In the age of infinite inspiration, I've not had an original idea for months. Fucking remarkable.

As a baseline, there’s been a lot going on during these last few months. Big things. Like new houses and babies. I've moved into a new home. Cool. I’ve also spent my nest egg and free time filling the place. I'm three months from being a dad – 37 years after never imagining myself in that particular role. My wife is going through it. I'm working through a thousand things in my head. Thoughts and ideas are fighting amongst themselves.  The work I'm doing in AI is highly influential on the world, in ways that may/probably/surely could be terrible for the world, and I’m forever hopeful that I may be able to help prevent that.

“And that's a lot to say without a word.”

Two weeks ago, I did a thing. An art thing. Music. I saw Titus Andronicus in what I describe as a seminal moment of performance art (and the righteous feeling of evocation) in my 39th year of life.

That lyric "And that's a lot to say without a word" comes from the opening track off the 2012 great, “Local Business.” You might not know Titus Andronicus, or you might know them and you might not like them, but for a moment, put yourself in my shoes – a human seeing his favorite band after many years. 

As lead singer Patrick Stickles came out to a Saturday afternoon crowd under the Chicago sun, I was transported. With the first riff of “Ecce Homo,” and shout of Okay, by now I think we’ve established…, I’d lost any notion of parenting and AI and anything that wasn’t this in front of me. I was in it. In the art. In the moment. Present.

For the next hour, I screamed, I sang, I let go. My brother and I sweated through our shirts, lost in the wave of a makeshift mosh pit. My dad was there, too and looked on with pride. I could hear his thoughts — B has this in him?

Sunday morning, I remembered the feeling – the freedom I felt. As proof of the experience, I woke with failing vocal cords and a hoarseness that made me sound a bit like Demi Moore.

But I know it’s a lot more than just being bored. 

Part of today’s truth is that artificial intelligence is a force we've never dealt with. We're in open water, being led by a bunch of technocrats and broligarchs. Sharks circling.

I woke with failing vocal cords and a hoarseness that made me sound a bit like Demi Moore.

The concept of heroic leadership during a time of concern is long past. We're reliant on guys who have grown up in different ways than us; dealing with concepts that are beyond our brain's capacity; who are backed by venture capitalists that care primarily about the money. 

It’s a conundrum. What happens when 90% of the work we know today is done by a machine that performs better and more consistently than we do? What happens when humans provide less worth than a machine across more of our work than not? What’s our value then? What’s our purpose then? 

 We've seen this story a few times. Let’s take the most obvious. The Industrial Revolution replaced the portions of human labor in fields — while adding new human labor to run assembly lines. New jobs emerge. New skills are needed. That will happen here, too. But the people in charge also think those jobs are going to be reduced, the humans no longer necessary. That's going to make things messy for a while.

Realistically, we need to recognize that progress is not going to slow down. No matter how much we might want it to. It’s only going to accelerate. It is in our nature. And that basically means we all must figure out how to rethink how we've lived and worked until this point.

Well I know it’s nothing more than just being born.

This is where we are. My work basically requires me acknowledge this. And that’s where my head has been. I wake up on Tuesday morning and explain to an executive why we’ve spent 3x this month on tokens (what are tokens?), while we need to keep giving our people access to the best tools (can they work faster?) and that the thing their assistant built is not ready for a product launch without actual engineering work (but this looks done to me?). 

And thus, we need to learn. We really need to learn how to make use of these tools so that we don’t all get left behind by the technocrats and early nerds. And dammit, it is exhausting to even try when you have life in front of you. 

I think that's the crux of it. The paradox. Look at my life. I'm now going through a new set of things to deal with. In my head, I hear "Grow the F up, man."

 Shit.

I can't quite remember the last time I watched something new. Or read something that wasn't in AI. Or wasn't always-on – Slack, Meet calls, and in the terminal building something new.

What I discovered that day in the mosh pit with my brother, as my father followed along, is that the anecdote is art. Art makes it possible to remember what it’s like to live and dream and feel. Those most human characteristics. --BL