I finished another good book this week, watched some more Shakespeare, binged a podcast series about using AI to create a podcast episode, was inspired by open source, and listened to some new music I love.

Reads

I’m enjoying the anthology of American short stories I bought a few months ago. I like to pretend that one day I might write a short story, and as I read the anthology, I collect the first sentences to study and reflect on. Every stab I’ve taken at fiction sounds self-conscious in the opening sentence, and it’s a joy to read authors who craft a compelling first line. This week I read Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft” from 1930, along with “Double Birthday” by Willa Cather and “Wild Plums” by Grace Stone Coates, both from 1929, and both about the confines of class distinction and the limitations they place on joy for all classes. I thought Coates’ first sentence was pretty great, and it certainly made me want to keep reading:

I knew about wild plums twice before I tasted any.

– Grace Stone Coates, “Wild Plums”

For longer fiction, I finished Brendan Slocumb’s novel Symphony of Secrets this week, and I loved it. Our trip to NYC jazz clubs catalyzed me to finally do a thing I keep saying I want to do but have never actually done: learn about music. As with everything I’m interested in learning about, I immersed myself in a novel. The setting is today and the 1920s music scene in New York. The characters are musicians and music publicists and music historians. They speak the language of music. They are moved by music. Their hearts and souls are in music. And the story was a page-turner. I recommend it.

In non-fiction, I’m still making my way through Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. The crux of what I’ve gotten through so far is that, in economic terms, as the cost of prediction decreases due to machines being super fast and good at prediction compared to humans, the value of complements like judgment and decision-making — which require humans — will increase. In other words, our humanness doesn’t make us less valuable: our uniquely human capabilities become more valuable as machines make prediction easier and faster for us. Humans can harness AI to complement our own skill sets, and because AI lacks critical components of decision-making (judgment, action, outcome), an essential role of humans is that of machines’ supervisors.

Listens

This week, I fell in love with the title track from Jenny Lewis’s new album, Joy’All. I’m trying not to listen to it over and over again, even though I want to. I don’t want to wear it out too soon.

I’m fascinated by the implications of AI, what it’s capable of, and how people are reacting to it, so I listened to several podcasts this week, including a three part Planet Money series where the hosts had AI write an entire podcast episode, including creating an AI generated voice of one of the hosts. The result was both impressive in what it was able to do, and funny in how corny and wrong AI got some of the elements. The first two episodes are about how the hosts worked with AI to create the AI-written episode, and the third episode is the AI-written episode itself, along with the podcast team’s reaction to it. My coworker recommended the series, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in AI’s implications for knowledge work and creative jobs (spoiler: we’re safe. See above for human judgment and decision-making).

Similarly, Fresh Air’s Could Artificial Intelligence Destroy Humanity? is a great listen to assuage fears and also explain today’s AI technology for folks who are hearing the buzz but aren’t familiar with exactly what ChatGPT is, how it works, what it’s shortcomings are, and whether it will kill us all (spoiler: unlikely, though given enough time, anything is presumably possible, assuming the infinite monkey theorem that given infinite time, a monkey typing random keys would eventually write the works of Shakespeare).

Watches

Speaking of Shakespeare, I watched Hamlet this week. I didn’t enjoy it as much as Macbeth; I found my attention wandering in several parts. I don’t know how much of that was that the production I watched stayed 100% true to every word Shakespeare wrote for Hamlet, and it was hard for me to follow at times, or how much was simply that I didn’t care for the story as much. As with Macbeth, though, my eyebrows shot up several times when words were spoken, I recognized them, and I had no idea they had come from Shakespeare. For example, the whole “What a Piece of Work Is Man” speech, which I know large sections of from Hair. All these years I’ve been singing that song, and I had no idea it was from Shakespeare. It seems fitting to include alongside all the AI stuff this week.

What a piece of work is man
How noble in reason
How infinite in faculties
In form and moving
How express and admirable
In action how like an angel
In apprehension how like a god
The beauty of the world
The paragon of animals

– Galt MacDermot via William Shakespeare

Finally, WordPress, the open source software that powers this blog and more than 40% of the web, turned 20 on May 27. In celebration of the anniversary, to talk about WordPress’s history, and to talk about the principles of open source and their implications for our future, WordPress’s co-founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, joined with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal open source project, for the first time ever. They talked about why and how open source — software that’s available to everyone for free to use, study, redistribute, and improve — is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation, is based on rights instead of restrictions, and enables software to evolve and improve because it has a world of contributors instead of a restricted group within a walled organization. I was once again inspired by and proud to work for a company whose mission is to make the web a better place through open source.