What a Piece of Work.

Many people, maybe especially Jews who have always been a tiny group of outsiders, resist being told what to do. To me, this obstinance could also be an affect of having grown up when Nixon was president and we were in the Vietnam years. We were naturally resistant to authority. Our limbic reaction to hearing the word "sit," was to stand.

Perhaps most germane, as my sister-in-law M says about my brother, Fred, "Fred is a rule-breaker."

I am, too. 

In our "you must accept terms and conditions world," rule breakers are suffering. Tossed out. In some circumstances, beaten.

We don't do well with HR, officiousness and all-caps. Or bullies. And we live today in a bully-ocracy.

Worse, it seems to me as more and more wealth and power gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, we get told what we have to do and how we are supposed to behave with a tsunami wave of repetition. 

For pretty much the last year we've been force-fed about 10,000 water-boardings-a-day heaped with the inevitability and splendor of AI. It's coming. It's everything. It's all powerful. And you can't opt out. Sounds like my mother-in-law stopping by for a visit.

Even as it ruins everything--your job, your hobbies, the things you buy--you have to not just accept AI, you have to welcome it with open arms, wallets and sphincter.

It doesn't matter that the people telling us of this inevitability haven't shown us any of the purported good AI is supposed to bring us. It brings them more money (and less taxes) and that's what this is about and that's the only thing that really matters.

In short, AI is being crammed down our throats. And I'm not one-hundred percent sure why, except that a few heinously rich people will get heinouslyly more richerer. We're hearing the overture 24/7. The Wagnerian shit is coming.

Denarius of Lucius Marcius Philippus, minted c. 113 BC.

[By the way, just about 2100 years ago when Rome was still a "republic," the same concentration of wealth and its horrid side effects were happening. Philippus, quoted below, I suppose was 100 BCE's version of Bernie Sanders. Like Sanders, he failed to undo the concentration of wealth and power among Rome's "one-percent."

Or as Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis said more than a century ago, " "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."]

Anyway back to AI.

And though I make much of my living working with tech companies to help them sell their AI, I do not believe it can do the things many in our business say it will do for us. 

I believe maybe it can resize an ad for us, or tell us the most efficient way to find a hamburger in a strange town, or even spot a bottleneck in a production line or a cyst on a lung, but I don't think it will ever think, create, make us laugh or cry. Such things are human-made, not machine-made.

This morning I got an email message from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. As a member, they were telling me about some special hours where I could see their Van Goghs.

I had mentioned Van Gogh just yesterday to a putative friend. I said something like AI can't do what Van Gogh did. Van Gogh painted Dr. Gauchet's face with swaths of blue. AI won't do that because it's wrong. Art is, sometimes, using wrongness to express something right. Like Sandburg writing about fog coming in on little cat's feet. 

It takes a human to cat-feet words.

I started looking at a Van Gogh, one painting in particular. I enlarged it to look at individual brush strokes. Trying to find the individuality of thought can be strange in and of itself, but the collection of thoughts can add up to something wonderful, god-like and surpassing. Something wholly and exclusively human.

When you look closely, you realize it's nothing. Just splashes of paint reflective of seeing things in a way no one else ever had. It is more than a man. It's reflective of everything anyone has ever seen ever.

I had breakfast once with a famous client, he was the former head of McKinsey and taught at Yale Business School. When he ordered his tea he asked for it with two tea bags. We talked about his business and what he was building. I said "science was about seeing things we could never see before."

He pushed away from the table and stared me in the eye. After a long pause he said, "that's the single best definition of science that I've ever heard." 

Thinking about it ten years on, you could say the same thing about art. "Art is about seeing things we could never see before."

Whereas AI is, I'm sorry, in essence a predictability engine and a pattern matching machine. Essentially, this looks like that, therefore, this.

While humans can do that, maybe machines can do that better and faster and cheaper. Maybe a machine could learn to hit a Koufax curveball better than Willie Mays could.

But as for seeing things we couldn't see before, that's our job.