works of wanderlust

Tag: technology

  • ghosts in our spaces

    please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.

    Have you heard the theory about spaces? 

    I think formally it is referred to as Third Space Theory, and having just spent some time reading about the background of it I can share that (a) it is a kind of sociological theory of culture and identity that is meant to help us understand our modern society but which may not reflect on other non-western cultures or historical cultures and (b) you should almost certainly read a more reliable source than my meanderingly philosophical blog post if you want to know more.

    But I can simplify it here to make a point.

    And a point about AI, even.

    The theory kinda posits that modern humans in the western world are creatures of multiple spheres of identity and existence: first, second and third spaces—or home, work, and recreation if one wanted to simplify the concept for a meme post like where I first stumbled across this concept before reading more about it.

    The first space is our domestic sphere: where we live, the place where we are part of a family unit, probably where we sleep, maybe where we eat in privacy and away from the public, and a space where we generally spend our quiet, personal moments. This space may be a house or an apartment or just a room to call ones own, but could alsobe something less physical.

    The second space is where we contribute to public life or society. For most people this work or school or public service or a job-slash-career space. Again, this can be a physical space like a building or a worksite, or can be something more transient like a video meeting or a conference in a faraway city or a job interview while wearing a visitor badge in someone else’s second space.

    Then comes the third space, and the theory talks about the variety of these spaces but often we can consider these, simply, spaces of public participation: recreation activities, playing sports, going to the library, attending a church, shopping at a mall, eating at a restaurant with friends. Other spaces not home or work and spaces where we can relax, socialize, and be our authentic selves for the purpose of playing and enjoying our lives.

    The theory also leans into some ideas about value of these spaces, particularly the third space, on the health and wellbeing of not only us as individuals but of society as a whole. Society, you ask? Well, according to the theory, but where else in the public sphere can we as individuals plot our dissent and dissatisfaction with the state of our society and work to communicate ways to improve it—or perhaps overthrow those who are seeking to oppress it? These theories always have a serious side, don’t they?

    But perhaps I digress. I was getting to AI, wasn’t I?

    So, consider for a moment what has happened to these spaces in the last few years. 

    Consider, for example, what happened to the second space of so many office workers during the pandemic: work from home became a collapse of the second space into the first space for many, myself included. My kitchen was suddenly my office, and I was staring through a digital window into the living rooms, basements, and (yes, really) messy bedrooms of many people I formerly only knew as nine-to-five office people. Many have only slightly decoupled this collapse since, and a lot more have remained (sometimes stubbornly oblivious to the downsides) still living in this blurring of first and second spaces for half a decade.

    And now consider what has happened to many third spaces in the last few years: libraries have lost funding, malls have gone bankrupt, the price of admission to public facilities has either gone up or simply been privatized and gated and thus become a barrier to entry for many and all the while many third spaces have just generally been usurped by the so-called digital town square of social media, or online shopping, or multiplayer video gaming, food delivery apps, or even unidirectional media platforms streaming content into our screens.

    To recap: the first and second spaces have collapsed and blurred together, and too the third space has become limited or completely virtualized as a collection of apps for others and consumed from the couch while sitting around that same blurry first-meets-second space.

    And all that might be manageable if one sad fact about those virtual third spaces wasn’t also simultaneously true: that more and more the participants we meet inside that third space are not other human beings but rather AI algorithms, bots and chat agents and tour guides to this artificial public sphere where we are supposed to exist for the sake of forging and maintaining a healthy society.

    What is the impact of that to not just our personal health, but to the strength of our political and social structures?

    On the one hand, AI is not necessarily to blame for our whole cloth migration into the virtual or our physical abandonment of second and third spaces, but at the same time it has likely eased the transition and gobbled up our willpower to go back to how things used to be when we had three fulsome spaces and all those spaces were populated by real people, for better or worse. And I suppose one could ask: does it even matter if the end state of all this is that enough people blur all three spaces into a single digital virtual sphere populated by artificial intelligences? Maybe that’s just what some people prefer, the health of themselves and a broader society be damned.

    But that’s just a theory.

  • The Poets Against the Processors

    I ask you: What is AI?

    Artificial intelligence, you reply.

    Sure, but what is it? Really?

    I suppose we first need to get a handle on what defines those two terms: artificial & intelligence—and I think the first is likely easier to get our minds around than the latter.

