I met a nice young woman on a hike last summer, exchanged numbers, and we met up again last weekend. She’s lovely. I also met up with my young cousin for breakfast today. She’s lovely, too. I have hope for the world again!
These young people don’t have it easy. The hiking friend feels like she’s training AI to take over her job, but still thinks there’s a place for her. She had to select photos for a brochure, and she thinks that an AI would never be able to find the humanity in the photos that she chose. There’d be no way of quantifying what made one photo show the personality of the people better (or faster) than she could. It can’t do context. That doesn’t seem like something it would ever be able to do?
She loves photography, and like my partner, has a partially manual camera that she loves to use. She was so excited when she found that out that she actually jumped for joy. How can you not feel better when you see someone that happy? Partially manual cameras mean understanding the physics of how focus works mechanically so someone can choose what they want to emphasize. It means learning what “film” to choose. Kodak films were good with reds, Fuji with blues, Agfa with greens, Leica cameras would soften images around the edges. Some cameras allow you to choose these looks, or mix and match, but you need to know the benefits and shortcomings of choosing one or another. Human skills.
My young cousin has figured out the limits of AI. She recently passed some hard exams (I’m so pleased for her!!! She made it into the second year of her program, and her university makes the first year hard to eliminate people.) She has friends who tried to use AI to synthesize lecture notes and as she went through the results; they were at least fifty percent just plain wrong. She talked about that the value of doing the hard work now so that she’s prepared for the program later. She said that it’s worth digging through the lectures, understanding the point, rather than going to the end and just studying for the exams. Wow. Again, how can you not feel better when you hear that?
I want this on the record. I want hope to be documented.
I still feel like we’re going to be screwed. Either AI “pays off” and we will be subjugated by our computer overlords, or it doesn’t and the economy is going to tank because there’s been such colossal sums invested in it.
But there are still young women jumping for joy because they found a kindred spirit in their hobby, and doing the hard work of learning because they bet on it paying off for them later. A lot of hope is telling better stories.
Quote from Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories:
Sandy Bates: Shouldn’t I stop making movies and do something that counts, like helping blind people or becoming a missionary or something?
Voice of Martian: Let me tell you, you’re not the missionary type. You’d never last. And incidentally, you’re also not Superman; you’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.
So I’m here trying to tell better stories about the world. It helps to have Foro as an assistant.
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