We must become a high touch society.
The year is 2010 or so. I’m inside the “executive suites” at Telemundo in Hialeah, which are walled off from the hoi polloi with glass. I’m talking to the head of H.R.
Answering a question, I say: “I think I’m kind of done with being in digital”. They respond: “But you’re our most digital person.” And I say: “I’m the oldest person you’ve met who grew up digital. Every person who comes after me will be digital.”
In other words, “digital” will become meaningless because it will be everywhere, in everything, all at once.
The same can be said of AI, which others have correctly pointed out is the word we use for “software that doesn’t yet work” because once it “just works” it ceases to be called AI and is simply called software.
(I’ve been using Google Translate for almost 20 years. It’s been AI all along.)
Do I mean the 1890’s though? Well, that depends on how we democratize access to the means of production.
This is a helpful reminder from ‘89:
The cartoon depicts the United States Senate as a body under the control of "captains of industry". Robber barons representing trusts in various industries,[5] depicted as obese, domineering, and powerful figures with swollen money bags for bodies, with their nature being juxtaposed with that of the senators of the 50th Congress, who Keppler implies are under the industrialists' control
Hey, look, it’s a storage tank data center:
Illustration shows a “Standard Oil” storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a state house, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House—President Teddy Roosevelt had won a reputation as a “trust buster.” Via Library of Congress
Anyway, we’re there now. And the octopus has many, many, many, many, many, many, many more tentacles.
Last night I got up at around midnight, couldn’t find my phone to listen to a podcast, and decided to watch a movie instead. (Why is there no dedicated podcast player with a speaker?1 AI can fix that.)
I didn’t want to wake up Ana so instead of turning on the smart TV to watch some Kanopy, I put the computer TV on my eyes.
I thought I would watch something from my endless queue of engineering / academic lecture videos but I was not logged in and so I got to see the below:
She Was Squatting Heavy AND THEN
Marvel FINALLY Got The Fantastic Four Right!
What would you do if you stumbled upon this on…
Homeless Veteran on Trial – Then the Judge Heard His Name and…
This is the front page of Google’s Alphabet’s YouTube and it is literally shit. As in excrement. Waste.
I’m told some children like to play with shit (Mom, if you’re reading this, please don’t let me know.) We don’t have to endorse the psychoanalytic tradition to propose that even as adults we humans are obsessed with shit.
Just consider our linguistic habits:
Hearing the news: That’s heavy shit.
Celebrating an experience: That’s the good shit.
Acknowledging irony: That’s some funny shit.
That front page of YouTube that I saw as a generic user is what happens when a computer optimizes for shareholder value by serving shit, after instructing humans to produce more shit, so that we consumers can cover ourselves with shit.
It is awful. I really mean that. It is the Math.absolute opposite of excellence.
These are not fart jokes like in Aristophanes or Chaucer.
This is generative AI slop – “what pigs eat” – being pumped into our mouths, at scale, by companies run by executives who have deluded themselves into believing that the purpose of business is to make money and not to provide a service to other people.
This is “content”. And it is shit.
Producing shit and consuming shit makes us shitty people.
And it’s going to get worse. Because the same children who play with shit grow up to be adults who “don’t give a shit” that what they do makes other people sick.
(See Covid backlash.)2
It’s time to take off our “techno” gloves.
We must become a high touch society.
We must be touched.
We must touch strangers.
If we fail to become a high touch society, our high tech oligarchs – quite literal merchants of death – will kill us all.3
I’m not shitting you. I really mean it.
postscript
The other night I was watching the most amazing movie Double Indemnity in my private Theater and, as always happens when using this empathy machine, the details leaped out at me.
Here are two photos I took from inside the theater:
On the left: note the three separate phones on the table as well as a Dictaphone.
On the right: “What do you mean our machines and businesses run in advance of our good sense?! Hey, miss, serve me another beer, and make it snappy. I gotta hit the road.”
Anthropic’s Claude tells me there are portable podcast players with speakers but I searched for them and the almighty prediction engine is wrong. Just take a look at this very select gallery of Sony portable radios and tell me there’s a device remotely like this whereby the user can say: “play me a lecture about Europe before WWI, preferably from a professor with a British accent.” And, no, I don’t think I’m the only person who wants such a magic box. ↩
Thank you Covid 19 for revealing the angels of our better nature; the tech oligarchs who took a hard right turn after being asked to put literally a single other person ahead of their wants; the ones who continue to tell on themselves by claiming empathy is a weakness and not our species-defining trait. Citations: Clash of tech titans: Zuckerberg praises coronavirus lockdowns; Musk sees 'fascism', The Group Chats That Changed America. And just for shits and giggles, here’s an excellent takedown of Joe Rogan, the preferred interlocutor of charlatans, just asking questions about Covid. ↩
The overwhelming majority of these magnates really DGAF. The claim that “the market” optimizes for human life, let alone human dignity, is bullshit, contradicted by all historical evidence. (cf. The Jungle) ↩