AI Evangelism is a Hazard to Your Health
Hello, again. Have you ever had a moment where you heard someone say, or read about someone saying, something utterly bizarre and you realized instantly they had no idea that what they were saying was completely bonkers? I feel like I have two or three of those every week, now.
Recently, I have been thinking about AI evangelism cooking people’s brains and why “Andor” is the greatest Star Wars story ever told. I have also come up with an idea for a new Major League Baseball award, gave up reading a book because its anachronisms drove me to distraction, and have an important recommendation. LFG.
GO DIRECTLY TO:
AI Evangelists Cooking Their Brains
Using an AI-Created Video of a Dead Man in Court
Men Being Hot
Rob Manfred Sucks, Part Bajillion
My Pitch for a New MLB Fielding Award
A Book I Love
A Book I Didn’t Love, and Some History
Watch "Andor" Now
A Recommendation
A Reminder
AI Evangelism is a Hazard to Your Health
A recent Bloomberg feature on Microsoft CEO Satya Natella’s efforts to realign his company around big tech’s obsession with artificial intelligence produced multiple passages that rocketed through my social media circles. The one that seemed to prompt (sigh) the most mockery is worth reproducing in full here:
[Microsoft’s AI service] Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.
Everything about this gives me a headache. The first and most obvious question is if Nadella said he likes podcasts and the reporter simply transcribed that, because what about “liking podcasts” is suggested by the actions of someone who doesn’t actually listen to them? Second, perhaps it’s unclear writing, but is this saying Nadella converses with his AI chatbot about podcast transcripts the chatbot ostensibly summarizes for him, and he does it while driving? My last question is if Nadella will ever realize all of this is systematically skipping the “work” of actually learning things and considering them.
The podcast thing is weird and bad, but that he’s applying the same principles to his work life, using an AI service to summarize messages he receives, ostensibly from people who report to him, and “[delegates] meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots,” is anti-human behavior. On the one hand, you could say the bots are doing just what an executive assistant would do, and Nadella is saving $150,000 that would otherwise go to an elite employee in that role. On the other hand, when a bot does that work, it ensures that no one actually does the learning and thinking that would come from fully engaging with the information at hand. Does Satya Nadella understand the full picture of his company if he’s letting bots filter not just which messages but what content from those messages reach him?
The descriptions of Nadella’s workflow — and the passage about an Estée Lauder VP summarizing an operations report — plainly show people who believe they have found a new efficiency without realizing their shortcut is not doing the reading, which in turn is not doing the thinking.
Remember the famous scene from “Good Will Hunting” where Robin Williams’s character tells Matt Damon’s character he’s full of shit because he’s full of book learnin’ but hasn’t actually done anything of substance in his life? This is the next step past that. This is people who need to be told they are engaging in the equivalent of watching that YouTube clip and claiming they understand the movie. No, wait. Scratch that. They’re listening to a reaction to the movie and claiming they understand the movie. No, wait. Scratch that. They’re listening to a reaction to the movie created by a word-generating program that does not learn, does not have emotions, and does not think, and claiming this unthinking word generator has taught them what they need to know about the movie’s message.
You Are Not Serious People
In 2021, a man was shot and killed in a road rage incident in Arizona. Earlier this month, after the accused perpetrator was convicted of the crime, a court allowed the man’s family to show an AI-created video featuring the likeness of the man’s image and his voice, presented as an “impact statement” during the sentencing phase of the trial.
The judge apparently said he was deeply moved by the video and that it rang true based on everything else he learned about the man from other testimony. Which is utter baloney. The man is dead. He doesn’t have an opinion about the guy who shot him. His family may be heartbroken and angry, and they can opine about what he might have said and thought, but I imagine the judge would’ve thought differently about this sort of thing if the family had, say, hired an animator and voiceover artist to dramatize the deceased man’s statement, because that’s what seems to have happened here.
AI is not magic. It’s not bringing someone back to life. I can’t believe this was considered, let alone allowed.
I Agree
@flyingidget.bsky.social: “Repetition is required if dudes gon’ learn that the P&P hand flex and Tom Holland’s Umbrella routine are the two hottest things a man has ever done.”
Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson
In a historic, sweeping decision, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday removed Pete Rose, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and other deceased players from Major League Baseball's permanently ineligible list.
