I Want to Know if AI Is a Washing Machine
This week, I wrote something a bit longer about how my opinion of using AI is evolving as I learn new information. The TL;DR is that I’m trying not to be a kneejerk opponent of new technologies, but the more I see of what AI is, the more I’m convinced its most valuable utility is extremely narrow. Aside from that, I wrote about a rich person saying bad things, a cool chase video, and my redesigned website. LFG.
GO DIRECTLY TO:
- I Want to Know if AI Is a Washing Machine
- Rich People Are Not Necessarily Smart: Exhibit Bajillion
- “A Miraculous Escape”
- The Climate Apocalypse Continues
- It’s Time For Baseball
- My Home Page Is a Motherfucking Website
I Want to Know if AI Is a Washing Machine
Recently, I’ve noticed more people in my social media circles either 1) warning that AI technology is now so advanced that it is undeniably here to stay and that those who have not yet embraced it ought to do so lest they be cast as an out-of-touch refusenik, or 2) outright touting the powers of AI to help them do their work, which, with rare exception, turns out to be some kind of computer coding. Here’s a representative example that made its way to my feed.
Over the past few years, I have evolved in my thinking about AI, generally. I remain repulsed by it, but recently I have opened myself to the possibility that my repulsion is too broad.
I think “AI”, writ large, is an utter disaster because it discourages actually doing things, a major component of learning and understanding. When a student turns to a chatbot and prompts it to produce an essay, that undermines the fundamental premise of education, which is that students think and do in order to learn — if the goal was to produce a quality essay, then the instructor wouldn’t be asking students to write them. As the modern aphorism goes, you don’t use a bulldozer to lift weights at the gym.
The principle extends to professional work, too. If I am charged with making something, certainly there is value in clicking a button and having a machine do it for me. However, with most forms of knowledge work, there is also value in a person going through the process of making the thing, because if literally no one made the thing then it’s likely no one has a mental map of the entirety of the thing. Good luck maintaining and resolving problems with complicated things made by a machine that no person actually put together and therefore no person understands in its entirety.
Separately, and perhaps worse, I believe it’s generally bad if there are too few people who actually know how to make things, themselves. When it comes to people who work with computer code, I think they are more likely to evangelize for AI because working with computer coding languages is significantly different from many other knowledge work in ways that allow for turning over more of the creation process to AI and not seeing immediate degradation of the final product. However, I also think we are early enough in the adoption cycle of AI tools that there are still many, many people using AI to make things who, crucially, got their start making things, themselves, and so have important knowledge and skills gained from those experiences. We have not yet reached the point where the majority of people have gone their whole careers using AI tools.
To my mind, the best-case scenario for AI is that it is a transformational technology like the clothes washing machine, one that frees people from drudgery to do higher-level work or frees them for leisure. If you’re unaware, the pre-washing machine process for cleaning clothes was a nightmare for many people, and modern washing machines are a miracle many of us take for granted.
I have opened myself to the possibility that there are a bunch of coding tasks that can be done with AI that, effectively, are like doing the laundry: necessary, but tedious and time-consuming. Furthermore, though I am doubtful, I am open to the possibility that coders can effectively separate what is “laundry” and what is higher-level work that AI can’t do, all while reining in knowledge debts that will inevitably accumulate from not having people actually doing the building.
Admittedly, I view AI through the lens of a writer and editor who understands that writing is thinking. When I write something, the process of drafting and editing it into something I feel is acceptable to publish requires engagement and organized thought, and outsourcing that process to another entity — person or machine — chips away at my integrity. To be clear, I’m not talking about feedback or collaboration; I mean that the ultimate responsibility for creating my part of a thing must lie with me, or else I can’t take credit for it, and also that in order to make something as well as I can, I must actually engage with it so that I know it. If I don’t know it, I can’t improve it. I feel the same way about editing podcast audio, writing and recording music, graphic design, and all my other creative pursuits and jobs.
I believe there is no washing machine for writing because there is no such thing as unnecessary drudgery in the writing process — drafting and editing, no matter how one does it, is necessary engagement because the whole point is organizing and transmitting ideas, and outsourcing that process means you’re no longer transmitting ideas but simulating the transmission of ideas. Perhaps most coders don’t see value in complete engagement with their tasks compared with the value they see in AI generated code. But I strongly suspect we will reach a point when they realize their knowledge work is not like washing clothes and they should have valued complete engagement all along.
