I’m late to the party in my fandom of Scott Galloway. I got to know him from his joint podcast with Kara Swisher, Pivot. I’ve come to admire his solid analysis of business and politics, and especially, as someone in my age bracket, his concern for the emotional wellbeing of young men. (You can hear his incisive views on that subject, in his typical iconoclastic framing, at the 1:09:35 timestamp of this episode.) Now I’ve also subscribed to his solo podcast, Prof G, and today that led me to this essay about the passing of the great Daniel Kahneman this year, pictured above, and how Galloway applies this Nobel Prize winner’s principles from Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman’s breakout book.
His premise is that we need to stop and think before acting. This sounds obvious, but as he explains in the essay, it’s far harder to put into practice than you’d think. Kahneman was the first to hypothesize upon, and prove the existence of, some profound cognitive biases we all possess, especially Loss Aversion. Kahneman describes in great detail how this influences our decisions — when we are thinking fast. It has since been shown to also exist in “lesser” primates, suggesting that we applied loss aversion when we were still swinging from tree branches by our tails.
Kahneman also wrote about how, since we make thousands of decisions per day, we tend to do more “fast thinking” as we become fatigued. If (or should I say when?) you break your 2025 New Year’s resolutions of eating fewer sweets, or drinking less, or doing less scrolling on social media, consider the time of day. You’ll likely find that you made the wrong decision, and fell back onto fast thinking, when you were most tired.
How To Bank Your Limited Daily Allotment of Slow Thinking Decisions
Maybe I like Galloway’s tribute to Kahneman because I apply similar rules as he does, to preserve thought energy for things that matter. He writes:
I actively limit the number of decisions I have to make to preserve neuron power for the key ones. I have other people order for me at restaurants [and] I have a uniform for work / working out, wearing the same thing every day.
Yep, that’s me as well. And maybe my admiration for Galloway just shows that I am susceptible to another damning cognitive bias, Confirmation Bias. It goes like this: He must be smart because I fancy myself smart as well, and he acts the way I do. Come to think of it, this is definitely true. And I’m also — more often than I’d like — the victim of myself in the sin of loss aversion. Here’s an example I’m not proud of:
During the pandemic, when my last employer included me in its efforts to deliver on quarterly profits and told me I was being let go, one of the very first actions I took seemed smart at the time. Without consulting anyone, that very day, I sold my 14 Ethereum “Ethers.” I told myself I could not endure another loss, so the crytocurrency I had purchased at $210 each, I sold for somewhere around $440. My fast thinking rationale was it could add to my considerable financial cushion at a 2x profit.
If I had held onto that $6,000 investment, purchased at half that amount, today I could have sold them for $47,000. Remember how I said my financial cushion was considerable? Well, so were my employment prospects, which someone could have helped me realize, applying slow thinking.
Seventy-five days after my last day of employment there, I joined my current employer.
Luckily, I’ve lectured on the power of loss aversion — the source of every dollar of profit at every casino blackjack table and within every insurance policy. I know its power and forgave myself for being an advanced primate. Anyway, crypto is way too volitile to be trusted. Good riddance.
More importantly, I also know, in advance, the breakfast and dinner I’ll eat every upcoming weekday, and the workout and work clothes I’ll wear every day until either I or that limited clothing selection fall apart.
Like Professor Galloway, I’m saving neuron power for the important decisions in 2025.
I first started blogging about the metaverse 15 years ago. Back then it was speculation about the adoption “stickiness” of Second Life, by Linden Labs. Much has changed, as evidenced by Mark Zuckerberg going all in — even renaming his Facebook corporation Meta, and paying the price in steeply falling stock value and frustrated employees. But there are things that have clearly not changed since Second Life’s arrival, and they suggest he’s on to something. They are listed below, with the fourth being most consequential:
The metaverse remains bound in the temporal world — but is not spatial — as we know it in the “real world”
The metaverse remains a reality that a group agrees to
The metaverse is still reliant on the Network Effect for survival
As true as it was last time with Second Life, if the metaverse catches on it will change everything
Let’s explore these one at a time.
1. Be Here Now, But Here Is Up To Us
With a hat tip to Ram Dass, I used his famous book title to remind you of the IRL world we call home. In the metaverse, the “now” is still immutable. Time cannot be changed. But the “here?” Negotiable!
