within its pages. The sciences of eugenics, phrenology, aether transmissions, and other antiquated ideas filled the volumes perched on those beautifully adorned shelves. There could be real research done within the sunlit galleries of that space, but it must be used as a measure against things we know to be more realistic. Thus, I think that the COVID analogy of the impact that AI will have upon our society is apt, but the basic fundamentals of Information Science is that the quality of the input is directly proportional to the quality of its output.
Our run with AI has only just started, and like our run with the Internet, it has a very brilliant and noise beginning. Will it have a socioeconomic crash associated with it? I tend to believe that it will and not only that it will have a very political element in that crash, as power and wealth are going to get redistributed in ways that are currently unpredictable. Just like the advent of the Internet had significant restructuring of society, Just like the automobile, Just like the printing press,
