Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Arrows Here, There, and Everywhere

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I hit the road last week for the first time in 20 months. Drove a long, long ways. Overdosed on podcasts (Epstein Files, Artificial Intelligence, MF Doom–look him up). When the car came to a stop, I got on my bike and road it uphill in warm sunshine.

When my bike came to a stop, I titled a document, “What I’ve Lost”. It’s a shit inventory. If you’ve been reading me recently, you can correctly guess parts of my “What I’ve Lost” notes, but you would not guess this part, “Lost connection to PLU students—lost meaningful service, exercising unique skills, youthful exuberance.” I decided to stop teaching a year ago, but didn’t make it formal until a few months ago.

My timing on pulling the plug on work isn’t the best, but there would never be an easy time to let go of something that’s been so rewarding for so long. I hope the university will be okay.

Alison and Jeanette seem to be experiencing grief similarly to me. In waves. Or maybe, more accurately for me, waves of piercing arrows.

Something as simple as going out to dinner while on my inaugural road trip proved surprisingly fraught with unsuspecting arrows suddenly materializing out of thin air. Order a pizza. Then pass time in an eclectic shop next door. One that has very nice Valentine’s cards. Arrow One. Lynn called me the “Card King”. Like the flowers I’d get her, she always, always liked my cards. She kept most of them. “Now,” I think to myself as I start to get woozy from the loss of blood, “I’ll never get to buy her another.”

After pizza, gelato. I get a large cup with four different flavors. Arrow Two. “One more thing Lynn was right about,” I can’t help but think, “blackberry is the best”. I’ll never get to share a blackberry gelato with her again.

In the later parts of a recent bicycle ride, I got blindsided by Arrow Three. Never even saw the archer, but somehow stayed upright. Lynn and I had a silly ritual whenever I got home from a group ride. She’d excitedly ask, “Were you the Alpha Dog?” She’d be genuinely happy and proud whenever I said “yes” and incredulous when I’d say, “Some days you’re the hammer and some days you’re the nail.” Now, when I get home from a group ride, there’s no one to ask me how was the ride, who was there, what did you see? If no one asks about an activity, did it really happen?

Recently, Jeanette lamented, “I just don’t know where she is.” I offered that her mom was in our hearts, to the degree we emulate her. But, as these remarkably unremarkable stories illustrate, she’s almost always in my head too.

Paragraph To Ponder

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From an excellent essay titled, “When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chainsaw” by Brian Groh.

“In towns like mine, outsourcing and automation consumed jobs. Then purpose. Then people. Now the same forces are climbing the economic ladder. Yet Washington remains fixated on global competition and growth, as if new work will always appear to replace what’s been lost. Maybe it will. But given A.I.’s rapacity, it seems far more likely that it won’t. If our leaders fail to prepare, the silence that once followed the closing of factory doors will spread through office parks and home offices — and the grief long borne by the working class may soon be borne by us all.”

Kara Swisher And The Female Ego

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I regularly listen to both of Kara Swisher’s podcasts, her own, and hers with Scott Galloway. As a result, I’m an expert on all things KSwish.

She’s a fascinating case study in gender because she prides herself in being atypically female. Her extreme self-confidence often tips over into bragging about herself. She makes no apologies for being the self proclaimed “best tech journalist” currently working. When you look up “swagger” in the dictionary. . .

She is good at what she does and she has accomplished a lot. At present, she’s on a nationwide book tour for her new book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, which is selling well. Among other things, people like that she’s so opinionated.

Normally, I think of her braggadocio as a harmless personality quirk, but her promoting of her book tour is proving way, way too much. The to-this-point undefeated male ego has finally met its match. Name an especially egregious male whose ego runs amok. KSwish would give that dude a run for his money.

Case in point. She recently bragged about doing the best job of anyone reporting on what really happened with Sam Altman’s firing and rehiring at OpenAI. She said something to the effect of, “It was cool to see I still got it. And that I can still be the best beat reporter going.” Swisher isn’t a reporter anymore because her ever expanding ego makes it impossible to defer to interview subjects. She has to be the story. End of story.

