Pylimitics

Artificial intelligence seems to be mostly about speed. Instead of days, weeks, or months working on your software, book, or other project, it can be done in hours or even minutes! Well…okay…but so what? 

There are certainly cases where speed is an important component of an outcome. Dousing a fire. Removing a steak from the grill or a cake from the oven at just the right moment. Running to catch a would-be home-run hit before it goes over the fence. Even more obviously, winning a race.

But I wonder about speed being considered an objective in other realms of activity. Writing is generally not improved by doing it faster. If you’re trying to understand something new to you, whether it’s the results of a scientific observation or getting to know a new acquaintance, going faster is not a good choice. 

I think the focus on speed comes from mistakes we’re collectively making, that our capitalist socio-economic system is true, that it reflects reality in some way, and that it imparts a useful way to interpret the world we live in. From “government” to “your life,” how many times have you heard and read sentiments on the order of “should be run like a business?” This is a twisted, myopic view. The only thing that should be “run like a business” is a business. And since there seems to be little or no agreement about just how a business should be run, it’s a distinction without focus. 

When you engage in thinking about nearly anything from a business-oriented perspective, you focus on outcomes and speed and start ignoring things. You oversimplify. Jane in Accounting becomes nothing more than a list of the outcomes of the tasks Jane performs during working hours. If you can get those outcomes faster than Jane can provide them, then through the lens of a business, that’s what you should do. But that is a radical oversimplification of Jane, of the tasks, and even of your business. It’s a level of abstraction I’m coming around to regard as a mental illness. 

An organization, whether it exists to do business or for any other reason, is far more complex than it appears. You can draw a map of the tasks people perform, their inputs, their outputs, the raw materials and the end products. But that’s only an oversimplified approximation of the organization. You can draw a different map of who communicates with whom in the organization, when, why, and how often, ant that too is only an oversimplification. You can write down everything anyone knows about the history of the organization; who founded it, why, and what happened after, and you have another oversimplification.

To be sure, oversimplifications are very useful. It’s how we operate. But when we only use one oversimplification, like thinking of everything in terms of business, of input and output, we’re making a major mistake. The nature of being human, of walking around with the big brains we’re so proud of, is complexity. An amoeba is able to move closer to a positive stimulus and away from a negative stimulus. That’s simplicity. A human can decide to move completely independently of the positivity or negativity of one stimulus, and can (one hopes) explain why. 

Getting everything done fast, focusing only on the input and output, is oversimplified, business-oriented thinking that’s leading too many people to value generative AI too much and for the wrong reasons. We’re choosing to act more like amoebas than humans. You can see the discomfort this is causing in the backlash, the protests, the chorus of jeers and boos at commencement speakers who mention AI. People feel there is something wrong here. 

One of the things we experience as humans is the variability of time. When you engage in some activities — and these differ for different people — you can enter a flow state where time is subjectively different. For me it happens most often when I’m writing, and I know there are people who experience it in running, in painting, in programming, in music. Practically anything. If you focus only on the outcome, and how long it’s going to take to get there, you’re “running it like a business.” But if you do that, you’re only going to be the poorer for it. And that’s not the idea of business at all.