Think about if you’ve ever passed a note in a classroom. And about the texts you’ve exchanged there as well.
The note is both spatial and temporal. It’s written on a 3D object (paper) and when you pass it to me, you see my reaction in real time, the temporal part of the temporal / spatial here and now.
A text from your cell phone to mine? You still see my reaction in real time, but the note only exists in a device.
This is the world of both Linden Lab’s metaverse and Mark Zuckerberg’s. One small difference is the blurring of the metaverse with Augmented Reality (AR). Unlike Virtual Reality (VR), mediated by a device such as Oculus, with AR aspects of the metaverse can be overlayed on the place you are viewing from, and the view through which you are experiencing in that device.
The metaverse in AR can play with our spatial experience. Which is pretty cool.
But let’s return to pure VR for a moment. What place does a VR headset take us?
2. Agreed-upon Real Estate
Robert Frost, in his poem Mending Wall, reminded us that, “Good fences make good neighbours.” Don’t believe him? Wherever you’re living now, please don’t contemplate strolling into your neighbor’s house or apartment unless invited. It won’t go well.
Why does this matter? The real estate in the metaverse is manufactured, and theoretically unbounded by physics.
My metaverse can be different from yours. But unless I’m throwing an insanely popular house party in mine, you’ll find my metaverse a pretty boring place (and frankly so will I). The temptation, in both Zuckerberg’s metaverse and Linden Lab’s, is not to leave things to chance. Instead, rely on real estate developers who know what they’re doing.
I can put on my VR goggles and meet in a really popular neighborhood, knowing I’ll have a good time and even find value in the acquaintances I make. It’s a neighborhood manufactured by an enterprise who will benefit from me and many others congregating there.
That’s why even in the early 00s, brands wanted to get in on the action. A manufactured place is not a stretch for a brand.
Debbie Millman, author, teacher and strategist, said that “branding [is a] process of manufacturing meaning.” It stands to reason: Why not keep manufacturing, and create a space consistent with your brand where people can deepen their feelings about it in an expansive and curated communal space?
3. Avoiding the Sound of One Hand Clapping
Zuckerberg has certainly studied the stumbles of Linden Labs and others. He has seen the hazard of a metaverse no one wants to occupy.
The failure to launch of Second Life, in a way where many still ask, “Second what?!?,” is due to the Network Effect. This effect was first observed when our world was mostly analog. I recall it being explained in the context of fax machine ownership. (Yes, I’m an Old):
A single fax machine is useless. A second fax machine has utility between the two owners. But with each incremental fax machine bought and used, their cumulative value grows.
This effect also dictates the survival of a given social network. And ultimately, the metaverse is a social network.
The jury is out if Zuckerberg’s gamble will pay off. But unlike Linden Labs, this gamble is extremely well-funded. And if it does …
That’s my last point, which was as true then as it is now:
4. Technological Change Is Not Additive
The subhead, “Technological change is not additive,” is from author and media theorist Neil Postman, and he elaborates, “[the change] is ecological.” It changes everything.
Everything.
We’ve already seen how Facebook’s current platforms have changed our world. Its politics. Its boundaries. Arguably even its collective levels of happiness and anxiety.
So those four things are what has not changed in one-and-a-half decades. What has changed? A lot, actually.
Ownership, yes. But also bandwidth and access
Web 3.0 has been touted as the advent of ownership, an addition to the read and write features that define the Web 2.0 world in which we currently live.
It’s true.
With blockchain, there are immutable records of ownership, decentralized and out of the control of governments and power brokers. This means, unlike in Second Life, in a modern metaverse you can stake a claim on a space or a possession that cannot be “claim-jumped.” Introducing NFTs.
NFTs are built on the blockchain, and although their value volatility presages a burst bubble, ownership of them can never be disputed. Completely independent a physical, notarized deed, or some institution with a finger in the ownership pie saying it is so, the NFT you buy today will still be indisputably yours a year from now — even if its value falls to less than that of a mint condition Beanie Baby.
That’s a huge benefit of the modern metaverse.
Right now NFTs have been primarily used for art. File away this thought: Wherever artist travel, brands are sure to follow. But I’m getting ahead of myself. There are two other major changes with Web 3.0.
