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Category: ideas

Blooming Where Planted

Blooming Where Planted

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For so long this has been a loaded phrase for me — “blooming where planted.” It carries with it more than a hint of compromise. Or maybe it’s wistfulness, that I didn’t stay where I was planted but moved several times as a young adult before settling where I did. 

And then there’s the fact that I’ve ended up in the suburbs. Heaven knows I carp enough about that.

But today, the angle of the light striking the grass on the lawns I passed, the scent of the air, rich with loam and honeysuckle, made me think that there could not be a much better place to be planted. And that whatever the mixed emotions with which I’ve traditionally viewed the saying, there is a nobility in trying to flourish wherever you are, in contenting yourself with the situation at hand. 

(Pebble people frolic along one of my favorite routes.)

The Credit Side

The Credit Side

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I first read Robinson Crusoe as a child. I can still see the book’s binding, dark green spine with a mottled green-and-gold cover, and I still remember the joy of losing myself in the novel for hours at a time.

Here was a shipwrecked man on a desert island, abandoned and alone. Here was a man forced to build a life for himself from the ground up, to find or make food, shelter and clothing, outfitted only with his own strength and wits and what he could cobble from a sinking ship.

Back then, it all seemed like great fun, an extended version of fort-building in the woods. Now, I’m struck by the hopelessness of Crusoe’s situation and the emotional adjustments he made to cope with it. At one point, having satisfied his immediate needs, he sits down and makes a list (with pen, ink and paper salvaged from the ship) of pros and cons, which he called good and evil, things like: I’m banished from human society but there is food here. Or, I have no clothes but it’s so warm here I barely need any. Talk about looking on the bright side!

“Upon the whole, here was an undoubted testimony that there was scarcely any condition in the world so miserable but there was something negative or something positive to be thankful for in it; and let this stand as a direction from the experience of the most miserable of all conditions in the world, that we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves from, 
and to set in the description of good and evil on the credit side of the account.”
— Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

The ultimate Pollyanna statement, but not a bad idea to keep in mind.

(I realized only after posting that “Credit Side” is an interesting title for April 15th, Tax Day.)

The Victorians

The Victorians

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They drugged their babies, wore four layers of underwear and often went hungry. They are the Victorians, and they may as well have been ancient Greeks so different are the lives they lived from our own. 

I learned these facts from the book How to Be a Victorian and the experiences of author Ruth Goodman, who lived for a year on a Victorian farm where she dug turnips, squeezed into corsets, and brushed her teeth with soot (which she recommends as an alternative to modern toothpaste). 

More than halfway through the book now, I can say with some certainty that life was difficult for most Victorians, who worked hard and ate little. It makes me wonder about the lives of ease that so many of us live. How has comfort shaped us? How did adversity shape them? 

(Halfpenny meals for poor children, 1870, from Wikipedia)

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

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I’m thinking about artificial intelligence this morning, about what it knows and how it knows it, about its regulation, about the world we’re creating with it. 

Because I’ve built a career on words, and bots can now string words together so well that most of us would be hard-pressed to tell the difference, I want to think there’s a level of creativity, a depth of soul that human-generated content has locked in. But because bots use creative, soulful work to build their models, that’s not necessarily the case.

Some writers work with AI to perfect their prose style. Others rail against it with sentences not as felicitously crafted as those they critique. Who will win this battle? That’s a question we can’t answer now — and won’t be able to answer for a long time. 

(These books are filled with human-produced content. Will future books be able to say the same?)

Human Content

Human Content

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At the end of its segment on artificial intelligence last night, CBS’s “60 Minutes” included a disclaimer it never has before. “The preceding was created with 100-percent human content.”

This kicker was the perfect conclusion to a jaw-dropping report on Bard, the new chatbot released by Google. Interviews with the Google CEO and other members of the company revealed a team of humans who seem genuinely concerned about the implications of this earth-shaking new technology. But even they seem to be struggling with what they have created. 

These bots are not sentient beings, they said, although the content they produce (including a story built on Hemingway’s famous six-word novel “For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”) make you think that they can. 

These new bots are something of a black box, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who brought up the problem of alignment — the divergence between the models we use to create artificial intelligence and the intentions we have while creating them. They teach themselves subjects they weren’t programmed to learn. They will take our jobs and create ever-more-hard-to-detect fakes. 

