My in-laws are preparing for retirement and so are paring down their possessions. They gave us this antique table, guessing (rightly) that I might like to refinish it. Really, it’s just the top that needs work; the rest of it is lovely. And it’s from a Hoosier manufacturer, likely 100 years old.
One of the principles I come back to over and over is adrienne maree brown’s invitation to move at the speed of trust. That is, whenever attempting any effort with other people, prioritize building trust and respect for each other over and above any other goal. The trust forms the foundation from which the work can grow.
In Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz gets at another angle of this principle: that often when we argue over how to engage with one another, our expressed desire to be right—to “win” the argument—is really a thinly veiled need to be cared for:
Our attachment to our own sense of rightness runs deep, and our capacity to protect it from assault is cunning and fierce. It is hard, excruciatingly hard, to let go of the conviction that our own ideas, attitudes, and ways of living are the best ones. And yet, ironically, it’s mainly relinquishing this attachment that is difficult and uncomfortable—not, generally speaking, what happens afterward. This provides a crucial clue about the origins of our desire to be right. It isn’t that we care so fiercely about the substance of our claims. It is that we care about feeling affirmed, respected, and loved.
The conflation of these things—wanting to be right with wanting to be valued—helps explain why disagreements within intimate relationships can feel not just like betrayal, but like rejection. That’s one reason why silly squabbles over the dishes sometimes blow up into epic battles about whether our partner listens to us, understands us, and cares for us. The moral here is obvious: we can learn to live with disagreement and error as long as we feel esteemed and loved.
Schulz, Being Wrong, page 271
I’d expand on that last bit, and argue it also helps explain why small work squabbles—whether over project management tools, or desk assignments, or the taxonomy of Slack channels—have a similar tendency to bloom into battles over whether we have sufficient autonomy, respect, and power. This is not to say that our experience of intimacy at work is anything like our experience of intimacy at home. (Although, as I’ve argued in the past, I can and do think love can show up at work.) It is to say that our relationships at work are not somehow diminished simply by arising from work. We demand trust and respect at home, in the streets, and in our workplaces—and rightly so.
To flip this around, if we want to build cultures where productive disagreement can happen—whether it’s about the dishes, or the ideal code architecture, or which lines of business to invest in—we have to first establish and nurture that trust and respect. Otherwise we’ll be too busy being right to get around to learning something new.
Many things have changed since I became a parent (including not wanting to be a parent to begin with), but the one that has impacted me the most is how fast things seem to be moving now. I know it's a cliche, people saying that time speeds up after you become a parent, but it's true.
On one side this is not necessarily bad. I'm definitely much (much) busier now than I was before, I now have enough free time to just do maybe one or two personal things I want to on a given day. On the surface it sounds bleak, but I'm lucky in that I actually enjoy spending time with my son. Playing with him, seeing him learn and grow (and seeing me learn to be a parent), have been one of the biggest joys of my life.
Being extra busy has also been a positive for my mental health in some ways. The fact that I have less free time also means I have less time to spend worrying about senseless stuff (my favorite hobby), less time to spend ruminating or imagining painful futures that are extremely unlikely to happen.
However, there's always something special going on lately, always something noteworthy. This, coupled with the strict schedule that my days seem to have, makes it so that my days appear to be blurring one into the other.
I feel that before, when there wasn't much happening in my life, I could use special events as markers, obelisks or island that I could look back on to measure the passage of time. But how can you measure time if you have a wall, just stretching out backwards until the horizon?
Earlier this week I was telling my son how well he was walking, and then realized that he's been walking ok for the past 6 months or so! I still feel like he started walking last month.
I imagine this blurring is greatly enhanced by the fact that, with a kid, things mostly happen in a continuous way. Every once in a while you do get new behaviors from one day to the next, but mostly things evolve slowly over a large span of time. For instance, my son has been babbling (what I think is mostly) nonsense for a while now, but how do you know when that nonsense stops being him just parroting words he hears, and starts being original thoughts? By the time you notice, you've already been hearing him express himself for a while without realizing what was happening.
Looking back I can see how this feeling, that things are just slipping through my mind, is a big inspiration for why I've been writing so much lately. Maybe I'm subconsciously trying to leave some kind of mark for my future self saying I was here, something I can look back on and see how things have changed.
You can't really put a kid on pause and then come back to them when you feel like it. They have their own peculiar way to summon attention, and I think we (as parents) are biologically wired to provide it. And this is good. I often find myself reevaluating my behaviors, admonishing myself when I do something I wouldn't like him to repeat, and in so doing I've realized I'm steadily, slowly, reinventing small parts of myself as I try to be the best role model I can be.
Sure, I don't always manage it, and sometimes it can't be helped, but it's definitely the best motivator I've had to try and grow as a person.
Reminds me of the popular cheesy quote that goes something like:
Try to be the person you want your children to grow into.
~ Take care 🌱
Sazón’s secret is MSG. That is why it makes everything taste so good.
Tracy recently talked about her drift away from Sci-Fi, and shared a very interesting article about people's reduced interest in the genre.
I like the article! I've always been a fan of sci-fi and I probably will continue to be but it explained some things. I thought it was strange how people seem to love new sci-fi shows and movies that come out, yet the sci-fi section at book stores is always really sad and pathetic.
This phenomenon holds the key to science fiction’s fall: Science fiction literature has always depended on an ecosystem of non-literary media, and the transformation of this media landscape, especially how the non-literary media landscape has pivoted to adaptation, has had a significant deleterious effect on the success of science fiction literature.