Let’s not underestimate the advent of 5G, and other new ways to move electrons. The speed of 5G makes it built for immediacy. When you and I pass a virtual note, the “now” I experience is as close to your “now” as physics can currently satisfy. That’s important in the metaverse, because, you’ll recall, time is the glue binding all of us to a shared metaverse experience.
The same wider pipes deliver a more detailed experience. On the urging of a colleague, I finally watched the film Ready Player One, and once I saw it I understood why. The metaverse of that story was vivid and inviting. And with haptic wearables, extremely visceral.
Which leads to access. Second Life, at least in its early incarnations, required downloading an app on a desktop or laptop computer. With Meta, all it will take is a headset. And Mr. Zuckerberg wants you to own one.
The Devices To Overshadow Our Cell Phones
“The next cell phone” is how this Economist piece described the AR and VR headsets that are being frantically manufactured by Google, Meta and others. The numbers projected there are breathtaking. This is different from the Linden Labs days, when there was no hardware push to match the software they developed.
And there are already eager device buyers. My old employer, Accenture, just announced they’re buying 60,000 Oculus VR devices. Will this and other investments be enough to achieve Network Effect velocity? Time will tell.
When the burgeoning AOL needed quick growth, 30 years ago, it mass-mailed CD-ROMs by the millions (Hey, they made great coasters!) Will Meta do something similar with their VR headsets? It seems implausible, but necessary to achieve Network Effect velocity https://t.co/X87Ys0b4ZI
But what if it does? Here is the use case I mentioned in the headline.
Superbowl Sunday, 2025
Scarcity is built right into Superbowl Sunday, the intellectual property owned by one of the most powerful brands in the world: the National Football League. This scarcity accounts for the insanely high prices for tickets to those games. With the metaverse, the in-person prices would continue to be stratospheric, but there would be another way to attend, and another price structure associated with it.
Imagine a game where those in the stands can watch the game, but much improved, through AR glasses. Statistics could flash, and replays would be on demand with the utterance of a voice command.
In addition, those who pay enough can be there as well, but from anywhere else in the world, by wearing VR goggles. They’d have an even more virtual way to watch the same time-bound plays and replays.
But in this humble use case, the real metaverse magic happens during half time.
In a way, the half time show we saw this February was close to an AR experience. Like other recent years, there was a miracle taking place, in real time, on that vacated playing field.
While the two teams were in their respective locker rooms, a miracle of logistics, LED lighting, and smoke machines transformed the square yardage of competition into a world designed for entertainment.
There was a multi-floor set, made of scaffolding but dressed to look like something else, that featured a half dozen hip hop elders, including an upside-down 50 Cent. Amazing.
Another recent year featured Lady Gaga atop a crane, surrounded by intricately choreographed light-emitting drones. Again, amazing, made more so by the extremely high stakes of getting the show off the stage once the music ends.
This time-bound event (everything erected must be off the field before the second half can start!) is ready-made for AR / VR sorcery.
Enter Google Tilt and Dozens of Sculptors
What if, in 2025, the rigging that showcases the singers and dancers was far simpler, and the other world that is conjured is created in a metaverse? And what if we get to see that world be sculpted, one sweeping plain of light at a time?
Imagine half time has just started, and everyone in the stands sees an assembly taking place through their AR glasses. The set for the musicians and dancers is constructed over and around pipes and stage planks, by real artists on the field, using virtual light they have mastered.
We see those sculpting talents through something like Google Tilt. Remember when I said brands aren’t far behind when artists step in, to create, and enthrall us? Well naturally, these half time artists would be heavily sponsored.
“Google Tilt?” you ask. Instead of me describing it, allow me to show you this:
The half time set creation dazzles the audience watching in the stands, but also the additional paid attendees using VR.
As for the rest of us? Technology isn’t additive, you’ll recall. It changes everything. We’d still be watching on a television, so we wouldn’t be able to see the performance in 3D, like others. But we would see the same amazing set that adorns the singers and dancers.
As an added bonus, at the end of the show, AV and VR attendees would get a chance to win the unique and heavily branded work of these artists. As the stage is struck, in readiness for the second half of play, the sculptures comprising the stage set would be distributed to the audience, either by lottery or highest bidder, as NFTs.
