Which Ends?
October 9, 2024
3-Item Status
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: The Shortest History of Economics by Andrew Leigh
Listening: Mountain Mama by Happy Landing
Quick Notes
Voting: If you’re in the US and keen to vote on November 5, it’s a good time to check your voter status, as some states have been knocking folks off their voter rolls for a variety of reasons (though in some cases you can register when you show up on election day): vote.org
New Project: I’ve published my first piece on Some Thoughts About—it’s about the growing conflict in the Middle East, and you can check it out here (and subscribe) if you’re keen to.
Question: This week’s question is about AI tools and how they’re being used.
(If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status and/or Quick Notes about what’s happening in your life.)
Which Ends?
A new working paper suggests that there’s an imbalance in the benefits of working with artificial intelligence tools: some people get more out of them than others.
And while part of that segmentation has to do with ability—those with relatively less-developed writing skills will tend to get more out of using AI writing tools than someone who’s a great writer, for instance—part of what determines how much value we get from these things is the accuracy of our skill-related self-assessment.
So if we’re not great writers and we know we’re not great writers, we’ll tend to benefit significantly from AI writing tools, but if we’re not great writers and don’t realize it, we’ll tend to benefit less, possibly because we’ll take the advice these tools offer us less seriously.
Self-perception and calibration are fundamental to our use of any tool (or any source of knowledge and wisdom, really), as lacking the epistemic humility to seek out knowledge we’ll tend to find a lot less of it, and lacking a sense of our existing shape/status/capacity, we’ll tend to ineffectively incorporate that fresh understanding.
“To what end?” we might ask ourselves, as we attempt to suss out the utility of a new app or software suite or gadget. “How does this help me become a more refined version of myself?”
This is a useful question to ask even beyond raw utility, though, as it’s possible to apply these new capabilities, these tech-imbued powers toward ends that are maybe valuable in a very limited sense, but harmful in a much broader, longer-lasting manner.
We can use such tools to churn out endless (if nonsensical, incorrect, and/or regurgitative) content, for instance.
We can use it to help us bypass spam filters and create increasingly manipulative marketing messages.
We can use it to reinforce false narratives and spread misinformation.
None of these utilities or the tools that provide them are inherently negative, but many are currently optimized for personal (or business) gain at the expense of online communities and our larger communication channels.
When we consider using these sorts of tools, then, we might first ask ourselves which of the many ends we might pursue are worthy of our time, attention, and effort, keeping in mind the potential externalities associated with leveraging our newfound powers.
It’s tempting to ignore the secondary effects and potential net-negative impacts of our actions, but as our efforts are amplified by increasingly sophisticated and potent tools, this is arguably a vital first step along any new path we might take.
If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.
Interesting Links
Work Is Under Way on NASA’s Next-Generation Asteroid Hunter
“NEO Surveyor is optimized to help us to do one specific thing: enable humanity to find the most hazardous asteroids and comets far enough in advance so we can do something about them,” said Amy Mainzer, survey director for NEO Surveyor and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We aim to build a spacecraft that can find, track, and characterize the objects with the greatest chance of hitting Earth. In the process, we will learn a lot about their origins and evolution.”
In Search of the Social Microbiome
The microbial flora that inhabits the gut, skin, lung, and oral cavity of humans and other animals is thought to play a critical role in regulating metabolism and immunity. Any disruption or imbalance in that mix, a growing body of literature suggests, may trigger inflammation that contributes to conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
A new theory expands on this view, suggesting that social connections profoundly influence the composition of a person’s microbiome—at least as much as the growing number of probiotic supplements found on grocery store shelves.
The Short History of Global Living Conditions and Why It Matters That We Know It
Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from, we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked like during our lifetime, it is easy to think of the world as static — the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there — and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and will always be like that.
Take a longer perspective and it becomes clear that the world is not static at all. We can change the world. The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago.
(If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.)
Question
Today’s question is about AI and its associated tools.
Consider answering in the comments (via the button below) or hitting “reply” to answer via email. Here’s the question:
What’s the most interesting / useful / mind-blowing AI tool or application you’ve seen (or used), thus far?
I have several answers to this question, as there are just a lot of AI paths being pursued, and there’s a lot of neat stuff being done with variations of the concept.
This year’s Nobel prize for chemistry (half of it, at least) was actually awarded to a pair of scientists (from Google’s DeepMind AI project) who seem to have solved the protein-folding problem, which is a huge deal for all sorts of reasons.
I’m very keen on that type of application for these tools, as virtualizing some of our research processes and making knowledge-expanding predictions using the gobs of data we already have can help us learn and make and do all sorts of new (civilizationally beneficial) things.
I also think there’s room for (arguably less meta-scale important) utilities, like what Google’s done with their NotebookLM project, which allows you to upload documents of all kinds, and then interact with that content in a variety of ways—including making a “talkpod-style” podcast out of it.
If you’re curious what that means, I gave NotebookLM the link to my first essay over at Some Thoughts About, and within a few minutes it made a surprisingly solid AI-hosted podcast summarizing and discussing the content (you can listen to it via the audio player near the top of that post); which isn’t groundbreaking in the sense of solving the protein-folding problem, but it’s still potentially useful and at least superficially impressive (the realism of the “hosts” is especially good).
Outro
It’s finally getting chilly here in Milwaukee, and though there will probably be some warm-wobbles before the end of the year, I’m leaning into it finally being cool enough to keep the windows open all day, and I’m spending a lot more time outdoors (because I no longer melt and burst into flames as soon as I leave my apartment).
My older sister lives in St. Pete, Florida, so she’s had to evacuate in the lead-up to Hurricane Milton’s arrival. Anyone else having their lives disrupted by this (or the previous) storm? I personally never understood the appeal of Florida (see my previous comment about warm weather), but it seems especially precarious now that storm systems are becoming more intense (from ever-warming ocean waters) and now that many insurance companies are pulling out of the region, entirely.
What have you been up to this past month? Drop me a message and tell me what’s been going on, and/or take a moment to introduce yourself—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
I am going to have to go with Runway. I am using it on a work project right now. It really seems like magic to me....