April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stammβ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-dukeβs, My cousinβs, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
Two unrelated photos, but matched for color and line.
If you have time, read below the break. Nothing revolutionary, mind you, but possibly helpful…
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What’s Going On?
Computers As Tools(this will relate to photography): Computers are especially good at math, pattern recognition, automating processes and performing set tasks as reliably as possible (much more reliably than we can across many domains). They possess superior pattern recognition as well as sophisticated analytical/synthetic reasoning; pushing frontier knowledge. Computers are also pretty dumb, and, so far, we’ve needed to program them. They break down a lot. Code degrades.
Think of an abacus. A cash register. A complex sorting machine. Speaking computer language requires specific combinations of math and human language, where every character counts.
We lean on computers (even for maintaining some works of art, but mostly for curation). Move electrons around in the right pattern, and your computer can store works of art. Now you can have the computer analyze and synthesize a lot of writing/human wisdom about that art. It’s like having access to a larger (limited) library and a personal, automated librarian (full of sound and fury).
A novel might have taken a particular genius decades of blood, sweat and tears, speaking directly to you. They crammed themselves into the medium, pursuing immortality. You still need the read the damned novel. Mull the novel over. Let it sink in. Go for a walk. It still helps to have a good teacher walk with you.
A work of art can make us think, make us feel; sometimes changing our lives completely. It can orient an entire civilization around itself, defining what counts in life regarding truth, wisdom and beauty. The computer makes access to these works of art cheaper and easier than ever before (for better and worse).
Many dangers are obvious (lower lows): Time and attention suck. Memory-crutch. Seven-second-video-brain-rot and optimized mind-crack. We lose what we don’t use. No gatekeepers (for better and worse). We’ve incentivized loud, shallow voices into a chorus of (S)elf-aggrandizing mediocrity. Latchkey kids plopped in front of an AI engine. Relationships withering on the vine. Lost souls seeking companionship with what is, essentially, a souped-up abacus. Sexbots. Crazies made crazier. Barbarians acting more like barbarians (they hit you, they laugh. you hit them, they cry).
There are a lot of problems in the world.
Higher highs: Well-adjusted, contented, reasonable people enhancing their pretty-good lives into more opportunity and contentment. Relationships enriched and deepened because time/distance have been shortened. More and easier access to wisdom. Quicker advancement upon many success curves. Deeper natural skill + work alignment in many more cases, even for some artists (less of a gap between what you’re good at vs what you have to do).
There are a lot of good things in the world. Work at ’em.
My current use case (what I use computational engines for) is a simple photography tool. I do NOT ALTER the photos or mess too much with the creative process. A basic subscription to Anthropic’s Claude has created a not-too-shabby html tool IN A FEW MINUTES. A few hours later, after testing and re-testing, and I can shuffle photos around and look at them WITHOUT a subscription to a website/platform etc. Claude’s made a platform for uploading, shuffling and editing photos while analyzing patterns at my discretion.
This tool is NO replacement for my creative process, intuition, judgement and practice. I rarely crop. I still have to put the work in. I still get more out of friendship, mentors, intelligent (critical and friendly) feedback and individual/institutional knowledge than I do a souped-up abacus. But now I have massively shortened time and distance constraints on certain elements of my understanding.
That’s useful.
What’s happening to all of us right now (to some extent): The layer of ‘speaking the language a computer understands’ is now much less needed. It’s been quickly automated. Many software engineers and the people who maintain them, are facing a new landscape.
What counts most in the current emerging setup: Knowledge + real-world experience + judgment + willpower, even amongst programmers. It’s never been easier to use computers through a direct, natural-language interface.
Possibly useful to you: Think of each company like a large building (Amazon/Microsoft/Apple). They’re ripping out much of the old wiring and replacing it with newer wiring and smaller, more powerful electrics.
Who loses? Many, many electricians who knew how to use the old wiring (speaking a language only the computer understands). Increasingly, the rest of us can walk in the room and flip the light-switch. The new engines can make HTML tools, reports, synthesize data sets and platforms, write workflows, aggregate vast quantities of data in…minutes.
Other institutions (who else loses)? Institutions will replace their wiring along different time-horizons, with differing consequences (knowledge-work, process-minders, automate-able tasks are the most at risk). There’s a lot of asymmetry and different competitive pressures/incentives for different orgs. Also, lest we forget, garbage in=garbage out. You’re only as good as your command, and natural language commands are still commands for a ‘dumb’ computer. These things aren’t your friend.
Adoption is increasing (no longer early).
Are you using?
Have you been using?
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Schmaltz-50% more.
Bullshit-Down 30%. Certainly true.
Diminishing T & Middle-Aged Man Resignation-Up 20% last quarter. Review in process.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown godβsullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in citiesβever, however, implacable. Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard, In the smell of grapes on the autumn table, And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
“Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep, his dreams walk about the city where he persists incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear. Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river animate a thousand automations. Who because they neither know their sources nor the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires-unroused.‘
Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing, They feel it moving Beneath them now like the deck of a ship, Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors They rediscover The face of the boy as he practises tying His father’s tie there in secret
And the face of the father, Still warm with the mystery of lather. They are more fathers than sons themselves now. Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound Of the crickets, immense, Filling the woods at the foot of the slope Behind their mortgaged houses.
