112: The Unavoidable and Blurry Benefits of AI
[Before] The snow is heavy and wet. Also, 3 Body Problem (Netflix) is solid
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ [out of 5] for the eGO electric snow thrower. It chewed and spewed heavy wet snow with no effort, twice. Two complete driveway clearings over 12 hours, both on one set of batteries. Of our two school districts (teens versus Felix) just one cancelled. Lucky teenagers got to sleep in.
We’re welcoming artist Julian Meyer to tonight’s AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs course. Tomorrow the Persuasion & Marketing class is visiting Target’s enterprise comms team.
I really loved the 3 Body Problem novels by Liu Cixin. My oldest and I read all three books, and have had many conversations about the intent and meaning behind various themes and concepts laid out over millions of years. Loved the characters, the way Cixin illuminates culture’s and history’s often hidden yet transformative impact on science and technology. If you were as oppressed as Ye Wenjie, wouldn’t you do what she did? Not sure how I feel about the dark forest analogy, but there’s an appeal to magic and wonder in his writing which I adore. I haven’t watched the Chinese film adaptation on Amazon yet. But I’m four episodes into the Netflix adaptation. And it absolutely is a reconfiguration. They had to consolidate, had to speed things up, had to embody ideas into characters. I’m fine with the differences so far. The series looks great. Benedict Wong is fantastic.
Now what if we conflate 3 Body with AI?
Let’s talk about “The Unavoidable Relationship” described by philosopher and scientist Sam Harris in this clip:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
He begins with an analogy for AI: It’s as if an alien from another planet walks into the room we’re in. There’s no choice but to be in a relationship. You’re in the room. It’s in the room. However you choose to characterize the relationship with AI, neither of you is leaving the room. Now what? Most of the world has access to electricity. Now what? Most of us have a personal smartphone. Now what? Hundreds of millions of people have access to AI on their smartphones. Now what?
Then Harris dramatizes Mollick’s “endless interns” concept: 10 guys in another room represent AI. But, they—the AI—aren’t any smarter than you or I, however they can process information a million times faster than we can. Let’s imagine we both work for two weeks, then regroup with the 10 guys who—again, are not smarter than us, just processing faster. Two weeks for us is 20,000 years of analogous progress for them. (3 Body fans might see a corollary here.) Now what?
If all we focus on is the endless interns (i.e. faster processing), generative AI will be a benefit for those who choose to leverage it.
And what about the value of “the painful and laborious process?”
In a slightly related post, ad man and behavioral economist Rory Sutherland provides another salient reply to Sam Altman’s recent quote. (Altman’s quote suggests creative output is the intentional and only outcome of marketing investment.) In other words, what if the more meaningful outcome of an ad campaign isn’t the ads?
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Altman’s quote suffers from “doorman’s fallacy.” What if the real value of doing the work of building a campaign is in the process itself (and not the perceived primary output)? And to that I’d add, imagine how much more you might be able to experiment and learn if your process was aided by an endless supply of AI “interns?”
AI+Creativity Update
🎶 This. Kokayi sat in with Nate Smith’s trio at the Blue Note NYC and they improvised. They are l-i-s-t-e-n-i-n-g!
🫦 Runway announced Lip Sync. It does what you imagine.
🤖🎨 The filmmaker Bennett Miller just launched a show at Gogosian Beverly Hills of his generative black-and-white pigment prints (mostly DALLE). More via ArtNet.
🌫️ Sir Martin Sorrell seems bullish on AI enabling but also reconfiguring what it means to be an advertising, PR or media agency. The short term impact is an increasing blurring of knowledge work as AI commodifies what were once niche skills. And might we see the end of time sheets??? “One change needed is billing according to output rather than time spent, (italics mine) he said, since the current model incentivises agencies to keep larger headcounts and time-consuming processes over efficiencies.”