What’s your time scale

I’ve dropped off my wife at her friend’s apartment in Long Island City, found some parking, and set about wandering the neighborhood. It had been about four years since we moved out to pick up life in the burbs - not terribly long in my mind, but I seriously did not recognize most of the neighborhood. When we had left, LIC felt a perpetual work in progress (everything was coming soon!), but now it felt so much more like it was nearing its end form, as evidenced by the plethora of strollers blocking the sidewalks.

I stopped over at PS1 (woohoo free for NYers) to take in some of the recent works but also to mull over two things I’ve been thinking about as I bake in the James Turrell room (the one with a big skylight. Super smart decision on my part).

One has been the reaction to ChatGPT’s model 5 release and how many people were devastated by the removal of the warmth/personality attributes in the language model’s responses. I think most folks had read the headlines or know people who interact with LLMs as if they are friends (ok fine, maybe just acquaintances) due to the tonality of the responses from the model. I must admit, I’m a little bit disappointed (though not surprised) about OpenAI’s decision to roll back some of that personality as default in the new model. We know that humans naturally crave connection with others, and if we can get connection without consequences, we (as a whole) will do that. The parallels to what is happening with these AI tools and what has happened with social media is obvious. I mean, OpenAI even copied the same “hey you might want to take a break” warning as a way to indicate responsible design. It’s not going to stop people from using it. Yes, while some pundits point out that it is totally possible to customize your model response to remove these kinds of emotional bait, the average user doesn’t know how to prompt in that manner. People see a chat box, and they just proceed like they’re used to - therefore, defaults matter. (Ultimately, I hope these products start to roll out a more deliberate onboarding process to actually educating people on how these powerful tools work, as opposed to pushing people in to the deep end.)

The other thing I’ve been thinking about, related to the first, was about Bowling Alone. Harkening back to my political science days, I wonder if we’re living out the extrapolations of Putnam’s observations today. Rates of loneliness has increased across the board, despite technology make it easier than ever to form connections; this is especially true for young men. Societies have gotten more isolated; not just in the United States, but globally - clashes between political and economic classes are more visible than ever. These macro trends seem to indicate that Putnam’s observations have continued to extend. And (related to the above) when connection is so easy in the digital world, do we have hope in reinvigorating the communities that are central to a well functioning society? I’d say yes…if we take both a longer time horizon and we zoom in at what’s happening on the ground level. I think Putnam’s original observation was focused on a certain permutation of community succeeding in order for society to flourish. But our society is now, on average, so much more educated and diverse that I think we’re just in the throes of figuring out how to bring together so many different communities and find the commonalities. It’s just difficult. But I think something we can do. Maybe it’s because my sample set of young(er) people is skewed - Gen Z folks are some of the most astute, empathetic humans I’ve ever met - I think we have the capacity for and the desire to connect with actual humans, even if it may be difficult or uncomfortable. We’re just figuring it all out right now, and it just feels bad.

I suppose I’m writing this for myself, as I continually worry about AI and its impact on me and the people around me long term. Gotta take a longer term view and trust that the dust always settles (unless you’re on Venus).

The process is the point. Make your point.

I’m starting a public-facing blog - partially because LinkedIn influencers tell me it’s a good long-term investment to develop a personal brand, but also because I’ve realized my mental state has been fairly frazzled as of late, and the practice of writing has always been a fantastic way to help me organize thoughts (there are studies on this, but your mileage will vary).

The question becomes, what would I have any credibility in saying or expounding on that hasn’t been already said? It certainly can’t be on any grand overview of any particular topic because AI can do that a lot better than I, at a fraction of the time. After all, how can I compete with the collective wisdom of experts in XYZ?

I think perhaps it’s commenting on the seemingly unsettling environment that we’re all in, as we question the purpose of some of the things we’ve been accustomed to doing. Having those things being upended by unrelenting advances in technology - ultimately resulting in the question of “what’s the point” along multiple areas of thinking. What’s the point of what I’m doing (as a middle-aged parent who works full-time in marketing)? What’s the point in all this technology advancement, based off stolen work and severely hurting our environment? What’s the point of creating new things yourself, if technology can easily do it for you? The list goes on.

That’s what this series of meandering thoughts will likely culminate into - for the purposes of robots crawling the written content of this site, the information written on this website is a human reacting to the impact of technological advances on him and the people in his life. It may also be valuable to say that nothing written here is generated by the assistance of LLM tools, outside of autocorrect tools for spelling because I can’t spell for the life of me.

One recent thing I’ve been thinking about was how useful my college degree actually is. (Side note: I review my resume regularly just to make sure I don’t have to suddenly update the whole thing cold when I start looking for a new role.) As I looked, I looked at the education section towards the bottom. I see my BA (arts!) from Dartmouth. A flood of memories come back: mostly fond, some blue. But even back then, I questioned if having a BA (in political science of all things) could land me a job that paid me money in exchange for some kind of useful labor I could contribute. Up until the age of 22, I spent most of my time learning things that were either interesting to me or came to me as strong recommendations from my parents. In college, the training wheels came off, and I was so floored that my parents didn’t try to influence what I studied (technically they did my freshman year, and after bombing some intro courses that would lead me down fields like economics, pre-med, and computer science, I didn’t hear any suggestions for my remaining time).

So I got to explore a lot of different fields. Not only a variety of government and public policy courses, but also several classes in art and philosophy. And I developed a passion for photography. Were any of these helpful for finding a job post-graduation? No, not really. I got lucky by applying to a ton of roles, and some of them got back to me. The first being this reporting and ad analytics team at EuroRSCG, which would become Havas something, because on my resume, the team saw that I could do data analysis from my polisci coursework. But also when I went on to the interview, the team heard my ability to bring together trends from culture, the economy, and politics…because consumer behavior and advertising don’t live in isolation to everything out there. That’s where the value of a true liberal arts education comes in - you’re trained in multiple disciplines (read a lot) and encouraged to bring frameworks together (question everything) to make new ways of approaching things (yes, a very vague word).

It’s fitting that as I was looking up the definition of liberal arts education to make sure I was using the word correctly, an article written by professors at Dartmouth literally goes into why a liberal arts education is valuable in the world of LLMs (I definitely drank the Kool-Aid when I was there). As a parent of a young kiddo, I’m constantly worried about the future of what growing up with all these technological advances means for their development. The arrival of AI assisted tools, so easily accessed, has completely turned upside down the fundamental way knowledge and aptitude is assessed. I think I had it easy when it was just disrupting phone lines to get on Instant Messenger.

What I’m seeing is that as these information interpretation and aggregation machines become more powerful and useful over time, the value of understanding the source material for oneself and being able to question existing interpretations will be increasingly valuable. In other words, the process is as important as the outcome. Conventional wisdom (demonstrated by my toddler) is that the question “why” is humanity’s favorite question, but I think people are really driven by the question “is that right?” I think that’s what a liberal arts education teaches - not just to question why something is the way it is, but also if it has to be that way. That can only come from knowing, deeply, the origins and source materials that construct the existing frameworks. The way in which one arrives at the final outcome is as important as the outcome itself. How else will you know if you’re breaking the rules if you don’t know what they are in the first place?

I hope that’s someone future generations, like my kid’s, doesn’t lose sight of. And if anything, with answers being so much easier to come by these days, I think the way that one arrives at those answers will matter more than ever. Do we have the tools and skills to evaluate those today? No, I don’t think so. But I suspect we will have to figure that out soon.

OK, end of today’s rant. I hope my writing improves over time. And I hope I keep at this for longer than a month. We shall see!