Technology is doing more with less

Simon Sarris on careful technology:

Technology is doing more with less. This is a definition we should not lose sight of. The wheel allows one to move more weight, or with less effort. The gas boiler allows heating with less labor than coal. Email is faster and cheaper than postal mail. There are other tradeoffs made of course. (…)

 

If people hate technology and think it clashes with nature, I find it hard to blame technology. We have careless technology because we are careless in evaluating it. We demand too little of it, or we are willing to sacrifice too much for too little in return.

I am reminded of a Tolstoy quote that has always struck me: “People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.” I take this advice to heart, and I think it generalizes well. If you are stuck in a mall food court with only bad food, and you are hungry, you could always just stay hungry. (…)

 

I love technology, the removal of drudgery over the last 250 years is something we should all be more grateful for. It lets us appreciate nature more: we have more time, more travel, more food with less risk, less disease. It is easy to lose sight of just how much was gained so recently. (…)

But I dislike gadgets. I own no TVs, internet-of-things devices, home automatons, etc. In my opinion objects should not beep or be filled with blinking LEDs. Though I built my own house, I don’t own a microwave — it is simply not useful enough to justify the space or the ugliness. The stove is propane gas. I like candles. In winter we heat with firewood. Some of this is durability: these things work even when the power goes out (as it does a few times a year in this part of New Hampshire). They can do more, with less.

What is called tech — that is, what is new and digital — is not necessarily technology in any meaningful way. Often it is merely fashion. The blame cannot rest with the objects and apps, no matter how careless they are made. It is always only up to you to decide if you are getting more for less.

 

Large Language Models — LLMs: it’s technology, not intelligent agents

Alison Gopnik [bolds are mine]:

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake.

A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long as we’ve been human.

Language itself you could think of as a means that allows this. So are writing and the internet. These are all ways that we get information from other people.

Similarly, LLMs give us a very effective way of accessing information from other humans. Rather than go out, explore the world, and draw conclusions, as humans do, LLMs statistically summarize the information humans put onto the web.

It’s important to note that these cultural technologies have shaped and changed the way our society works. This isn’t a debunking along the lines of “AI doesn’t really matter.” In many ways, having a new cultural technology like print has had a much greater impact than having a new agent, like a new person, in the world.

 

Source: “How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell | Los Angeles Review of Books.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 31 May 2024, lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-raise-your-artificial-intelligence-a-conversation-with-alison-gopnik-and-melanie-mitchell/. Accessed 19 June 2024.

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On writing what you know

Simon Sarris:

Someone once mentioned to me that “Write what you know” is not particularly interesting advice, and “Write what you’re learning” is much better. I find this distinction compelling.

A benefit of prioritizing creation and then sharing it is that you might inspire others along with yourself.

And if you are creating while learning in public, you may find others who come along and help you.

 

livre- Mes histoires, Jean Chrétien

book cover with picture of authorUn achat compulsif à l’aéroport de Montréal. Je l’ai lu d’un seul trait. La prose et le contenu sont sans prétention. Une anecdote après l’autre, sans aucun plan de rédaction particulier. On y reconnaît Jean Chrétien: intelligent, vaillant et souvent pince-sans-rire.

Voici le baratin de la maison d’édition:

Pour marquer le 25e anniversaire de son élection à titre de premier ministre du Canada, Jean Chrétien a décidé de prendre la plume et de raconter quelques épisodes savoureux de sa longue et prestigieuse carrière. “Je n’ai écrit ni mes mémoires ni un livre d’histoire. En fait, je me suis amusé à coucher sur papier toutes ces anecdotes que je prends plaisir à raconter à ma famille ou à mes amis après un bon soupe”, prévient-il. L’ex-premier ministre en profite enfin pour rendre hommage à des amis et à d’ex-collègues, chefs d’État ou acteurs de l’ombre. Ses mots les plus tendres, c’est toutefois à celle qu’il appelle affectueusement son “roc de Gilbraltar”, Aline Chrétien, son épouse depuis plus de 60 ans, qu’il les réserve.

 

Chrétien, Jean. Mes Histoires : Récits. les Éditions La Presse, 2018.

Voir mes lectures ici.

Be human to human beings

Whether it’s Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, mass shootings, massive firings in some industries, the war in Ukraine, or the war in the Middle East… it is reasonable to expect that any, some, or all of these events -and others- have impacted and still impact the minds and hearts of the people in your charge at work.

I invite you (and keep in mind that I am not beyond imploring or begging) that you do not turn a blind eye to how your people are affected, and that how they are affected impacts their ability to perform. I’m inviting you to be human. Being human to another human being is not a sign of weakness nor does it entail a loss of power.

