We tried to get an AI to write this newsletter
June 10, 2018 Newsletter
Summer Reading.
Somehow, I still manage to have a lot of good conversations on Twitter. Lately, we’ve been talking about books. For a while there, I’ll admit, in my enthusiasm for the Internet, I was thinking “How are books still a thing?” Now, they are more important than ever. We’re starting to see the downsides of ubiquitous, instant, disembodied interconnectedness. Enjoying a complete, composed line of thinking contained in a discrete disconnected object is a necessary alternative and corrective to drinking from the often toxic stream.
Just for fun, I asked “If you could assign every American to read one book over the summer, what would it be?” Jason Kottke was kind enough to gather up some of the responses. 1984 was also a very popular recommendation.
After picking up Alone in Berlin by chance in an airport, I started thinking about how much it would benefit everyone working on new technology to brush up on their humanities and social sciences. So many bookstores have gone missing from downtown SF, it’s very hard to stumble across unfamiliar ideas in SOMA. Many tech companies offer a book buying benefit, but how many offer the space and the time for leisurely serendipity?
The AI startup studio All Turtles does a podcast bookclub. I stopped in for a delightful chat about Conversational Design. You can listen here. The afternoon we recorded, I went directly from their office to the launch party for Amy Jo Kim’s Game Thinking, which goes much deeper than that recent fad for gamification.
Whatever is on your reading list, get out there and support your local bookstore!
— Erika Hall (@mulegirl)
What No One Expected Would Be Possible.
In our post-iPhone, robot dog Instagram world, it’s hard to imagine that AI might not be a big part of what’s to come. Somehow it’s been positioned as the inevitable next step in a progression; towards what end is anyone’s guess. Paul Ford brilliantly digs into what it’s all about and whether we should care in his article for Bloomberg: I tried to get an AI to write this story (Then I gave up and wrote it my damn self).
What’s most surprising about AI to me right now is how often it still doesn’t solve much of anything. While one can surely imagine the nearly infinite handing off of functions and feedback loops that inform a sensor network, or help a machine distinguish text from a photograph — for me these technologies don’t inevitably cascade to anything quite as complex or awe-inspiring as my cat.
While she surely responds to stimuli and keeps to a schedule sometimes more predictable than my own, her behavior is emotional and somehow, she knows when I’m having a down week or trouble sleeping. Her ability to predict what I need comes when I least expect it and definitely never when I’d like to trigger it. What led her there couldn’t have been a set of repeatable, deterministic steps because life is unpredictable, just as this week has been.
In fact, the very scaleability of AI was surprising in and of itself. This week, while I was refreshing my own memory I came across a recording of my college professor’s explanation of neural nets and deep learning. He says: “When you throw an immense amount of computation into a specific arrangement it’s possible to get performance no one expected would be possible.”
— Larisa Berger (@berglar)
There’s So Much I Don’t Know.
Only a week into June and so far and it has not been very kind to us with the loss of three incredibly influential people in the creative world.
Many books by art historian and critic, Irving Sandler were supplemental reading for my art history classes. The intimate relationships he had with the artists he wrote about provided the insights that I craved as a budding artist. He initially studied American history, but after being incredibly moved by Franz Kline’s painting “Chief” at the MoMa, he thankfully decided to immerse himself in the art world. The non-profit gallery he founded, Artists Space gave a larger platform to emerging artists at the time, including now well-known favorites Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer. He was a fervent supporter of artists, not just the art they produced.
I have never been super fashion savvy but as a teenager, Kate Spade was one of the first designers that I was introduced to and the very first designer that felt any sort of accessible to me. She made the first “fancy” wallet that I saved up money for after landing my first retail job right out of high school. In all the articles I’ve read about her over the past few days, so many other women have expressed similar stories to mine. Their first Kate Spade purchases marked big achievements in their lives. Her work was and is essentially a celebration of women. She even started a foundation that supports and empowers women from underserved communities.
And then there’s Anthony Bourdain… damn. This one really hurts. He was such an amazing champion and ally for all the underdogs of the world. So curious, so humble, and always eager to listen, he used his work to share stories and amplify the voices of marginalized people. It’s hard for me to find the right words to articulate all the ways in which I admire and adore him, so I’ll just leave you with a couple of video clips that bring me tremendous joy. Here he is eating and loving foods I grew up with, adobo and halo-halo.
Be good to each other. 💕
— Amanda Durbin (@fannyburping)
