generations use AI differently

We see more and more ink spilled, computer power devoted to, software feature descriptions incorporating how to make the most of AI. Different generations are using AI for different roles, from life coach or adviser to encyclopaedia or search engine.

The announcement of the teami up between the designer of the iMac and the founder of OpenAI in a video directed by the director of 2001’s Training Day and music from a cinema movie composer marks a change in the way companies talk about themselves and their role in society.

We are only in the early stages of the impact that this technology will have on how we search for information, how we form our understanding of what is important. One of the questions I keep thinking about as I look at how different generations might interact is “what commonalities of experience can be tapped into to help people see the world in compatible ways?”

Watching my creative friends become more and more worried about the tasks their livelihoods depend on be soaked up and replaced by worse AI equivalents (book authors, illustrators, video makers) that make no effort to compensate or license the original creative works still feels like the early days, with announcements of changes to hiring practices even in tech startups indicating that the changes are far from over.

Is there still value in writing blog posts from scratch, rather than using a LLM tool to help with a first draft? I hope so. Even if it’s slower, there is some change being wrought in the mind of the person doing the writing that remains undone when using a LLM. Finding the balance is one of the challenges of modern work, while there is still a choice to attempt the task without a starting draft being offered by your text editor of choice.

Hopefully there are significant upsides along wth all of these changes – enhanced productivity, new insights, perhaps even more leisure and longer health span / life span. Time will tell.

Movie: Treasure (2024)

For some reason I keep being drawn to movies that are seeking to tell stories of loss from WWII.

This humour-flecked story of a divorced 30-something journalist (Lena Dunham) and her Polish holocaust survivor father (Stephen Fry) who has invited himself along to her tour of key sites from their family history.

Fry does an impressive job with this story, and unusually for a cinematic outing, I chat briefly to a lady who was also in the screening, who tells me of how the film connected with her, and her own family story of loss.

A touching story, that leaves you continuing to think about loss and tragedy.

Crossing the river

Already lost to me is the LinkedIn post that brought this to my attention, but searching for that story, I found an article that told some more of the background.

https://mindmatters.ai/2024/05/a-man-a-boat-and-a-goat-and-a-chatbot/

The link between the original post and the classic non-fiction work “Gödel Escher Bach” is the icing on the cake.

You’re familiar with the concept of the puzzle where a man has to cross a river with various things: perhaps a goat, a wolf and a cabbage; but only a certain number of items will fit in the boat.

Watching the different AI’s variously make a mess of this puzzle when asked to solve a much simpler version sparked no small amount of joy.

anhedonia and digital dopamine

i recently signed up to try the Opal app for which I’d seen many ads on my Instagram feed. The app essentially puts your own smartphone into parental guidance mode, and lets you lock yourself out of social media (or any other) apps for blocks of time. I had found that I was spending more time scrolling on Instagram than I wanted to, and this seemed like a good way to slow down and think more deliberately about how I’m spending my time.

Today a friend linked to an article – the state of the culture in 2024 – its thesis was that increasingly fragmented attention spans have led to something called anhedonia (the inability to enjoy an experience designed for pleasure) that seems to have been caused by the level of lock-in that we have to our devices, and to our social media apps in particular.

pause

Jamberoo lookout - February 2024.

Spent some time this week slowed down and trying to reset. It was good going to a retreat centre for a couple of nights to spend some slow time. I probably rate myself a B- for my efforts at slowing down; what should have been a season of silence and solitude was interrupted with podcasts and even pushing through for one work email in particular.

Learned some good lessons about what to do, and what not to do, when slowing down, so that’s a win.

If you haven’t tried being silent for half an hour, it is a fascinating exercise. The things you notice over that period of time. Try it!

book: Fahrenheit 451

Reading a blog post from danah boyd I realised I’d never read Fahrenheit 451, so I borrowed the audiobook from my local library using Libby and worked through it during my holiday downtime (mostly dog-walking) over the last couple of days.

The irony of listening to an audiobook while hearing about a world constantly distracted by screens and in-ear audio (and this written in the early 1950s) was not lost on me. The depiction of a world where people stay in a numbed state all the time, entertained by, but separated by, their ever-present sources of entertainment was a reminder to keep engaging with people in real life (even as that becomes more challenging).