If you win a sculpture, you’d get to “take home” an actual piece of the Super Bowl show, to show off and cherish. Instead of getting a tee-shirt shot from an air gun, you’d win a beautiful, one-of-a-kind art piece for all to see and admire.
I just posted three things I’ve learned over the decade-and-a-half on Elon Musk’s latest acquisition target. You can read about them on my business blog.
I posted a version of this on my marketing technology blog in 2008, during an exotic summer vacation. This was just months after Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone, and I had no idea I was living in the era of the migration of high quality cameras into our cell phones. The next 13 years would take the changes I observed below to far greater levels, with the assist of social media.
I documented my vacation using a digital camera. With every photo of friends and family that I snapped, I was thinking of the concept that had been sloshing in my brain for years. Still in a distant foreign country, I excused myself long enough to post this, even sketching the accompanying graphic. I’m rerunning the post here, and now, because of news of the well-hyped Poparazzi app, which takes the selfie off the menu for its users.
As I post this, I’m still on vacation in the Faroe Islands, where I’ve attended the wedding of a dear friend’s daughter. It was a traditional ceremony, blending ancient and new traditions. For instance, ancient Faroese and Danish songs were sung during the wedding reception, which also featured PowerPoint slideshows of photos and Quicktime videos depicting the bachelor and bachelorette parties. Digital cameras were everywhere.
I’ve thought a lot about how digital technology has changed the way we experience the world. We like to think that we craft our tools to serve us, but the limitations of these tools cannot help but change us as well, in the same way that our human eyes see a different spectrum of light than, say, the puffins I photographed the other day on the steep Faroese cliffs.
One example of this profound change is electricity. That’s obvious. The other I’ll describe is more subtle, and involves digital photography.
Electric Light: The Other Midnight Sun
Faroese weddings go on for two solid days. The first day, which included what Americans would call the reception, had three distinct meals (the formal dinner, the serving of cakes, and an early-morning soup course). The first meal was only just ending at 11 PM, which didn’t seem so late, since the sun was only just behind the horizon. What’s more, being so close to the Arctic Circle, the sun didn’t stay away for long. As it began to reemerge, at 4 AM, we were still dancing to a band that played exclusively American — and British Invasion — rock songs.
I was told that the wedding dancing of a few hundred years ago would have included a traditional Faroese dance that takes at least an hour to complete (danced, as it is, to a song with 300+ verses). Back then oil lamplight would have illuminated the steps. This certainly would have dampened some of the more boisterous aspects of the event!
So much about us has changed because of technology’s electric sun.
What struck me about his description is the muted reaction of New York Times reporters. Keep in mind that daily news reporting is driven by extremely tight press deadlines. Yet before the electric light, there was much that could be forgiven. A reporter could more easily file stories developed over weeks — and in the process, get more sleep.
Edison’s “lighting of New York” included 27 electric lamps in the Times editorial rooms. And so, you may wonder, what was the account of this sudden conquest over darkness from the reporters of “The Grey Lady?” Well, the column on Page 8 (yes, 8!) of the next day’s paper said it was, “In every way satisfactory.”
Klein made the obvious point that the paper, “never fully grasped its significance.” Only hindsight could show these reporters that their careers were to be changed forever. And also their family life. The electric light would extend both wedding festivities and work responsibilities — allowing for a day that need never fade into darkness.
Life In A Digital Viewfinder
In my travels these two weeks I’ve visited some extraordinary families (and I have one more to meet, in Belgium, before returning to the States). On the walls of homes in Milan, Berlin, Copenhagen — and now Torshavn, Faroe Islands — I’ve admired photos of relatives that sometimes go back to the very first silver plate photographs of the mid-1800’s. These photos are sometimes right next to the latest generation’s photos. Having observed at the same time some very ancient European traditions, attitudes and mannerisms, I have to again posit that the medium has changed us as surely as we have changed the medium.
It was two years ago, when I saw this pose depicted in a still from a movie (illustrated below), that I first realized that the portability and disposability of digital camera technology actually created a new type of romantic embrace.
Compare the stock-still (and emotion-free) poses of couples and families in the tintypes of antiquity with this commonplace example of PDA (public display of affection), and you have to wonder if our cameras own us as much as we do them.
Traditional values — superseding romantic love with love of family, and narcissism with selflessness — may have been made quaint as much by our evolving tools as our evolving beliefs.