Maybe a women with an unbridled ego is alright, fuck the patriarchy and all, but I’m repelled by egomaniacs of either gender. I’m at an “advanced” stage of my life where I’m drawn to people who sublimate their ego in the service of others. Especially when that service takes the form of disciplined listening. Of choosing not to speak. Of looking, and listening, and learning.

That said, I am down with KSwish-like ambition. And even her admittedly excessive work ethic and intense focus on professional status. With the critical caveat that we keep Qoheleth’s Old Testament Ecclesiastes insight front and center—that’s there’s a season for everything. Including ambition, professional status, and ego.

In your 20s, 30s, and 40s, go crazy. Be ambitious. Work hard. Achieve things. Line your pockets. Increase your status.

But KSwish, like your Humble Blogger, was born in 1962. And listening to her promote herself over and over makes me wonder, when should one stop giving a shit? When is the time to cull our professional “to do” lists and create space for others?

Of course it’s a personal decision. KSwish would vehemently reject my suggestion that we think about our professional identities in terms of life chapters. She would profanely brush off my suggestion that we defer to our younger colleagues on their way up.

And that’s her prerogative.

I’m repelled by KSwish’s self promoting, look-at-me, in-your-face ego. But, but being the expert I am, I can say this with total confidence. She doesn’t give a shit about what I think about her. Which is her most appealing trait.

It’s 1995

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Said one technology analyst this week on the heels of artificial intelligence chip maker Nvidia’s red hot quarterly results. Meaning just like when the internet caught fire in 1995, Nvidia is igniting a whole new technology whose trajectory requires educated guesses.

Let’s press pause and ponder whether we’re better off now than in the early 90s. Inevitably my privilege contributes to my belief that we are a lot better off. Partially because of convenience. Specifically, we take for granted the time we save on almost a daily basis from internet-based personal tech. Case in point. A friend recently posted a picture of himself on Facebook at the Westminster, CA Department of Motor Vehicles where I got my license 46 years ago and I thought, “Why the heck did he go in person?” because I can’t remember the last time I went to the DMV.*

Granted, not a substantive example of human progress, but I suspect it is the cumulative effect of relatively simple and smallish such examples that translate into an improved quality of life.

More meaningfully, here’s a far-out social media adventure I went on last week after an extended family member posted this gem to the ‘Byrnes Family’ group text.

That’s my oldest bro teaching me the sweet science in Muhammad Ali’s hometown. As I looked at it, my attention drifted to the background and my best friend’s house. Jimmy D and I were in separable from ages 3-9. Heartbroken over the end of our friendship, when we moved from Louisville to Ohio I sobbed in the back seat halfway there.

Where the heck is Jimmy fifty-five years later I wondered? A quick google search turned up his dad’s obituary from 2020 including his and his sister’s places of residence. A few seconds later, I was on Jim’s Instagram page looking at his island home just off the Maryland shore that he and his husband were selling.** Then I watched a video from inside his home art studio where he talked about his process. Another quick search turned up his new location. After scouring his instagram and admiring his big white fluffy dogs, I visited his sister’s Facebook page and saw a picture of Jim and his elderly mom. And then back to the obituary and some remembrances including an amazing picture of a very young Jimmy with his parents and sisters on the back brick patio of his Cardiff Rd home. . . the one in the picture.

A miracle of modernity.

I listen a lot to people on the forefront of large language models and my take-away from their predictions is that this technology will greatly accelerate economic productivity and further save people time to pursue more non-work interests and activities.

Not all boats will rise to the same degree, because they never have, but artificial intelligence will in all likelihood induce a much higher tide. White collar people in particular will work less while enjoying simple and smallish and quite possibly complex and more substantive improvements to their quality of life.

BUT will any of us be happier? One way to get at that is to reflect on whether we’re happier now than in the early 90s. Despite internet-fueled economic growth, there’s lots of evidence that we are not. In fact, some would argue that a large part of the internet’s legacy, especially among the young, is steadily worsening mental health. And a coarsening of civic life.

Another way to approach the question of whether we’ll be happier in a post AI world is to consider whether it will foster stronger interpersonal connections. Will it, I wonder, enable us to enjoy the company of more close friends? I also wonder whether it will enable us to slow if not reverse the environmental degradation that threatens our well-being. And will we, I wonder, experience more art that moves us more often, and in the end, makes us feel more alive. Alive in ways that renewing car tabs on-line and skimming friends’ Instagram pages never will.

