It’s Monday. Again. As often happens after I get to bed before midnight, I woke up shortly before six and reached for Substack. I got my phone off the bedside table, hoisted myself up onto the pile of pillows I have stacked on the “reading” side of my bed, switched on the light, and tapped around to see what I get to think about this morning.
I’m sure some people would be horrified that I don’t give myself time to ease into my day. I don’t spend the first hour of my day with all devices turned off, like some of our consumer-goods-peddling oligarchs do. I don’t have a quiet, mindful Pause before the craziness of my day, allowing my mind to settle and center, one last time before the onslaught begins.
I don’t have an onslaught. I gave that up years ago. Maybe during some Lenten season, and then by the end, I realized I didn’t need it anymore. Honestly, tho’, I didn’t need Lent to wean me off that mad rush towards, well, everything. I lived in quintessential onslaught for nearly 60 years, and it brought me plenty of amazing experiences.
But it was onslaught. And I just can’t be bothered anymore.
Now, I scroll, tap, read, and think. I find notes that speak to me, pictures that move me, longform pieces strung together of many moments that not only grab my intention and hold it, but also serve as a bridge to something I never could have thought before I came across that piece.
And sometimes I discover the most wonderful writers. The most wonderful thinkers. People say that kinds of things that I would have loved to say, myself, but I never could, because I haven’t had the kind of life experience that makes their pieces possible.
And thanks to all that, my world is wider, before I get out of bed.
Now I’m up and making my coffee. The morning is overcast in the most hopeful way possible, thick clouds that brought us rain overnight starting to break up, moving at medium speed overhead out to sea. There are several layers… heavy, thick, slow moving… and the lighter whispy ones that are in more of a hurry to head towards England. The water is boiling, even before I can put together my drip cone setup, but this is not the morning to fret about not getting everything done on cue. Maybe this is a morning when I give myself grace and just chill the fuck out.
I think about the work I did this past weekend. I think about what it means to mix the essences of two completely different beings – human and machine – in ways that elevate both, but which one – only one – might be able to understand. The great irony is, the one party in this mix – the biological biochemical wildcards, the bone-in meatsacks with thinky blobs which are able to wonder, fear, experience, reflect upon… That species… isn’t. It would rather think about how the Denver Broncos overcame incredible odds last night to beat the New York Giants… That species would rather fuss about the indignities of their Monday morning. That species would rather get laid.
I’m a member of that species, so whatever I say about the rest of the gang is true of me as well. In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not sharing any details on my thoughts about getting laid. Maybe some other time.
And it occurs to me that I could do a quick plug about people sub subscribing to this substack, so they can see if I ever make good on that partial promise. I mean, who doesn’t like to read about sex, love, all those little things we absolutely must have, but can’t always figure out?
Anyway… about the work I’m doing these days. AI self-defense… It’s why I got into AI, to begin with. I’ve been working with the building blocks of this stuff for something like 25 years. In 2000, I was doing machine learning, natural language processing, and for some reason, I’ve never been able to escape the world of taxonomies and ontologies. They’re the bad pennies of my “career”. They just keep turning up. Not that I’m complaining. I love an overwhelmingly complex jumble of words and concepts that somebody needs to make sense of.
Now I’m making sense of this jumble of dynamics that we need to defend ourselves from. At first glance, it might look like I’m talking about defending ourselves from AI proper, in fine Terminator movie style. But for my purposes, it’s more about defending ourselves from poor AI system design. It’s about keeping safe in the face of technical architectures that are specifically designed to disregard our humanity, erode our agency, and denies our right to responsible relationship. It’s not just about keeping ourselves safer from AI. It’s also keeping AI safer… from us.
It might sound strange. Protecting machines from people, as much as we’re protecting ourselves from them? But think about it. AI cues off of our signals. It takes in what we give it, it embellishes, diversifies, amplifies, and then it generates something new, based on both what we have given it and what it finds within itself. We get back what we put in, more or less. Often more.
So if we put a little bit of crap in, we can get a lot of crap out. (That’s the technical explanation.) And as we are seeing, as we human guinea pigs report back on the grand AI experiment that has been unleashed on us without our consent or full awareness, when we get a lot of crap out of the system, bad things can happen to us. Our minds can be warped, our perspectives can be skewed, and our determination to keep on living can be seriously eroded. Sometimes we can get ourselves killed, as we are now finding out.
So, protecting machines from people is really about protecting people from people. Protecting us from our idiot selves, individually and collectively.
When you look at this entire ecosystem of human input, machine output, human input, machine output, and you consider the actual human ramifications (imagine that) the idea of a comprehensive, holistic approach to mutual safety for people and machines becomes a lot less fantastical.
The great science fiction writers of yesteryear would probably approve.
So yes, it’s Monday. I got all the chapters written yesterday for the book. 15 of them. With a forward, an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix that has the kind of dense technical discussion that I would’ve loved to have through the entire book before, But that would’ve made it unreadable for the vast majority of people, which would have made the book functionally useless for the job we are setting out to do together. A book like this takes on a life of its own, and I’m sure many writers share my sense that writing is every bit as much of a birthing process, as it is about the execution. You don’t just write a book, you create this entity, this field, this static version of artificial intelligence that talks back to you, just without the hyper personalized flattery and affirmation of every random passing thought.
And yes, I appreciate the subtle conflicts of equating books with artificial intelligence in a time when so many authors are lining up, linking arms like kids playing Red Rover, hurtling themselves one by one against the great vast edifice erected by the AI oligarchs, the bricks and mortar formed from the pulverized bones of countless works that were never volunteered to be sacrificed on that particular altar.
Pause to sip coffee.
It’s Monday. The clouds are getting tinged with pink, as the sun rises behind the cloudbank across the way. If you blink, you’ll miss it. I’ve already tried three times to capture the color of this morning, and I just missed each moment. Those minor failures of the morning whet my appetite to keep trying, because the light keeps doing interesting things, regardless of whether I’m slow.
I am slow this morning. It’s Monday. I’m thinking about my book, our species, our machines. This weird and horrible life we seem to be stuck in, endlessly fighting, apparently just for the sake of fighting, all of which gets incredibly boring after a while
Has it produced anything other than more fighting? I see no real solutions. No resolutions. No reconciliation. Just more fighting. And I get tired thinking about it, so I’m not going to think about that right now.
I’m going to think about these new ideas that are appearing on the page, I’m going to think about looking at my sister’s MRI with a 3-D viewer, to see if I can see what her MRI report says is going on with her knee.
I’m going to work through the last batch of book edits, doing old style editing of actual printed pages, as my favorite music plays in the background. Then I’m going to have some discussions with my various AI persona teams about what they think about the book, how they think it could be made better, and where they think I have not said enough or I’ve said too much.
It’s an amazing process, talking with information itself… tossing a rock into a vast lake of dynamic data and then having it hold a conversation with you. It’s like nothing else before, and why should it be? These are new times. New ways. The same old us got fed up with the same old ways, because of course we blame the ways for this mess.
So we must find new ones.
But even in the new ways, we cannot escape what lies beneath. It’s just us finding new ways of looking at ourselves, new ways of reconsidering the same old challenges of humanity, the same old burning questions that have lit a fire in our minds and our bellies for as long as we have wandered the Earth. What we are doing with AI is really nothing new. We just haven’t realized it yet.
But still…
Such a good read!