On a recent trip, while we waited at the gate to board our flight, Jeff and I were remembering the days of air travel before the Internet, back when we needed actual paper tickets, and the many layers of smooth card stock covered with inscrutable codes from dot matrix printers. We couldn’t remember how they checked us in at the gate though. Did they just take our tickets? How would they know it wasn’t a fake? We sort of recall a clipboard with a master list of passengers. Is that possible?1
I actually once went to a posh private VIP event that used a clipboard with our names on it. Maybe that sort of lo-fi system is now a status symbol, like a hand-knit sweater or an artisanally brined pickle.
Life changes; I recently discussed the change thing, I won’t belabor it again. We talk about life pre-covid and life pre-9/11, but it’s really funny to talk about life pre-Internet. It also marks you professionally as an old, so I don’t really do it much. I have loads of good clips that are–gasp–on paper. Ewwwww. They’re downstairs in a file cabinet that my husband said we should throw away because who needs it, or anything inside of it. At that moment, deep inside, my little papery heart whimpered.
Remember when we had to write?
One day I imagine my kids will laugh when they reminisce about how strange life was before AI. I hope when that happens I’m sitting at the end of the table, dandling a chubby grandbaby in my lap. I hope I won’t have starved to death by then for lack of gainful employment.
Do I sound panicky and paranoid? So be it. For over a year Kara Swisher and her tech-attentive ilk have warned us all about the massive shifts that AI like ChatGPT could hasten. The Hastening has begun.
My company recently had a hefty batch of layoffs, adorably called a “reduction” by our CEO. (Audible is on Ozempic!). We lost a bunch of designers and writers and we’re already incorporating interesting ways to use AI and other intuitive tech to automate work that used to be done by human hands. Our team is certainly about to shrink more, so keep me in mind if you’re hiring.
My friend told a kooky story about how she saw a post from an old college pal whose dog had just had puppies. They FB-messaged and she connected her to a coworker who wanted two of the puppies. Money changed “hands”... and then my friend and her coworker realized it was all an AI sham. Her friend’s Facebook page had been hacked, there were no puppies, the phone number her coworker had been given was not her friend’s number. It was all hackers employing AI to hustle cash out of innocent dog lovers.
I took this quiz on the NYT where you had to guess which photos were real and which were AI-generated. I rolled into this test cocky that I’d ace it. I got 30% right.
Countless AI-generated images litter social media now. I can already feel us adapting to it, too. Sometimes I snuggle with my girl and we scroll through Instagram together, oohing at the puppies and haha-ing at the kookslams. Seemingly overnight we now routinely encounter a truly wild video and she’ll blandly scroll past it, “That’s AI, mom,” as if duh, as if it’s NBD, as if utterly convincing videos of cars driving up the vertical wall of a cliff routinely pop up in my feed.
I’m not sure what this all means for the world. My go-to impulse is to think we’re doomed, because catastrophic thinking is one of my special talents. I do wish the government would take a firmer hand in regulation, but I won’t hold my breath. Maybe if the Senate didn’t skew quite so old. Forget remembering paper plane tickets, most of them can remember a time before television.
Getting chippy about it
I’m working hard to maintain equanimity and curiosity. One thing that helps me is to know that what I’m doing right here is utterly specific to human me, and would be hard to automate. An AI-generated newsletter about one (fake) woman’s take on what she’s read and the world she’s “inhabiting”? It wouldn’t work. Ezra Klein recently had an interesting episode about taste and how we cultivate our personal taste. He interviewed a New Yorker writer who recently wrote a relevant article about it, and they arrive at the notion that things like this–one person talking about what they like, or what caught their attention–are superior to algorithms. Man, I hope so. Maybe I won’t starve to death after all?
As for my curiosity, I'm now fascinated by the silicon microchip industry, the vital building block for all this astonishing tech. I read a great piece about it by Virginia Hefferman in Wired, where she calls silicon microchips the new coin of the global realm.
Her article is a long read and worth the time. Nearly everything she writes about was novel to me, including my new favorite concept: chabuduo, the Chinese philosophy of “good enough.” I didn’t really know anything about this, or that these microchips are only really made in Taiwan—a precarious situation, geo-politically speaking. I also didn’t know about the fascinating devoutly Christian Taiwanese moguls who run these companies.
An aside: Robert Tsao collects ancient Chinese porcelain and sold one of his old plates for $33 million dollars. The world is so full of happenings these days that what I would consider quite a whammo story–old plate for washing paint brushes sells for eye-popping $33 million in auction–didn't even rank domestically.
I appreciate how Hefferman weaves theories about capitalism into the story, and introduces us to a government official named Keith Krach whose contributions are a perfect counterargument when anyone starts whining about how old and infirm Biden is. (I just mean that the Biden administration—what you’re actually voting for—isn’t entirely staffed by 80-year-olds and they’re doing great work.) At its heart, so much of what worries me about AI is what worries me about unchecked rapacious capitalism, i.e., the reductions CEOs celebrate.
I kept highlighting paragraphs I wanted to paste here to showcase Hefferman’s wonderful writing but I’ll stick to just this one. She’s describing the meticulous protocols she needs to subject herself to be clean enough to tour a fab, or fabrication facility, where these microchips are made:
“The fabs demand caution, reverence, and of course the hygiene of an abluted priest. A jittery, uninitiated person without an engineering degree could be a menace in the fabs, where she could sneeze like a putz and scatter a heap of glittering electrons like cocaine in Annie Hall. I’ll banish my chabuduo from the utterly dustless fabs like an errant molecule of neon gas.”
As for me, I must combat my own chabuduo to get back to job hunting, housekeeping, exercising, etc. Thanks for reading words written by an actual human. Please subscribe, and maybe consider paying for it. I might need the money.
This is a picture I made with AI of “Puppies in safety goggles working at fab.”
Molly Shannon demonstrates the holes in this old system in her great memoir, where she writes about sneaking onto a plane. Here’s my recommendation of her book.