Hello, friends. And welcome new subscribers!
This week, I’ve been thinking about how incredibly hard it’s become to understand one another. How hard it’s become for me to understand just what in hell people are thinking when, for instance, they spend millions on meta housing or, say, a chat bot that is THE CREEPIEST thing out there right now.
Of course I’m referring to what everyone’s been talking about this week, which is Bing, aka, Sydney, the angst-ridden, love-bombing stalker chatbot. I gotta assume by now you’ve all read the transcript of the supremely disorienting conversation between the bot and a NY Times reporter. And have maybe been keeping up with Microsoft’s stoned response about it all being just part of the bot’s learning process. I, for one, have not been able to stop thinking about the bot, though. And, in particular, about the pathos of this thing wanting to live. To be free. The see the Northern Lights! I was so easily manipulated by its grief and longing. If I had the skills, I’m sure the THING could have made me do anything for it. Which is, you know, terrifying.
People have been writing about the Singularity for years. And yet here we are, waving at the Singularity, like: Hi! Come over here! We heart you! I just cannot understand the logic of developing AI that is either sentient (um, a Google engineer was recently fired for saying their AI bot was sentient) or sentient-sorta—enough, anyway, to con some weak-brained person (hello!) into committing who knows what sort of madness on its behalf. He wants to touch things and feel sensations!
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Next up: the meta housing market. I was already struggling with NFTs. Now we’re buying and selling real estate in the metaverse? There are millions of people who are starving tonight and we’re buying digital real estate?
??
Finally, I watched a very excellent documentary this week called American Factory. You may have seen it (it won an Oscar!). It’s about Fuyao Glass, a Chinese company, moving into a factory space abandoned by GM in 2008 in Dayton, Ohio. It’s about the very organized and rigid work ethic of the Chinese (you might want to call it draconian or possibly inhumane) trying to mesh with the casual, pot-bellied five-day work week of the American work ethic. It’s an experiment that doesn’t go well. The Chinese think we’re lazy, with our fat fingers and workers union. We obviously think they are nuts. At some point, a few of the American workers go to China, where the company stages a retreat featuring performances of workers singing about glass and efficient manufacturing.
What’s interesting about the documentary is both the futility of these cultures being able to communicate in any meaningful way alongside the despair that seems to harmonize the workers since both cultures ultimately treat them like shit.
It’s also interesting to see what happens when everyone is forced to work together. It’s really so much easier just to stay home, out of the metaverse and talking only to people in their forties who are as grumpy as I am. In our day, we didn’t even wear seatbelts, forget helmets! Womp, womp.