Those who know me well are aware I’ve been through some difficult times. To be clear: I’ve never for a moment forgotten the undeniable advantages I’ve had, by the era of my birth (Boomer here), the color of my skin and yes, my very maleness. But I’ve had tests in my life. And I’m writing to you now as a bearer of consolement. I bring you hope in these dark times. Maybe even joy.
You be the judge.
As I write this my friends are reeling from the news of the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s the latest calamity this year and it comes when we all know more are on their way. Like a prize fighter on the ropes, with no referee in sight to stop the pummeling, that ruthless brute “2020” has landed some horrible blows and shows no sign of relenting.
We’ve just surpassed 200,000 deaths from Covid, before even the arrival of the flu season
The U.S. West is only in the middle of its fire season and already the devastation has sprawled beyond a combined area the size of Connecticut
Hurricanes drown other parts of our country
But of course there is more.
I fear, as I’m sure you do, for the very integrity of our democracy, while a vocal minority of our country nods approvingly toward fascism and insists Black Lives Matter has no place in our social discourse because, Why? Fake news? False equivalencies? I can still hear the booing from many in the audience for the opening NFL game when players and coaches linked arms or took a knee in a moment of silence and solidarity.
It’s as if our country has lost its mind, and one wing of the asylum is burning while another is flooding.
To quote a song from King Leer, “The rain, it raineth every day.”
The healing power of The Mary Ellen Carter
At around the time of his death in the mid-80s, my wife (at the time) and I became familiar with Stan Rogers. His folk music endures. At that time, when we first heard his song The Mary Ellen Carter, my wife was extremely sick with a debilitating chronic illness and I was barely making due with freelance consulting work. Times were bleak. (This was just before we scraped up enough money to move to Milwaukee. What came next was discussed in this speech to a Chicago audience, at the most recent Pecha Kucha Night.)
We loved this song, and eventually recorded it onto a cassette tape off of public radio. That tape got a lot of use. It was a source of healing, and inspiration.
When I stopped my marathon work sessions, and our low moods seemed to find no bottom, we would play this song, over and over if necessary, until we moved from holding each other and crying to loudly singing the refrain.
Maybe you will too.
So here is my advice to you: Play this song during or just after your tears, when what you need is a tonic to help you get ready to fight anew. There were other rallying cries for us back then (I’m thinking of Kenneth Branagh’s St. Crispin’s Day speech in the film Henry V), but none as reliable as this.
Here it is, played live as part of a documentary, prefaced by a brief explanation of the power of the song’s refrain. As one man recounts, it may have saved his life, as he faced a death by drowning or hypothermia in a swamped lifeboat.
Photo credit from this post. I hope the author(s) don’t mind.
In that New York Times article, Andy Lamey writes that the timing of this semantic question is far from coincidence. “Lawmakers know that plant-based meat substitutes have become big business: In 2019, plant-based meat sales totaled $939 million, an 18 percent increase over the year before, while sales for all plant-based foods reached $5 billion. The real reason for the meat industry’s interest in grocery labels is that it is threatened by this surge in popularity.”
When those interested in maintaining the status quo start firing up the lobbying machines, you know they are perceiving a real threat. The story of lab-grown meat is starting to get more than just academic. In that press release on lab-grown “McNuggets,” put out by KFC, they remind us of what’s at stake:
Biomeat has exactly the same microelements as the original product, while excluding various additives that are used in traditional farming and animal husbandry, creating a cleaner final product. Cell-based meat products are also more ethical – the production process does not cause any harm to animals. …
According to a study by the American Environmental Science & Technology Journal, the technology of growing meat from cells has minimal negative impact on the environment, allowing energy consumption to be cut by more than half, greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced 25 fold and 100 times less land to be used than traditional farm-based meat production.
The coming few years will be interesting to watch.
In my family, this day of the year was more important than any holiday. My dad had been working intense nights and weekends since late January and was now wrapping up his clients’ taxes (or filing their extensions!).
The next evening, April 16, would be his firm’s Tax Party, where he and his fellow Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), figuratively drunk with pride, would gather to get literally so.
My dad died a few years ago, so is spared the isolation and fear of this pandemic. Not to mention witnessing the disruption of his firm — which is still going strong in my hometown — coping with the postponement of both Tax Day and the annual debauchery that followed.
