This is a half-baked thought I’ve been preheating for a bit. Technology has changed the way we consume and create media, and considering all the benefits against the drawbacks, sometimes it doesn’t feel like a net improvement to me. Or maybe it’s just that things evolved too quickly, we got excited about all the upside and didn’t think enough about second and third order effects, and now we’re still figuring out a way to catch up....
I am reading and hearing a lot of discourse about AI, machine learning, and more specifically, ChatGPT. It seems like a lot of people have a lot of opinions and things to say, and, like ChatGPT itself, they seem to be often wrong but never in doubt1. From what I can tell it seems like a lot of it is noise (generally when people make blanket statements about AI being bad and dangerous) but there is some real signal (generally when people use more precise verbiage, detailed use cases, and less sensationalized/more nuanced thoughts and conclusions such as potential for bias at a large scale with large language models and generative AI causing harm2)....
After I quit medicine and went corporate (as corporate as tech startups can be, which I guess depends on your vantage point; for me it was and is extremely corporate coming from doctoring), I got really into it and became particularly fascinated to learn how business leaders operate and spend their time (at work and in life) in order to be the most efficient and effective they can be. I guess a lot of people who came up in corporate work (and maybe the culture at large which is often dictated by creatives who may pooh-pooh the corporate life) think MASSIVE EYEROLL when they hear what the latest tech bro thinkboi has to say about optimizing their life and their time, but I actually found it pretty refreshing that in business a spade is called a spade and that spade is a dollar and nobody pretends that we aren’t trying to make money....
I’m getting worn down by all the digital noise. By digital noise I mean the constant barrage of alerts, notifications, pings, email subscriptions I didn’t sign up for, email subscriptions I DID sign up for but regret doing so, all the inputs that come through my connected devices. Sometimes I secretly wish I could be one of those people who moves off the grid, abandons the smartphone, deletes all social media, and lives a quiet minimalist life in the woods....
I signed up as a beta user for an AI art generator that uses keywords (text) to create images. The first image I asked it to make was one using the keywords korean queer mermaid liminal space and these are the four options it generated: Four queer Korean mermaids, drawn by a machine (generated by Midjourney) It’s pretty amazing that a computer made these images, and that is obviously a marvel and an incredible feat of technology, although if you look closely you can see where it still needs a little bit of work (for example, in the bottom right panel the face is fairly well done, but I’m not sure what’s happening with the body or why the tail is detached, and the bottom left very much seems like the generator phoned it in)....
RIP to my attention span. The world seems to be opening back up now that we are no longer surging (or are just between surges?), but I wouldn’t say that I feel normal again. Lack of focus has been one of the most pronounced negative effects. For example, I sat down with a cup of coffee and opened up a text editor to write this note about an hour ago and have since abandoned the window no fewer than seven times (see Appendix)....