[snip]
"Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game," Manfred wrote…
Look, Rob Manfred is never beating the charge that he has little interest in baseball as a sport, but the least he can do is not try insult my basic sense of time and causality when proferring justification for removing Pete Rose, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and other deceased persons from MLB’s permanently ineligible list, especially when it’s pretty transparently an attempt to curry favor with — or avoid the wrath of? — Donald Trump.
He says a dead person “cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game” as if that’s self-explanatory. But I disagree! Of course a dead person can “represent a threat to the integrity of the game”! Someone’s death does not erase their actions. Not to be too amateur semiotician about it, but being placed on the permanently ineligible list means a whole lot more than a mere lifetime ban. Permanently ineligible acknowledges that Rose’s and Jackson’s actions still resonate through the game today, and that they and their memory remain institutionally punished for their transgressions.
Further reading: Just Because You Can Honor Pete Rose Doesn’t Mean You Should
My Pitch for a New MLB Fielding Award
Late last month, Craig Calcaterra graciously published my short proposal for a new MLB fielding award: the Ozzie, after Ozzie Smith.
The elevator pitch: Perhaps you’re familiar with FIFA’s Puskás and Marta Awards. What if MLB had its own award for “most aesthetically significant” defensive play of the year?
It would be a formal recognition that baseball is beautiful, and athletic performance is more than just statistical results. Think of Derek Jeter’s flip, or Ramon Laureano’s catch and throw. Commenters on Craig’s newsletter also suggested past Ozzie nominees might have been Bartolo Colon’s behind-the-back toss, Mark Buehrle’s kick-save and glove-shovel, Byron Buxton’s warning track dive (this year!), and Gary Matthews, Jr.’s ridiculous center field robbery, among others.
Don’t you feel better, already, just looking at those?
“The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach
About six years ago, I went to the library and pulled out “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach, a novel centered on a shortstop at a fictional small D-III school in Wisconsin. I read it straight through in one day.
Recently, I re-read it, and while I was actually able to put it down this time in order to do other things, it still retained its magic. More than any other baseball novel I’ve read — great ones like “The Celebrant” and less-great-but-still-wonderful ones like “The Cactus League” — “The Art of Fielding” captures what it felt like for me to be on a baseball team. There’s the practice and the work, the sheer flow of playing baseball well, relating with teammates who are very different personalities, and balancing all of that with the rest of life. Granted, I topped out with a very competitive high school team (and played rec hardball for a time as an adult), but those elements rang true for me in a specifically baseball way.
As well as being a love letter to baseball, the book is a meditation on what it means to commit oneself to excellence, an illustration of various stages of masculine maturity, a sendup of competition in academia, and an homage to Herman Melville. I love it.
Now, for a Book I Didn’t Love, and Some History
After “The Art of Fielding”, I gave up on two straight novels. The first was written on a narrative plane with such breathless flowery language I simply couldn’t bring myself to care anything about the characters.
The second was “The Briar Club” by Kate Quinn, and it actively annoyed me to distraction. The author is a noted writer of historical fiction and I kept spotting things that made me question if this book is an outlier in her oeuvre. (Spoiler alert for the rest of this item, in case you wish to read it someday.)
“The Briar Club” is a murder mystery set in 1950s Washington, DC. Within the first few pages, I was thrown off by a description of a teenage boy wearing a Washington Senators cap. While not impossible in 1950, I believe it would’ve been extremely unlikely for a regular kid to have a team-branded hat because pro sports teams were still at least a decade away from attempting to monetize their branded merchandise in earnest, let alone industrialize production. I wouldn’t be totally shocked if a mom-and-pop sold a cap with a W on it somewhere in the DC area in 1950, but as best I can tell, that would’ve been pretty rare.
A second anachronism jumped out just a few pages later, when a character refers to a neighborhood deli as having great bagels. Again, this is Washington, DC, in 1950. Perhaps there was a deli selling bagels, but that seems unlikely since the histories of bagels in the US I was able to dig up all suggest that bagels were pretty much exclusive to New York Jewish delis until the late 1950s, at the earliest.