    Let’s get that one out of the way then: the term artificial can perhaps be defined easily by its negative. Artificial, for example, might be thought of as something that is not genuine. Something that is not natural. Something that is an imitation, a simulation or a fabrication designed, perhaps, to mimic what we might otherwise consider to be real.

    More precisely, the etymology of the word gives us a more positive example. Something artificial is something that is crafted by art, made by humans, designed, built and invented by effort of us. Something artificial then might simply and most clearly be thought of as something that someone used their human intelligence to bring into existence.

    Ah, but what is intelligence then?

    A much more complex answer is required for that, I say.

    For example, a dictionary will simply tell you that intelligence is the ability of a thing to gather and synthesize information into knowledge and understanding.

    Sounds easy, you reply.

    But wait, I reply, what you may not see is that from there on in we delve into what is almost certainly a quagmire of philosophical pondering and metaphysical analysis: the human mind trying to understand itself is a profession nearly as old as humans themselves. A mirror looking at its own reflection. What is thought? What is consciousness? What is the self, the mind, the soul and the spirit? What is it that makes us human? How can we even know that every other person we know thinks in the same manner as we do—and by that we don’t refer to content or concept, but simply trying to gauge the depth to which their mind is actually a mind like our own and that they are not simply a reactive automaton, a robot, an alien force, a simulation, an… artificial intelligence.

    Together we join these words into a modern catchphrase and shorten it to just two letters that carry all the weight of a shift in the course of human history: artificial intelligence or AI.

    AI then is, not-so-simply, something that we made that has the ability to gather knowledge and synthesize understanding.

    AI is a tool, a technology, and a kind of metaphorical progeny of ourselves: our attempt to remake our own minds in craft and art and design.

    We have chosen as a species (dictated by the history of our scientific pursuits, of course) to have done this with silicon computers—though, one might speculate that in an alternate timeline perhaps we may have sought to accomplish such things with steam valves and brass cogs or neutrinos colliding with atoms or quantum interference patterns resolving upon clouds of stardust or even with microscopic sacs of self-replicating organic chemistry brewing inside a calcium-rich orb. We take computer circuits etched into silicon wafers as the de facto method because it is a mature craft: we can make complex things with this understanding we have. We can build machines of such enormous complexity that any other approach seems as much science fiction as thinking machines would have seemed to our recent ancestors.

    Yet, here we are. I say. Look at us. We have made something that, though often arguably lacking or laughable or uncanny or a thing that draws any of a hundred other pejorative pokes, is an imperfect beast and now made and unleashed. It is far past time we all started asking what exactly this artificial intelligence might actually be—and what it will bring upon a society and a species whose perhaps greatest competitive advantage in the universe has been its higher cognitive prowess.

    This is an introduction to what I am hoping will be a series of reflective essays and technological deep dives into the social implications of AI.

    I have been told repeatedly, often by people with stake in the game of business, life, and culture, that AI is nothing to be feared, a tool to be embraced and a paradigm that has shifted long past and to just climb aboard.

    But while these systems will almost certainly not challenge our physical humanity with violence or in any of the multitude of science-fiction spectacle ways of popular literature and media, what I see happening already is that we seem to be emmeshed in a fight for intellectual effort for which we may have neither the endurance nor strength to win: out-competed by automated systems, siloed by information algorithms, strip-mined of our creative outputs and reduced to a livestock-like herd for our attention by technology so fast as complex that it is steps ahead of us in a race we don’t even realize we are running.

    It is the poets against the processors.

    And what then is AI? I ask you.

    We made it to mimic ourselves, our minds. It is yet imperfect, and perhaps little more than a simulation of our humanity. Yet, it is a tool that amplifies evil as much as it does good. It is a technology that yokes us into dependency. It is a system that robs us blind and vanishes into the digital ether. It is something we can barely even define, let alone understand and control—and it would be arrogance in the extreme to think otherwise.

    please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.

  • those autumn vibes

    There is a pale soft mist floating upon the grass this chilly October morning.

    I realize that is has been nearly a year since I wrote here, and in the meantime I have complicated our little relationship—a transaction that should be simpler—by adding and twisting and doing things that were never going to work without a full on manifestation of effort towards turning this thing into a full time career.  Also, I am cheap (nay, thrifty) so I have reduced my digital footprint into a subdomain where I can properly secure the invisible-to-you code that helps create this website.  Yet, I won’t bore you with the complexities of it all here. Not today. Not in a vague sort of explanation post.