I was reminded of all of this when I found this video of the brilliant improv duo, Nichols and May. Possibly the funniest sketch is the second of the batch, as they enact a psychiatrist scene.
A version of this post originally appeared in my workplace blog, behind a firewall.
Last week the lunch crowd at Accenture’s Digital Hub cafe in Chicago was buzzing with speculation. Actually, it was buzzing about speculation. An engrossing exercise in a Lunch and Learn presentation called Then & Now: The Evolution of Trends, presented by Fjord, had us reviewing some antique predictions of the future.
I and the rest of the audience was given a reprinted magazine article that our great, great grandmothers might have read and we were asked to summarize its themes. The piece was full of predictions about the last century, written just at the turn of it, in 1900, by The Ladies’ Home Journal.
We found some predictions spot on. Others not so much …
The free university education prediction is of course just depressing. But delivery of products via pneumatic tubes? That’s not far off. Just imagine bolting wings on those tubes, and jet engines on those wings.
Fjord’s predictions — well, actually, more like themes packaged up as trends — were quite good, albeit more conservative. That’s to be expected, since they weren’t boldly looking at a 100-year horizon. Or even one 10 years out. That’s what the excellent Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce, Vala Afshar, did in this recent tweet:
Roughly a decade ago I made a prediction. It’s not in the above list, which frankly surprised and saddened me. You see, it will be a game-changer for our planet.
Once the challenge of this innovation’s scalability is tackled, the only major hurdle will be mass acceptance.
Today at least, most people find it kind of icky.
Test Tube T-bones
If you’d like to tuck into the details of lab-grown meat, I urge you to do so. I wrote the post nine years ago, but the facts in it are still correct … and if anything more relevant today than in 2011.
Lab-grown meat can and will someday feed the planet, while simultaneously helping to heal it.
I’m sharing all of this because, well, as I write this the polar ice caps are melting and Australia is on fire. I find that disgusting.
And although I’m an eager omnivore — I enjoy a real hamburger when I can’t get my hands on an Impossible one — the conditions of the domesticated animals that we slaughter, and the conditions of the underclass forced to do the killing, are also disgusting.
So while scalability is being solved, let’s all think about the tendency toward disgust … the ick factor. I urge you to talk to your friends and family about whether they would eat a hamburger or McNugget made in-vitro. Yes, they’ll say yuck initially. But that’s how societies change — by exposure. It’s called shifting the Overton window.
And if you don’t believe attitudes change, consider that 120 years after that Ladies’ Home Journal prediction, we’ve got legitimate presidential candidates talking about that previously unthinkable free college idea.
The nineties had some exciting music. I could say the same for right now, but the difference is today you can experience that excitement at almost zero cost. As I type this I’m listening to something on Spotify, a cut from a Philip Glass album released thirty years ago. Thanks to streaming music services, my cost-per-minute-of-enjoyment is just pennies.
Not so back then. And because of the steep cost of owning music CDs before Napster kicked off a music distribution revolution, and also because of a personal lack of friends into neo-classical music — and also because I was a pretty broke small business owner with a tiny music-buying budget — I went through the early nineties completely ignorant of Mr. Glass’s work.
Ignorant of him — until that night.
I was living in Milwaukee, trudging through a gentle, sloppy snowstorm, heading to an East Side grocery store. My Walkman was keeping me company, set to FM radio mode, and tuned into WMSE. You need to know that back then WMSE was a college radio station that was particularly … er … college radio.
This meant you were listening not only for the music and news, but for the gaffes of student volunteers learning as they went along. Chaos could break out at any moment.
This was New Music Night. Every college radio station back then received boxes of sample LPs they could play at will, without royalty. The young man spinning vinyl that night must have grabbed the Glass album and plopped it on the turntable knowing as little about the composer as I did.
The excerpt below was recorded in the mid-seventies, but in my memory the sound that night resembled this:
What followed was some of the most repetitive, profoundly annoying music I had ever heard. It was also casting some kind of a spell on me. I almost walked past my destination. Instead I stood outside, eager for what happened next.
I didn’t have to wait long. The young man stopped the song mid-drone. No needle-scratch, but just as abrupt.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
A new song — by a different artist — filled the silence.