Third, all of the main characters are white. By the time I quit 1/3 of the way through, there had been a couple mentions that Black people existed, and one Black woman — a housekeeper — makes an appearance, but does not speak, as I recall. This isn’t an anachronism so much as a missed opportunity that sticks out, since DC was in the midst of rapid demographic change right about 1950, going from a majority-white city to majority-Black, and starting a decline from its peak population. It also speaks to how the novel uses DC as a convenient plot element but not an essential character (at least in the portion I read); the story could’ve taken place in any number of other cities.
Finally, after giving up, I looked at Goodreads reviews to see what others had to say about it, and quickly realized that apparently there was some kind of big reveal about a main character. So, I flipped to the end and discovered that one of the women at the center of the story was a KGB spy who had been trained to be an American from her youth, but had ghosted her partner and sought to start a new life. If that sounds familiar, it’s because “The Americans” was an acclaimed FX drama that aired six seasons from 2013 to 2018, and it focuses on a pair of Soviet spies trained in their youth to blend in with Americans.
Indeed, in the historical note at the end, Quinn explains that the idea for the novel came from watching an episode of “The Americans” and her husband commenting that, in real life, many of the Soviet spies would appreciate the US so much that they escaped from their handlers and continued life anew in their new country. This is presented as a new insight that sparked her curiosity and led to the book. That’s fine and good, except that, as someone who thinks “The Americans” is one of the three or four best American television dramas ever made, I think that anecdote is extremely odd because it’s a major theme of the show! Throughout the show’s run, Elizabeth and Philip constantly question whether they ought to continue being loyal to the USSR, or if they should give it up and defect, considerations made more complicated by caring for their two children and by how the more espionage they do, the less likely the US would accept them. In fact, Philip explicitly suggests they defect in the pilot.
A Star Wars Masterpiece
I am one of many many many people who will tell you “Andor” is a wonderful television show. So long as you’ve seen the first Star Wars movie, that’s enough grounding for the show, but of course it helps more if you’ve seen “Rogue One”, the standalone movie that tells a sort of side plot to that first Star War, of which “Andor” is a prequel. Watch it. Watch it. WATCH IT! (No spoilers ahead, as best I can.)
This won’t be a full-fledged recap, but know that “Andor” is a magical thing. It is wild that Disney signed off on a Star Wars show so explicitly anti-fascist, with a same sex couple, drug use, protagonists killing people for hazy reasons, and on and on, a show that is about how people react to the collapse of civil society — people both within the state apparatus and without — and brilliantly shows the mechanics of authoritarian oppression at work. And that’s before getting to the individual performances, which are all fantastic, none more so than Denise Gough’s depiction of a truly evil fascist being unquestionably evil, while at the same time humanizing her and showing the toll her evil takes on her, all without turning her into a hero.
Anyway, go watch “Andor” as soon as possible. And if you want a companion reading list during your watch (or for those of you who have finished), I suggest FilmCritHulk’s review/analysis essays: ANDOR and a Short Note On “Saying It Without Saying It” (S1, after Ep 9) • ANDOR and Real Work of Rebellion (After S1) • ANDOR - Season 2 - Episodes 1-3 • ANDOR - Season 2 - Episodes 4-6 • ANDOR - Season 2 - Episodes 7-9 • ANDOR - The Final Episodes (S2, Eps 10-12)
A Recommendation
How do you store your shoes? If you have more than two or three pairs, do you have one of those over-the-door shoe organizers? A pile in your closet? Consider this recommendation, coming from a guy who has six pairs: four pairs of sneakers I choose for outfit, a pair of fancy-ish shoes, and a pair of workout sneakers.
I keep them all on a shelf and maximize storage space with the Ikea Murvel organizer. It’s a simple plastic thing that allows one to basically stack a pair of shoes and save space horizontally. Super cheap, functional, and in a classy neutral gray that can work if you display your shoes somewhere public.
(Note: That’s not an affiliate link. I don’t get any cut if you choose to buy that product.)
One More Thing…
Another reminder that my novel, “A Hell of a Wedding”, is published! If you want a paperback, get it here. But if you want a digital version, either PDF or reader-optimized Word doc, you can request your free copy here.
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Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let's do this again, sometime.
(Photo: "LE WEB PARIS 2013 - CONFERENCES - PLENARY 1 - SATYA NADELLA" by OFFICIAL LEWEB PHOTOS. Used under CC BY 2.0 license.)