And why should you?

Well, because they are human. They’re not things.

Call me a master of the obvious and I will say that there is enough evidence to show that managers and business owners often override this with the doctrine of some dead economist to the effect that “everyone is looking for their self-interest” or “employees have contractual obligations”.

That, by the way, is eons away from the other discourse they hold for the gallery: “We’re a family”, “people are our most important asset”, and -wait for it- “We’re all in this together”.

Again, why should you?

Well, because you are human too. As managers and business owners, we work with people, not through people.

We work with what’s there – now. And that changes from day to day as people have successes, are tired, have children, are worried, navigate grief, move from one city to another, go back to school, etc. It also changes based on what is going on in their environments, close and remote.

Over the years I found that the best teachers and the best managers and business owners all work from the same premise: you teach/manage the people in front of you. Not the ones you wish you had, but the ones you have, the ones that are there.

And not only are they different from one another in abilities and readiness, but they are also different from one day to the next. That is who you work with. Every day.

People are struggling.

There is a lot going on and they carry quite a bit from the recent past.

On the odd chance that you feel this might be too touchy-feely for you, I will say this: Emotions exist. They affect what we think about and how we think. The reasonable thing to do is to acknowledge emotions and work with them. To dismiss them altogether is, well, irrational.

So the invitation is this: be human to your fellow human beings, in difficult times and always.

I know you can. I trust you will.

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I originally published this text in the October 2023 issue of my monthly newsletter.

Executive compensation: reality is different than what Americans believe

From a nationwide Stanford University survey:

The typical American believes a CEO earns $1.0 million in pay (average of $9.3 million), whereas median reported compensation for the CEOs of these companies is approximately $10.3 million (average of $12.2 million).”

Those who believe in capping CEO pay relative to the average worker would do so at a very low multiple. The typical American would limit CEO pay to no more than 6 times (17.6 times, based on average numbers) that of the average worker. These figures are significantly below current pay multiples, which are approximately 210 times based on recent compensation figures.”

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“Americans and CEO Pay: 2016 Public Perception Survey on CEO Compensation.” Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2016, www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/americans-ceo-pay-2016-public-perception-survey-ceo-compensation. Accessed 10 Aug. 2023.

 

Failure and being hooked to a positive outlook

Costica Bradatan:

We fail all the time, in things large and small, yet our biggest failure may be that, as a rule, we don’t understand failure. And since we are not equipped to think about it, we can’t grasp its broader significance in our lives.

A long evolutionary history has hardwired us to go blindly for whatever increases our chances of survival in the world, and therefore to chase immediate success. Brooding over failure, just as brooding over our finitude and mortality, doesn’t improve our chances of survival.

Failure is the sudden irruption of nothingness in the midst of existence, and contemplating nothingness, while spiritually enlightening, doesn’t make much evolutionary sense. That’s why when failure happens – and it happens all the time – we instinctively tend to move on, without paying much heed or studying it in depth.

This must be one of failure’s sweetest victories over us: on a deep level, we are designed to fail, and to fail badly (including our final failure: physical annihilation), and yet we are conditioned to remain blissfully unaware of failure’s darker message because our thinking can’t come to terms with it, just as it can’t come to terms with death itself.

(…)

Th[e] sugarcoating of failure is part of a larger societal process. Everything that is unpleasant, disturbing, depressing in our culture is neutralised, sterilised and promptly taken out of view. Not so much for mental health reasons as for economic and social ones.

To be productive members of society, to be able to make large amounts of money and to spend even more, to take loans and to pay them back with interest, we need to be hooked to a ‘positive outlook’.

Capitalism doesn’t thrive on loners, depressives and metaphysicians. No respectable bank will lend money to a client today who may snap and go Henry David Thoreau tomorrow.

—

Costica Bradatan. “Learning to Be a Loser: A Philosopher’s Case for Doing Nothing.” Psyche, Psyche Magazine, 19 June 2023, psyche.co/ideas/learning-to-be-a-loser-a-philosophers-case-for-doing-nothing. Accessed 28 June 2023.

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Orwell feared oppression. No need, said Huxley, triviality is what makes us irrelevant

From the Foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public discourse in the age of show business (20th anniversary edition, by Neil Postman, Penguin Books 2006. First edition published in 1985.

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another–slightly older, slightly less well-known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be
drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

 

Advice to a 13-year old

Nick Cave:

Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too.

Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts – be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can.

Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world.

Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.

A great start. Better being habitually awed than, you know, “serious”.