A Few Thoughts about AI, plus Nov. links!

Nov 24, 2023

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I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving, readers!

I can’t resist a little corporate intrigue. I confess Succession might be my all time favorite prestige TV show. A few weeks ago, I rewatched Super Pumped (now on Netflix) about the rise and “fall” (he’s still a billionaire) of Uber’s Travis Kalanick - because of my aforementioned interest. And OK, true, I’ll watch Kyle “Coach Taylor” Chandler in just about anything, but his casting was a bonus.

So it won’t come as any surprise to you that I read about Open AI and CEO Sam Altman’s fall and resurrection with some interest. The CEO wins; the board is dissolved and reconstituted. I’ve also watched dozens of takes on AI in the education space and I haven’t really weighed in since the initial chatGPT panic (my take at the time - maybe think about assignment design rather than heavily policing the tech). This is not my expertise nor my self-assigned lane in Talking Out of School.

But I did want to offer some observations at this point and link to a few articles and an interview I’ve found helpful.

I have by no means read comprehensively all the takes from education, but the overall tone on AI seems to be rather doom-y. And doom doesn’t feel like a great fit for K-12 education. And the takes when Altman was fired last week seem to be that the board was on the side of humanity, trying to prevent AI from becoming a sentient monster stopping Altman from his filthy pragmatist ways.

The tone reminds me of the pieces this year in response to stories in the New Yorker and elsewhere about the demise of humanities majors on college campuses - vigorous defense of how it’s always been. And I say that as a person with two humanities degrees and no regrets.

The Open AI situation is not as simple as “virtuous board/greedy CEO.” And generative AI is coming, and Open AI as a leader is, from what I’ve read, only slightly farther ahead than Google and other tech giants in developing this paradigm-shifting technology. And that’s just in the US.

And while there can (and of course, will be) plenty of prognostications, we don’t know how quickly generative AI will develop and how it can help or harm us - but we also have to keep in mind humanity left to its own devices is pretty good at screwing things up for the planet even before the advent of our potential AI overlords. So maybe it’s time for some optimism and thinking about how we can harness its power for good.

What I find more interesting is the question we are educating young people is about their role in our democracy. Government has capitulated to big tech in truly scary ways. If we had confidence the government could harness the power of AI through creating sensible and enforceable regulations and incentives, we wouldn’t be left to panic on our own. And the US government itself could have gotten into the incredibly capital intensive generative AI space and gotten over the finish line first - but it didn’t even try. Space travel, satellite networks, AI, electric vehicles - now have all been left to the tech billionaires to develop on a scale that dwarfs armed state militias coming in to break up union strikes for Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills during the Gilded Age. Dwarfs by a lot!

How do we educate kids about civics, give them the tools to demand better from our elected representatives or even develop the desire to become an elected representative themselves? We need new generations of kids who are educated to have a handle on this tech, who aren’t afraid of it but also know how to ask critical questions. And we need to be thinking about education in a different way to achieve this outcome, rather than perpetually fighting the last war.

AI links:

Long time tech reporter Ashlee Vance’s work for Bloomberg is great - he gets to the point.

Open AI Frontmen Break Up the Band

Altman returns to Open AI (for access register for free Bloomberg account)

I’m a House of Strauss Substack fangirl and you need to subscribe to access, but Ethan Strauss does such accessible, entertaining, and useful interviews way beyond the world of sports. In this interview, Strauss and Vance very plainly lay out the Open AI drama and then move on to discuss other powerful developments on the tech horizon, such as animals getting neurolink brain implants so talking to our pets might be possible. (!?!?) (I really don’t want to know that my dog sees me pretty much as a food distribution coordinator…)

House of Strauss interview with Ashlee Vance

In the second half of this Ezra Klein NYT piece, he lays out the US government’s initial attempts at AI regulation.

November links appearing in TOOS posts

How I've Changed my Thinking on Burnout by Anne Helen Peterson

Crunches can be managed; slogs lead to burnout - Raw Signal Group newsletter

Friends buying Brooklyn brownstone together - NYT

The Friendship Dip by Anne Helen Petersen

November TOOS posts

A Strong Head/CFO Partnership, Part Two

A three essay series on fostering connection. Didn’t plan it but it happened!

One: Reimagining the Triple Threat Model

Two: Retooling the Burnout Factory