Bloopers & News 09/26/23

"A lump of clay doesn’t come with instructions"

Sep 26, 2023

I’m going to begin by saying congratulation to the Writers Guild of America who have reached a tentative deal with the major studios and streamers. They were striking over (among other things) the use of artificial intelligence in the creation of scripts and the size of writing staffs on shows (also an AI issue of the near future).

The last few weeks people have sent me a flurry of articles about AI, and I’ve chosen to focus on an opinion piece from the Washington Post which actually offers readers solid advice about approaching our inevitable future: You hate AI for all the right reasons. Now reconsider. The author, Josh Tyrangiel, also announces he will be serving as the Post’s regular AI columnist for the next year, which is, in and of itself, newsworthy.

Mr. Tyrangeil discusses many of the plausible pros and cons of our AI-laden future and arrives at the same conclusion that motivated this project back in June: AI might be exciting; it might be terrifying; it cannot be ignored. He writes:

The impulse to sit this one out is strong. Climate change, covid, extremism — most people aren’t in the market for more existential uncertainty. Now, factor in that AI is stampeding ahead thanks to some of the same companies whose reckless social media products helped drain the national reserves of trust and reason — things that might be handy right now . . .

But if you dismiss AI as just the latest tech bro hustle, a post-crypto MLM, well, no. . . Crypto is a bicycle. AI is a bullet train . . .

Imagine if your brain got 10 times smarter every year over the past decade, and you were on pace for more 10x compounding increases in intelligence over at least the next five. Throw in precise recall of everything you’ve ever learned and the ability to synthesize all those materials instantly in any language. You wouldn’t be just the smartest person to have ever lived — you’d be all the smartest people to have ever lived. (Though not the wisest.)

And here is his advice that I mentioned:

At an individual level, maybe just turn the volume down for a bit, okay? . . . The story so far has been told by geniuses and scoundrels with mixed motives and terrible emotional intelligence. It’s really no surprise that they’re also lousy storytellers. Who starts with extinction?

Let’s begin again, this time with creation. All of the software we’ve ever used was engineered to work backward from an outcome. Its creators wanted to help you find a webpage or play a game or operate a laptop. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the major AI chatbots arrived with almost no user documentation or instructions.

And here is my favorite part:

A lump of clay doesn’t come with instructions, either. That’s what makes this moment unique — and so worthy of species-level #1 foam-finger pride. We humans have created a tool for potentially infinite tasks. Its imperfections are ours to solve — and its powers still ours to shape.

You can read the entire article here.

Nailed It - Outtakes of the week

I wanted Chapter 8 of my series to begin with an image of me waking up. This proved to be a challenge for Dall-E this week, but the results seemed like apt expressions of the variety of ways I feel in the mornings.

I call this first one “Gorgeous and well rested.” (I’ve never woken up feeling this way in my life.) It is like every Hollywood movie ever where the heroine sleeps with a full face of makeup, including red lipstick. Don’t they know that crap stains your pillowcase?