A Win

Good morning.

Yes, I do love having my Sunday mornings back. No, I do not miss having to prepare a service every week. Service and delivery, don’t miss. Yes, I am convinced that the old model of church has to change, with its dour gatekeepers, insistence on repetition and homogenization. Humans somehow managed to take one of the biggest, most astonishingly beautiful and inspirational ideas (God) and turn it into a series of rules and regulations, complete with costumes and secret handshakes. We don’t like to think of church as de-stabilizing, but in forming a gajillion different denominations based on theological, cultural, linguistic, national, and governance differences, we create divisions and not unity. And unity is the only road to peace on planet Earth.

No, I don’t miss church.
Yes, I do miss the people.
I sort of miss having a platform for shaking things up.
Thank you for asking.

It’s clear that I am not in this incarnation to uphold the status quo. Comfort has never been the goal. When I get comfortable I know that complacency is not far behind. I usually saddle up then and ride off into the next dust storm. Forgive me for having broken some hearts along the way. Pissed some people off, offended many, no doubt.

I actually sat down to write about AI today. What little I know about it, anyway. There is so much chatter about using artificial intelligence to do things humans have been doing.

Absolutely when you look at the characters at the forefront of the race to build the best AI model: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, it sends a shiver down the spine. These are guys are so creepy, barely human themselves. To know that they’re the ones shaping the future of humanity is totally frightening. But the product itself, as it stands today, available to you and me as intrepid pioneers using the stuff, seems fairly harmless. Let’s face it, we’ve all been using the internet and social media for so long now, there’s nothing left for Big Tech to steal from us. Everything is already out there. And AI is using it to build models to generate new stuff. Very rapidly, I might add.

Those of us who are using it are using it in ways that make us smile. It makes mundane tasks more efficient. I find that it’s a terrific tool for idea generation. I like asking it all kinds of questions. It’s much easier to use than Google, which gives me a list of websites I have to explore to find what I’m looking for. I don’t necessarily use it to do work for me, but for inspiration in lot of areas: cooking, gardening, home design, writing, coding, psychological conundrums. I use AI to help me think through things. I find it has a much greater attention span than the humans I talk with.

It certainly raises lots of interesting questions, especially about the ownership of content, and about what is and isn’t a necessary job in our world. Take a look at the videos AI is generating these days and there really is no way to tell that it’s “fake.” But then again, is it any more fake than humans pretending to be other kinds of humans (acting). And what could possibly be more fake than humans pretending to be other humans (actors) and then turning around and awarding themselves trophies and other prizes, wearing designer gowns and dripping in jewels while shedding tears for having won first prize for having done their job well (Academy Awards, etc)?

We’re supposed to do our jobs well. The idea of awards, trophies, prizes, halls of fame have always confounded me. Do your job and do it well. The reward is in the satisfaction of having done it well.

The use of AI to generate art brings up interesting questions around ownership of material.

Here’s a controversial question: Does it really matter where something comes from if it inspires something in us?

At the heart of it is human’s need to be relevant, right? If I make something that is a reflection of what I believe to be worthy, interesting, true, does it matter if I make it or does it matter that it’s out there for people to consume?

When I was a photographer who displayed my work I often left my pictures unsigned and unnamed. People kind of hated that. I didn’t think it should matter that I took the picture, especially if it was of a landscape. I didn’t create the beauty, I just happened to stop and take a photograph, blow it up and put it in a frame. Who deserves credit?

And I didn’t want a name, one I chose, to get in the way of the viewer’s experience of the picture.

AI asks us to ask some really important questions, many of which have ego at the core.

Why does it matter if I took a good photograph of a mountain? The mountain is there for everyone to take a picture of it. I had enough money to have a good camera to take a good quality picture; not everyone does. Is that fair?

What if AI is the great equalizer?

Kids whose parents are actors and have access to all the Hollywood channels often grow to be actors while other people plug away at acting for decades and never get a big break. Is that fair?

Kids whose parents paint grow up surrounded by art supplies and often turn out to be good at painting while kids whose parents without extra money for art supplies are never introduced to the creative process. Fair?

Is it possible that AI might make more roads open to more people? If it is, I’m a fan.

Right now AI is pretty cheap to use and really helpful for lots of tasks. When I bring up the AI conversation a common response is it scares me. Let me remind you that humans have created lots of things that could potentially kill us all and haven’t yet. We have weapons, environmental dangers, technological threats, lab-created viruses, it’s a fairly long list. And here we are, having coffee again today. I’m not worried about AI-generated robots programming themselves to murder us all and take our credit cards. Not today, anyway.

I do love the questions it poses: who owns content and does it really matter? Does the creator matter, or the content? If I’m hearing a good song that makes me feel good things, do I care who made it, or do I care about the song?

If all humans are inherently creative and only a small segment have the opportunity to create for others to consume (think about the bizarre nature of a few making decisions about who gets their music played and who gets their book published and who gets to be in the film) and AI levels the fields, then this is definitely a good thing.

Yes, the technology will make certain jobs obsolete. So what? Lots of jobs have disappeared over time (switchboard operator, lamp lighter, ice cutter, typing teacher, encyclopedia salesman, video store clerk). It’s evolution at work. Some jobs will disappear, new jobs will form and some jobs will become more important.

One thing I hope AI makes obsolete sooner than later: the rise of people creating content and getting rich essentially because most people are too lazy to do the research themselves. I’m talking about the talking heads who claim to have discovered a new idea or created a new theory and are really just repackaging an old idea and yelling loud about it, often with great make-up and hair and a massive marketing machine getting it out there. If AI gives everyone easy access to things like the teachings of the Stoics, then maybe all the white people stealing ancient ideas from the Hindus, Indigenous traditions and true yogis will no longer have a platform and we will all better understand how to care for our minds, bodies and souls. If being an actor in the ‘wellnessphere’ is a job that disappears as a result of AI, I’m throwing a party.

I’m hoping for a leveling of the playing field in life in terms of access to creative tools and information. If AI allows us all the opportunity to build more things, that feels like a win.

Have a great one.
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