In the same space of time, 29 years from now, in 2053, I suspect we won’t be much if any happier than we are right now. I would like to be wrong and still around so that you can recall this post and roast me for not being nearly optimistic enough.

*needed to do an eye test to renew his license

**someone in my fam asked if I knew Jimmy was gay, “LOL,” I said. “We were six, I don’t think I knew what ‘gay’ was.”

Artificial Intelligence Paragraph to Ponder

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Few are as intelligent on A.I. as Tyler Cowen. He’s largely optimistic.

“I am reminded of the advent of the printing press, after Gutenberg.  Of course the press brought an immense amount of good, enabling the scientific and industrial revolutions, among many other benefits.  But it also created writings by Lenin, Hitler, and Mao’s Red Book.  It is a moot point whether you can ‘blame’ those on the printing press, nonetheless the press brought (in combination with some other innovations) a remarkable amount of true, moving history.  How about the Wars of Religion and the bloody 17th century to boot?  Still, if you were redoing world history you would take the printing press in a heartbeat.  Who needs poverty, squalor, and recurrences of Ghenghis Khan-like figures?”

Everything Is Going To Change

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People don’t resist change per se, they struggle with the pace of it. Tom Scott’s perspective on artificial intelligence reminds me of the winter weekend ski trips my Southern California friends and I took to the San Bernardino Mountains. The ones where my older high school friends drove way too fast. That scared me kind of like A.I. scares Scott.

I Failed

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How will large language models/artificial intelligence change K-12 education? Maybe the better question is will large language modes/artificial intelligence change K-12 education? Through teaching, research, and writing, I spent most of my academic career trying to make high schools more democratic, more international, more personal, and more relevant and purposeful.

I’m sad to report that I failed bigly. The fact of the matter is, except for all the surreptitious texting under desks, the typical high school today functions remarkably similar to the way Cypress (California) High School did when I graduated in 1980. What other institution in American life can you say that about?

Lesson learned. K-12 education is incredibly resistant to change. Like YouTube, surely ChatGPX-like devices will have some effect, but probably not enough to fundamentally alter the teacher-student relationship. One education scholar uses an ocean metaphor to explain the futility of education reform. Schedule tweaks, new curriculum initiatives, education technologies, all create changes on the surface of the ocean just as high winds do. Descend to the ocean floor however, meaning the teacher-student relationship in the classroom, and the water’s darkness, chemistry, and animal life are completely unaffected by the tumult on the surface. The teacher still mostly talks and the students listen.

Despite it being so obvious, it wasn’t easy to admit my my failure, you know, professional identity and ego and all. But the consolation is a quiet confidence that I have made a positive difference in a lot of individual teacher’s lives. Despite not having dented their work environment, I have made meaningful contributions to their professional success. I’ve failed, but I’m not a failure.

And even though I’ve admitted defeat and let go of my teacher education identity, I am still helping individual teachers on occasion, just fewer of them. Yesterday, for example, one of my first year writers from Fall 2021, a prospective teacher, wrote me seeking advice. Here’s how she started her missive:

“I hope all is well! I am reaching out to you because I need some advice. I figured you would be an excellent person to reach out to because you are part of the education faculty and have taught abroad and done things I want to do with my life. I also think you won’t sugarcoat things and you will tell me the truth.” 

I liked that she didn’t think I’d “sugarcoat things”. So, in that spirit of keeping it real, I predict high schools in 43 years, make that 2066, will still look and feel pretty damn similar. Given my protein bar consumption, it’s unlikely I’ll live long enough to see if my prediction comes true. I hope it does not.

Postscript: Not an “institution”, but same idea.

Be Your Own Therapist

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I trained a ChatGPT AI chatbot on my childhood journal entries to talk to my inner child.

“Young Michelle told me: ‘I’m honestly proud of you for everything you’ve accomplished. It hasn’t been easy, and I know you’ve made a lot of sacrifices to get where you are. I think you’re doing an amazing job, and I hope you continue to pursue your dreams and make a difference in the world.’ 

I sensed the kindness, understanding and empathy that she was so willing to give other people, but she was so hard on herself. I was tearing up during that exchange.”