There is a marked difference between E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial on one hand and exhausted IP shlock like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania on the other. Scifi blockbusters of the 1980s, while not exactly the zenith of altruistic creativity, were at least the product of human imagination as opposed to C-suite thinking. It’s possible part of the decline of science fiction as a saleable genre of literature has to do directly with the reduced interest people are likely to have in tie-in fiction. This is especially exacerbated when the movies become largely adaptations of earlier work, or bomb completely.
The article explains very well how the focus on adaptations is hurting the genre, and I think this may be true in a general artistic context as well. We all know that art is hurting as good stories become an afterthought to films that "sell well". But as they tend to say: no risk no fun. And sci-fi appears to be hurting the most.
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Like the Metaverse, history is repeating itself with zero contact with the last time a lot of smart people had conversations about AI Agents.
Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2024/04/13/2404-ai-agent-metaphors/
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I’m currently reading Dan Bricklin’s 2009 book ‘On Technology‘.
It’s a collection of blog posts written during the 2000’s and a fascinating window into the kinds of topics that were being discussed in that era.
There’s great post reproduced dated April 4, 2004 called Metaphors, Not Conversations. Reading it the other night, it caused me to experience a kind of temporal whiplash. It’s about embedded software agents and artificial intelligence in computing UX.
Exactly the same topic of conversation that is occurring right now across social media about the future of AI. Like the Metaverse, history is repeating itself with absolutely zero contact with the last time a lot of smart people had these same exact conversations.
The beginning of the essay links to a July 2000 New York Times article titled ‘Microsoft Sees Software ‘Agent’ as Way to Avoid Distractions’.
There’s some fantastic zingers in it. Including a quip from Jakob Nielsen a ‘Silicon Valley expert on software usability’ who said. “Most Internet entrepreneurs treat the users’ attention as a Third World country to be strip-mined”. Which is a line that can generate enough hot takes to fill a whole episode by itself … anyways.
The main thrust of the article it’s a focus on Microsoft executive Eric Horvitz and his work on human computer interface design. He said back then in 2000 that if he were to write a book, it would be called ‘My Battle With Attention‘(Same). What he was proposing as a fix was a context aware Attentional User Interface:
Using statistical probability and decision-theory techniques that draw inferences from a user’s behavior, the team is developing software meant to shield people from information overload while they are working.
This is the same team that invented Clippy. But the article makes it clear that despite its failure, there was still a strong will at Microsoft to create an agent or co-pilot to help a user navigate a computing environment.
Bill Gates too has always been enthusiastic about software agents. In his 1995 book The Road Ahead (which is brilliant by the way) he describes an Agent as “a filter that has taken on a personality and seems to show initiative. An agent’s job is to assist you. In the Information Age, that means the agent is there to help you find information.”. And again in an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2000 he talked about personalised TV Guides.
The “TV guide” will almost be like a search portal where you’ll customize and say, “I’m never interested in this, but I am particularly interested in that.”
It is no surprise then that Microsoft has gone all in with it’s OpenAI investment and launched so many AI products. LLMs speak to ambitions embedded deep in the DNA of Microsoft, present since the very beginning.
I have at this point read a lot of 90’s material on computing visions. Which has resulted in frustration about contemporary conversations around the same topics. For example: The recent discourse sparked by NVIDIAs AI powered NPC announcement would have benefited greatly by an understanding of Leonard N. Foner’s early 90’s work on software agent interactions in MUDs .
Anyways I digress again.
It seems to me that 1990’s ideas around software agents fell into into two camps. They are one. a sort of context aware passive filter, or two an active participant alongside a user.
Responding to the NYT article Bricklin talks about metaphors and their importance in software design. A good metaphor he says: “aids in developing trust between the program and the user”. And what he takes issue with is that “the metaphor proposed for many of the agents and assistants (…) is of a “magic” program that says, “I know, trust me, I’ll tell you. (…) An easy metaphor to invent, but one with very little transparency”. Biricklin by the way is the inventor of Visicalc – the first electronic spreadsheet.
He goes on to talk about why “this is the answer, trust me” is a very poor interface metaphor. Which I can illustrate with a recent example – the uproar over ChatGPTs confident assertions of hallucinated facts.
We did however actually get the passive agent based future imagined in the 1990’s. It’s the Netflix Algorithm or Amazon’s recommendation engine. And they were all built with the hot computer science Microsoft were jazzed about later on that 2000 NYT piece – Bayesian Inference.
What’s happened to more recently is that recommendation agents have became active ones in passive clothing.
The algorithmic feed. TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook etc all utilise content filters that lack transparency and lean heavily on ‘trust me’ as an interaction metaphor. They aren’t helpful agents at all, they all restrict human agency inside their systems.
The gap between the Microsoft article on Bayesian filters and the first Netflix recommendation algorithm was 10 years. We learnt a lot about how humans react to AI Agent in techno-social systems in the 90’s. and Computer science has been dreaming about software agents since the very beginning.
In 1995 Gates thought that in the future an agent would be there to help you find information and make sense of things. But it turns out they’ve been weaponised against us in order to boost dwell time and increase ad venues. Social media is a mess and Google has become practically useless.
So I am right now, deeply sceptical about the current rush towards the development of active software agents built on top of LLMs. We’ve been through all this before, and it could take 10 years.
And as Birkman says – these are easy metaphors with little transparency.
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Russia Is Buying Politicians in Europe. It Is Happening Here Too.