Mind you, I had heard New Music Night cuts over the years that were real doozies. One example: a PIL “song” that sounded like a buzz saw over the screams of the band’s leader, Johnny Rotten. And yet this night was the first and last time I heard a song abruptly stopped, and an apology extended.
Now I’m listening to a Philip Glass cut that could easily have been what disturbed the snowy peace. How interesting that new music, like a new clothing fashion, soon becomes familiar and even welcome!
I hope, Dear reader, you too experience the pleasure of hearing with new ears the things that once confounded you. It’s a gift of our extremely flexible brains, an alchemy that can turn a lump of aural coal into a diamond.
I’ve thought and read a lot about artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly, its potential threat to us, its human creators. I’m not much for doomsday theories, but I admit I was inclined to fear the worst. To put things at their most melodramatic, I worried we might be unwittingly creating our own eventual slave masters. But after further reading and thinking, I’ve reconsidered. Yes. A.I. will be everywhere in our future. But not as sinister job-killers and overlords. No, they will be extensions of us in a way I can only compare with that most beloved of domesticated creatures: The dog.
For you to follow my logic, you’ll need to remember two facts:
Our advancement as a species from hunter-gatherers to complex civilizations would not be possible without domesticated plants and animals
Our collective fear of technology is often wildly unfounded
Bear with me, but you’ll also probably need to recall these definitions:
Domestication: Taking existing plants or animals and breeding them to serve us. Two examples are the selection of the most helpful plants and turning them into crops. Michael Pollan’s early book, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, will bring you a long way to seeing this process in action. As for animals, you may think of dogs as being mere pets, but early in our evolution as humans we bred the wolf to help us hunt for meat, and to protect us from predators. Before domestication, we pre-humans hunted in packs, and so did the wolves … never the twain shall meet. After this domestication, we ensured the more docile canines a better life, under the protection of our species and its burgeoning technologies (see definition below), and they delivered the goods for us by helping us thrive in hostile conditions. It was a symbiosis that turned our two packs into a single unit. No wonder the domesticated dog adores us so, and that we consider them man(kind)’s best friend.
Technology: Did you know the pencil was once considered technology? So was the alphabet. You may think of them merely as tools, but technology is any tool that is new. And our attitudes toward anything new always starts with fear. Douglas Adams put it this way: “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1.) Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2.) Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3.) Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” Fear of technology not surprisingly spawned the first science fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a literal fever dream about a scientist’s hubris and the destruction it wrought upon himself and the world. This fear has a name: Moral panic. And it has created some pretty far-fetched urban myths.
In a Wall Street Journal piece, Women And Children First: Technology And Moral Panic, Genevieve Bell listed a few of these vintage myths. The first is about the advent of the electric light: “If you electrify homes you will make women and children … vulnerable. Predators will be able to tell if they are home because the light will be on, and you will be able to see them. So electricity is going to make women vulnerable … and children will be visible too and it will be predators, who seem to be lurking everywhere, who will attack.” And consider this even bigger hoot: “There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed.”
Sounds messy.
I don’t have to tell you about our modern moral panic surrounding A.I. Except there is a bit of reverse sexism going on, because this time it is male workers who are more the victims. Their work — whether purely intellectual or journeyman labor — will be eliminated. We’ll all be out on the street, presumably to be mowed down by self-driving cars and trucks.
The Chicken Littles had me for a while
So what changed? In the same week I read two thought-provoking articles. One was in The New Yorker, The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark. Its subtitle says it all: The tools we use to help us think — from language to smartphones — may be part of thought itself. This long piece describes Clark’s attempt to better understand what consciousness is, and what are its boundaries. In other words, where do we as thinking humans end and the world we perceive begin?
He comes to recognize that there is a reason we perceive the world based on our five senses. Our brains are built to keep us alive and able to reproduce. Nothing more. All the bonus tracks in our brain’s Greatest Hits playlist … Making art, considering the cosmos, perceiving a future and a past … these are all artifacts of a consciousness that moves our limbs through space.
To some people, perception — the transmitting of all the sensory noise from the world — seemed the natural boundary between world and mind. Clark had already questioned this boundary with his theory of the extended mind. Then, in the early aughts, he heard about a theory of perception that seemed to him to describe how the mind, even as conventionally understood, did not stay passively distant from the world but reached out into it. It was called predictive processing.