Read more: AI Evangelism Is a Hazard to Your Health
And more: Want to Make the Most of AI Tools? First, Become an Expert in Something
Rich People Are Not Necessarily Smart: Exhibit Bajillion
Marc Andreesen is an extremely rich venture capitalist who may be best known for helping launch the Mosaic and Netscape web browsers. Because he got rich investing in companies, a lot of people want to hear what he has to say about many different topics. Unfortunately, he obliges.
That he does not believe in the value of introspection is odd, but whatever. That he has publicly proclaimed that introspection is a supposedly modern construct that did not exist to constrain great men of the past is wrong and should be a shameful mark against anyone taking his meandering blubberings seriously. I mean, nobody ever considered that “the unexamined life is not worth living” prior to, like, Freud, or something.
Relating to the previous item, all this may be exacerbated by Andreesen’s public estimate that his media consumption consists of 1/4 X (the roiling Nazified soup of post-Twitter), 1/4 podcast interviews, 1/4 “talking to the leading AI models” (whatever that means), and 1/4 reading books. There’s plenty of wiggle room in there, but I’m pretty sure half of that media consumption is total and complete garbage.
“A Miraculous Escape”
This is a video of a hare getting chased by two hounds, shot from what appears to be a drone. Genuinely pumped my fist when the little guy split the defense. Great soundtrack, too.
The Climate Apocalypse Continues
This past week, a heatwave hit San Francisco, with temperatures popping well into the 80s. This happens a few times per year, and at first blush it seems merely annoying for those of us with no air conditioning in our homes. But an increase in heatwaves’ occurrence portends bad things for the people in my region, as heat is deadly.
Also deadly: the knock-on effects of increased heat and reduced precipitation. There is dangerously low snowpack in western mountains. This means the upcoming spring, summer, and fall likely will be marked by terrible wildfires paired with water shortages, putting a strain on basic societal functions.
You likely don’t live in a mountain forest, or run a major agricultural business, but all of this is coming for you, soon enough.
It’s Time For Baseball
I appreciated the World Baseball Classic this year much more than I have in previous years. Perhaps it’s because I was more acutely aware of players saying how much it meant to them to be able to play for their countries, and that connected especially well with the joy they expressed on the field. (Hahaha not the USA of course.)
I’m now fully ready for the Major League Baseball season to start. Summer Wednesdays and Thursdays when I can work from home and put on MLB.tv for day games from morning into the night are the best. The WBC environment is great for that kind of tournament, but I also love the languid pace of June baseball — not on the field, because virtually everyone’s trying hard and on their game at all times, but in the stands and in my living room, where I can lie on the couch and watch ball games.
My Home Page Is a Motherfucking Website
If you read my posts on the web, you’ve likely already clocked that I aspire to responsive and readable design. Some time ago, I moved my home page to Google Sites with a custom domain, because it was just a single page, and it seemed to meet my needs with minimal work required to put into it. However, it still nagged at me every so often that I am fairly Google-captured, so I looked into other options, and while “free” isn’t everything, my homepage/blog/newsletter stack was completely free (I pay for hosting), and I didn’t feel like adding another $50 annually just to feel better about whether Google would continue supporting Sites.
Then, someone showed me Motherfucking Website and I was inspired. Yes, I already knew about Brutalist Websites, but many of the examples there felt over-designed, self-consciously ugly, and not actually brutalist in the sense that brutalism is about being unadorned. Motherfucking Website isn’t scalable to a commercial website, but it is a brilliantly plain iteration of a personal non-commercial website.
As from the start of the public web, I believe it’s important for people to have their own websites so they are less captured by platforms and services. Moreover, I decided to get my hands dirty and, in the spirit of Motherfucking Website and the first item above, hand-code my home page so that I engage with everything that is on it, and so that I include absolutely nothing that is unnecessary.
The result, on www.29sunset.com, is a Cloudflare Pages deployment of html and images. I like it! I have a lot to share, so there are a lot of links, but it’s an extremely lightweight site that should load with little issue on the dinkiest connections. At the same time, I haven’t eschewed “design” entirely. I fiddled with the headers. The link formats are intentional. The photo selection and placement is intentional. The background color is intentional. It’s a motherfucking website. It’s my motherfucking website. It’s all it has to be.
Read More: The 49MB Web Page
* * *
For those who celebrate, have a happy Easter. Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime.
(Photo: “Laundry room” by Mitch Bennett. Used under CC BY 2.0 license.)