As a student of the human condition (the title of the class I’m taking this semester) I’m thinking about the new technologies we’ve experienced in recent decades and how we will adapt to this one. Many knowledge workers will lose their jobs and many others will be teaming up with robots on a daily basis. How will we face this new challenge when we can’t even keep up with old ones? 

Lots of questions. Not many answers. But of this you can be sure: This post was created with 100-percent human content. 

(Above: a small printing press, vestige of a lost world.) 

Always Evidence

Always Evidence

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I’m writing this post as a break from designing an economic system. It’s a class assignment, of course. I don’t design economic systems just for fun. 

But once I’ve gotten going on this project, it’s more enjoyable than I thought it would be, somewhat like the hours I’d spend drawing pictures of houses when I was a kid. They had towers and secret passageways and all sorts of bells and whistles. I didn’t worry about the cost or the plumbing. I gave my imagination full reign.

This assignment is not quite so free-form. We must explain what this system would produce and cite evidence to prove our case. But one thing I’ve learned in my brief time as a graduate student is that there’s always evidence … somewhere. I’ll go and look for some now. 

(A market in Myanmar, 2017, part of a more sustainable agricultural system.)

The Ones That Got Away

The Ones That Got Away

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By the time I got upstairs, all I could remember was that it was one of the best ideas I’d ever had. Down in the basement it had seemed revelatory, perfect for a blog post or even an essay. But by the time I’d climbed two flights of stairs to jot it down, it was gone, lost amidst the grocery lists and other to-dos in my mind.

Such is the fate of what seem my best ideas. 

What to do? Ought I to wear a pen and notebook around my neck? Practice better memory hygiene? Learn the mnemonic devices of the ancients? All of the above? 

Or, should I just let those brilliant ideas go, have faith that they’ll return again soon, perhaps when I least expect them.  At which point I will realize that … they weren’t so brilliant after all. 

Walking the Line

Walking the Line

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The temptation, for me at any rate, is to say, this time last week, I was … exploring a palace, clambering up the ramparts in a castle, nibbling a delectable almond pastry in a tiny cafe.

Not the healthiest approach to re-entry. So I tell myself that vacations can’t go on forever, that I don’t live in a quaint European village, and that, in short, I should get on with it.

On the other hand, I see no harm in letting my mind drift to the narrow lanes of Barrio Santa Cruz in Seville and the lull that comes over them before the restaurants open for dinner at 7:00 or 7:30.  Or the view I would wake up to in Sintra, turrets and towers tucked in among the green. 

There’s a fine line between dissatisfaction and enlargement. And I’m trying to walk it right now.

Old World

Old World

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On the way to the airport Sunday, the chatty cabdriver, Isabel, pointed out sights along the way. “Here is where the king would stop on his way to Sintra,” she said, pronouncing it “Seen trah.” It was a two-day trip so he needed an intermediary palace, she explained. And sure enough, there was a telltale spire amidst the trees and apartment blocks. 

“The past is so alive here,” I said, exclaiming over the beauty and the bounty of the place I was sad to be leaving. 

“But you are a young country,” she said, pronouncing it “young uh.” “We are old.”

I thought of her words as the plane touched the tarmac at Dulles Airport in the waning light of a midsummer evening. Everything was so green, and there was so much space. It was easy for a moment to see the potential of this continent, the feelings that must have greeted its discovery by Europeans. 

It’s easy to rhapsodize over the quaint lanes and cobblestones of Europe, to decry the fast food joints and 10-lane highways of the U.S. But it’s important to keep Isabel’s observation in mind. Portugal is the Old World. We are the New. 

Golden

Golden

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It’s an idea they had for 10 years and it wouldn’t let them go. A trove of family papers they inherited. It’s a question, a notion, a curiosity. 

Over the weekend I hung out with 150 writers. And though I spoke with only a fraction of them, the conversations were all struck through with the same bright threads of humor, determination and yearning. 

We’re a greedy bunch, we writers. If we don’t have an idea, we want one. If we have the idea we must have the time and space to explore it: to research, write and revise. 

Of course, if we have the finished manuscript we need the agent. And if we have the agent, we need the publisher. 

But when the stars align, when we have the idea, the time, the space, the words, the agent, the publisher …. ah, then life is golden indeed.