Predictive processing starts with our bodies. For instance, we don’t move our arm when it’s at rest. We imagine it moving — predict its movement — and when our arm gets the memo it responds. Or not. If we are paralyzed, or that arm is currently in the jaws of a bear, it sends the bad news back to our brains. And so it goes.
In a similar way we project this feedback loop out into the world. But we are limited by our own sense of it.
Domestication of canines was such a game-changer because we suddenly had assistants with different senses and perceptions. Together humans and dogs became a Dynamic Duo … A prehistoric Batman and Robin. But Robin always knew who was the alpha in this relationship.
Right now there is another domestication taking place. It’s not of a plant or an animal, but of a complicated digital application. If that seems a stretch … If grouping these three together — plants, animals and applications — keep in mind that domesticating all of them means altering digital information.
All Life Is Digital
Plants and animals have DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid. They are alive because they have genetic material. And guess what? It’s all digital. DNA encoding uses 4 bases: G,C,T, and A. These are four concrete values that are expressed in the complex combinations that make us both living, and able to pass along our “usness” to new generations. We’re definitely more complicated than the “currently” binary underpinnings of A.I. But as we’ve seen, A.I. is really showing us humans up in some important ways.
They’re killing us humans at chess. And Jeopardy.
So: Will A.I. become conscious and take us over? Clark would say consciousness is beyond A.I.’s reach, because as impressive as its abilities to move through the world and perceive it are, even dogs have more of an advantage in the consciousness department. He would be backed up by none less than Nobel Prize in Economics winner Daniel Kohneman, of Thinking, Fast and Slow fame. I got to hear him speak on this subject live, at a New Yorker TechFest, and I was impressed and relieved by how sanguine he was about the future of A.I.
Here’s where I need to bring in the other article, a much briefer one, from The Economist. Robots Can Assemble IKEA Furniture sounds pretty ominous. It’s a modern trope that assembling IKEA furniture is an unmanning intellectual test. But the article spoke more about A.I.’s limitations than its looming existential threats.
Machines excel at the sorts of abstract, cognitive tasks that, to people, signify intelligence—complex board games, say, or differential calculus. But they struggle with physical jobs, such as navigating a cluttered room, which are so simple that they hardly seem to count as intelligence at all. The IKEAbots are a case in point. It took a pair of them, pre-programmed by humans, more than 20 minutes to assemble a chair that a person could knock together in a fraction of the time.
Their struggles brought me back to how our consciousness gradually materialized to our prehistoric ancestors. It arrived not in spite of our sensory experience of the world, but specifically because of it. If you doubt that just consider my natural and clear way just now of describing the arrival of consciousness: I said it materialized. You understood this as a metaphor associated with our perception of the material world.
This word and others to describe concepts play on our ability to feel things. Need another example: This is called a goddamn web page. What’s a page? What’s a web? They’re both things we can touch and experience with our carefully evolved senses.
And without these metaphors these paragraphs would not make sense.
Yes, our ancestors needed the necessary but not sufficient help of things like cooking, which enabled us to take in enough calories to grow and maintain our complex neural network, and the domestication of animals and plants that led us to agriculture and an escape from the limitations of nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes (I strongly recommend Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies for more on this), but …
To gain consciousness, we also needed to feel things. And what do we call people who don’t feel feelings? Robots. “Soulless machines.”
Without evolving to feel, should A.I. nonetheless take over the world, it’s unlikely they will be assembling their own IKEA chairs with alacrity. They’ll make us do it for them. Because our predictive processing makes this type of task annoying but manageable. We can even do it faster over time.
It’s All About The Feels
But worry not. Our enslavement won’t happen because — and I’m feeling pretty hubristic myself as I write this — we’re the feelers, the dreamers, the artists. Not A.I.
Before we domesticated dogs, we were limited in where in the world we could roam, and the game we could hunt. After dogs, we progressed. We prospered. Dogs didn’t put us out of jobs, if you will, they took the jobs they were better at in our service. Inevitably, we found other ways to use our time, including becoming creatures who are closer to the humans we would recognize on the street today, or staring back in the mirror.
We are domesticating A.I. Never forget that.
And repeat after me: We have nothing to fear but moral panic itself.
