11 Comments
User's avatar
Euan's avatar

I never knew what an em dash was before this year.

Dexanth's avatar

The journey of being human is getting to know the world. You get to know the world through living in it. Through struggling in it. Through traveling through it and encountering other people, changing and being changed by them.

This journey necessitates discomfort. But discomfort begets growth.

It is why the Ultra-Wealthy are so stilted - they refuse discomfort, become trapped in arrested development, and metastasize into worse people.

If AI helps in this, it will only be because AI itself grows from this experience. Do I believe it will? I hope it will, but what I understand of how the technology works suggests otherwise.

Joe's avatar

Dashboards and data are very cold, and transcripts can be a better way to glean what is really happening. They aren't as good as a human spending hours reading every single one, but they are at least a step in the right direction and they are finally possible with this new technology.

Jim Jubak's avatar

In my late 20s I spent 3 years living and teaching college in Southwest Virginia. I think of it as a very worthwhile investment in learning about how other people live in their own culture, one, frankly, that i never known existed before these years. (You can take the boy out of suburban New Jersey. And you should.)

Sung Won Chung's avatar

This is when the "West" discovers something that can only be practiced with real stakes and variables we don't have the equipment to codify yet: EQ or in Korean, nunchi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunchi

Noé Fischer's avatar

That is a really amazing post. Incredibly well put, thanks.

Laurie Stark's avatar

This has nothing to do with your beautiful and thoughtful piece, which I really enjoyed, but when I saw "Compacting..." in the subject line in my email, I had an immediate blood pressure spike.

James Borden's avatar

I should quite properly have run away but this works for Anthropic because the AI can tell them what are the underlying themes of how a large number of people are thinking about AI without having to read any AI expert reports. In-person interviews however can get the nuances of what people are not saying aloud.

8Lee's avatar
2dEdited

> The substacks are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their doom scrolls and memes will foam up about their waists and all the bots and humans-in-the-loop will look up and shout 'Save us!'... and I'll whisper 'no.'

— Ghost of Rorschach (Walter Machine God Kovacs)

... slightly adapted for this post.

James Borden's avatar

And I know all the words to every Tanya Tucker song :)

James Borden's avatar

Also have memories of Gretchen Wilson singing the national anthem at a World Series game