    There is a mist on the grass that is indicative of a change in the weather, the temperatures trying to fall into winter temps while the summer sighs its failing gasps and in the middle of it all, a pale drift of mist sits atop the green grass which itself is flecked with orange and brown leaves.

    Back when I started writing this blog it was a hobby project meant to reflect a certain sensibility—the kind of sensibility that notices the clash of ethereal nature with the drumbeat of technology. Cast iron cooking became a bit of a symbol of that in my mind.

    Those were some ambitious years.

    In the meantime a dozen other “guys” have done cast iron much better than I ever could have, spending money and time on tools and collections and techniques and ideas that turn me, relatively speaking, into a mere rambling philosopher of something less cast into iron and more cast into words, something that I can’t quite pin down.

    And a lot has changed during that time, too. I was a guy who did technology professionally and food for fun, and now—somehow—I am a guy who does food professionally and technology for fun. My newest, latest gig immerses me in exotic ingredients, asks of me that I learn the nuances of the smoke points of oil blends, the protein content of breads and pastas, or the result of fat on the flavour absorption of soft cheeses. I am turning into something of a roving expert on these things, helping people eat and enjoy and cook and be healthier.  It is amazing.

    And somehow I have been sitting here on a blog archive that is almost perfectly lined up to support that—at least support my introspection and deeper personal learning about that.

    I won’t bore you with the boring technology bits about domain name security certificates and 301 redirects and complexity of securing a blog, even a little one like this, against hackers but I will tell you that like the mist on the autumn grass all of that is kind of a symbol of seasonal change and that something different is afoot on this site.

    I can’t say I’ll write daily, but I will write more.

    About food. About cooking. About the outdoors and healthy living and running races through the trails. About a cast iron kinda life that doesn’t necessarily always mean a cast iron frying pan—but then sometimes it just might.  Stay tuned.

  • when they go high (tech) we go low (tech)

    December 1 of 31 December-ish posts.

    Oh, how those billionaires-who-shall-not-be-named would factor into a good political-type post that I’m sure would attract all sorts of readers like wasps to a honeypot.

    How would I… should I describe my 2022 in tech or tools?

    As the year wraps up I’ve dabbled in what I’m (right now) calling the addict’s last puff on the drug known as corporate social media. I tried spinning up a Youtube channel over the summer. I posted with some frequency on Twitter and Reddit. Instagram was routinely at the top of my daily digital dosage. I even downloaded TikTok for a few weeks, though I couldn’t ever figure out why I would post there.

    I grew up weaned on technology, but also I was part of that tech pioneer generation who co-opted the family phone line to connect to dial-up bulletin board systems over a 2400 baud modem hissing from beside my hulking CRT monitor.  We installed games from floppy diskettes and challenged copy protection with meticulously hand-copied versions of code sheets and game manuals.  My first website was coded by hand in a text editor and uploaded through an SSH command line to a server somewhere. I had multiple Geocities accounts and, for crying out loud, I had a paid subscription to Blogger.com before they got bought out by Google (and they actually mailed me a hoodie with both the Blogger and Google logos to thank me when that happened.)

    This has never been a tech blog, but it is tech.

    I use high tech to write and share about low tech.

    I use bare metal and code to post about cast iron and food.

    I had high hopes for social media’s role in the world. I was an early adopter of many of those platforms, bringing many people along and feeding them content on the near-daily for nearly a decade.

    Is it unfair to say I feel a bit cheated by how things turned out? It is too much to feel that lots of low tech folks have used the high tech tools we helped build and refine for things that don’t jive with my worldview?

    I’ve deleted many accounts and shuttered more. I’m reluctant to walk away completely if only because my usernames would get slurped up almost instantly and cause confusion to a few people I care about.

    This site is not corporate. I’m just a guy who wants to write. I pay for my own hosting. I run my own technology stack and manage my own updates. I write. I post. I share. I do it all.  And I feel a nostalgia for that as I round out 2022 and consider the state of our online spaces and the chaos that is swirling inside them.  Perhaps stepping out of the “digital public square” will mean fewer people will read these words, but not caring as much about size of my audience versus writing for myself and few quality people, like you who has found this site in other ways, is where I am right now.

    And as we creep into 2023 when I need to think less about the moral and ethical impact of my high technology use, I can spend more time thinking about and writing about my low tech fun, fire, food and cast iron cooking, right?