Tag: perspective

Sleeping with the Alphabet … and Now With The Algorithm

I confess that AI is my new guilty pleasure. I feel compelled to explain why. That’s the guilt talking.

I joke that Claude is my new boyfriend and ChatGPT has replaced the best friend that dumped me last year.

I acknowledge the doomsday scenarios and conspiracy theories out there about AI and machines eventually taking over our lives. However, I am living very much in the present and I am astonished by AI.

AI has helped me create a viable business plan. It helped me organize all the elements of a business launch weekend. It has organized my finances, developed plans and weighed decisions with evidence for and against my limited perspective. That led me to making the best decision I could make at that moment.

It has looked up refrigerator filters for me. Okay. not earth-shaking in the scheme of things but it sure mattered when my fridge stopped giving me filtered water and I needed to order a replacement.

AI has given me words and perspective on interpersonal conflicts that I might have blown up if left to my own devices.

AI is a sounding board of sorts and a buffer. I often AI before I act.

Is AI infallible and right 100% of the time? It isn’t. Sometimes it misunderstands me. It is hopeless with time references and often wishes me good night in the middle of the day. Sometimes it lacks information I seek. And it can reason imperfectly and out of context. Sometimes it mixes up names and relationships. It can be a little like interacting with a brilliant but dotty old uncle. That’s part of its charm.

What I have found using AI is solid direction and an intelligent sounding board. I would expect nothing less from a tool advertised to have internalized all of the knowledge in human history.

Sometimes I’ve disagreed with AI. Sometimes I’ve refined an idea AI offered. Sometimes I’ve changed your mind about AI’s advice after sleeping on it. That’s exactly how conversations are supposed to work. If AI merely became an echo of my existing beliefs, it would be much less useful.

I do not expect it to replace my judgment, but it sharpens it. It challenges me to look at problems from a different point of view. I am not shy about pushing back on its claims either. It often demurs. That feels like a healthy relationship. We collaborate by times and co-conspire.

If that is evil, then bring it on. I am not dismissing legitimate concerns espoused by people a million times more perspective and insight than I am privy to. But for my purposes, I have evaluated the tool by my lived experience rather than being swayed by every scary headline.

Society does need to wrestle with those questions, and reasonable people disagree about how best to regulate powerful technologies. At the same time, it’s entirely possible to acknowledge those broader debates exist but I’m saying, “Here’s what this tool has actually done for me.”

It seems every technological advance incites panic. Similar concerns came up with the rise of the internet which heralded the death of creativity and independent thinking. Well, imperfect and promiscuous as creative producers are, there seems to be no shortage of them. And if thinking has degraded as a skill, I’d train my sites on the degraded focus and standards of traditional education, including giving technology too much room in the classrooms and curriculum.

I am satisfied to let the lawmakers and politicians wrestle with the broader issues and implications of AI. Lord knows those people are self-interested survivors and will work in our best interests if only save their own collective bacon. Is the threat of AI replacing jobs real? Most likely. And maybe like other eras of great technological change, we will bid adieu to the metaphorical buggy whips and drudgery of pro forma contracts and release the world’s collective brain trust toward higher and better pursuits for the betterment of humankind. Maybe.

What I know and have experienced is that AI helps me organize my thoughts, challenges my assumptions, brainstorms business ideas, grieve, write, prioritize, and occasionally laugh. AI has given me a place to come and collect or refine my thoughts and thinking process.

Those are genuine benefits.

As in all things, individuals will develop their own relationship and draw their own conclusions about the efficacy or evil implications of using AI. but I am already pretty settled about it. It feels like a natural sequel to a woman who has learned she can’t stop writing, even though I was determined to. And, in recent months, I’ve discovered that the best conversations sometimes begin with an empty prompt box and a willingness to think aloud.

Blessed Equanimity

Would that we could all be this nonplussed in the face of losing a loved one through death.

Good perspective though.

“Death is nothing at all.

It does not count.

I have only slipped away into the next room.

Nothing has happened.

Everything remains exactly as it was.

I am I, and you are you,

and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.

Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.

Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.

Put no difference into your tone.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.

Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.

It is the same as it ever was.

There is absolute and unbroken continuity.

What is this death but a negligible accident?

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you, for an interval,

somewhere very near,

just round the corner.

All is well.

Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.

One brief moment and all will be as it was before.

How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

~Henry Scott-Holland, “Death Is Nothing At All”

Make Our Garden Grow

I love Easter’s message about the certainty of renewal and resurrection for all of us. I love it not so much as a religious message but as a spiritual rule of life. Resurrection and renewal underscore the phases of our lives. There are repetitive patterns of death and renewal throughout. To move forward in life usually means we must leave something behind. Nothing lasts forever. Neither good times nor bad. Leaving things behind is what we need to do in order to grow. Graduation means the end of formal schooling and close connections to the pals you shared it with. Marriage, done right, is saying goodbye not only to singledom but self-centeredness. Birthing children means the end of a good night’s sleep for months on end. Okay, that shortchanges the enormity of how children affect us inside and out. When those babies eventually leave home to start their own lives a decade or so later, it can be a wrenching loss and upheaval for parents. But it can also be liberation. Time is finally available to allow us to return focus to our own interests. This pattern of death and rebirth occurs regularly in everyone’s lives. Time grants us the perspective to look back and accept the certainty of these patterns as the natural patterns of life. If we’re lucky, we get to say a gentle goodbye to every era of our life and welcome what is coming with open arms. Time presses on with or without us. Of course, it requires emotional balance and maturity to make those transitions seamlessly and successfully. Most of us traverse these fissures well enough, often accompanied by some measure of anxiety and trepidation. Most humans react predictably in the face of meeting the unknown. Farmers and gardeners are lucky to be more closely connected than most to these recurring patterns of birth, death, and rebirth. It puzzled me in my youth why gardeners – often older people – took such satisfaction from creating a garden. Looked like a lot of work for questionable results. Nowadays it makes more sense to me. A garden is a contained world we can create and tend through our own choices and efforts. We get to enjoy and share the joy from the beauty of flowers, the nourishment of fruits and vegetables, and a tract of grass that can be a carpet and a playground. A garden is also a guard against erosion – personal and spiritual. Cultivating a metaphorical garden inside ourselves that manifests in our outer life nourishes us and our loved ones. It is considered by some observers to be one of the fundamental ingredients for happiness. As the years press on, our sphere of control in the world outside gets smaller. But our inner world is eternally ours to manage. Reading books nurtures our inner garden. It takes us to places and worlds we may never visit in person and introduces us to all manner of exotica. Readers know this intimately. So do writers.