Growth Days

Yesterday and today were blocked out as “growth days” on my calendar at work - we get a number of them per year, and if you don’t use them, you lose them. Having not used any of mine all year, I now have two per month pencilled in all the way through until Christmas.

Of course the rest of the world outside of the company has no idea about these “growth days”, and the rest of the world doesn’t conveniently stop for a couple of days every month - so guess what happens. Just guess. “Can you quickly jump on this call?”. “Have you got five minutes?”.

We all know five minutes is never five minutes, don’t we?

I’m probably being a little bit dramatic. The entire concept of a “growth day” is still kind of novel to me - I’ve spent most of my career learning how to put fires out while the flames climb up my trousers.

The one thing the growth days have given me is the opportunity to take a step back - to really think about what I’m doing, and where things are headed.

The core skill-set that has differentiated me from so many for the last several decades has almost entirely been replaced by AI in the last year. That said, there’s still a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt pedalled about artificial intelligence. Here’s the thing - the name is wrong.

Artificial intelligence is NOT intelligent. It’s a very, very fast idiot with photographic memory. Actually - more than that - it not only knows what it has seen, but it knows the general way a million similar situations went. When you strip AI down to it’s nuts and bolts, all it’s really doing is probability calculations on an unimaginable scale.

AI has no big ideas. It has no hunches about anything. The interesting thing to me at least in the huge backlash around the arts is how short sighted people are when denouncing how AI learns. It learns it’s colossal matrix of probabilities by looking. You know… like when we go to a museum, or an art gallery, or flick through a magazine, or walk down a street, or watch television, or a hundred other things.

We do the same damn thing.

It’s a bit like saying “how dare you use AI to write that passage of text - after letting it read the entire contents of the library - only humans should be allowed to write - after reading the entire contents of the library, and writing with peer review throughout their entire lives”.

Have the detractors SEEN the general level of grammar, spelling, and punctuation on Facebook or Threads?

Being fair, I suspect a LOT of the spelling problems that afflict the social internet are down to Apple auto-correct. I’ve used just about every major modern operating system over the last several years, and Apple auto-correct is by far the worst - which kind of proves the point about AI not being intelligent.

Anyway.

One unintended side-effect of having a “growth day” is the opportunity to take a step back, and read a little of the dreaded “social internet”.

I stepped into Threads at lunchtime, and marvelled at the tent-pole battles about anything and everything. It seems rather than commentators gathering around posts to be the smartest guy in the room, on Threads anything and everything posted is an invitation to attack. It’s pretty harrowing stuff.

I left Threads behind rather quickly, and retreated to the safety of Substack - where the most recent note on their wall caused me to pause for quite some time. Somebody had posted exactly what I had been thinking for some time - that since Substack became popular, and flooded with tens of thousands of writers, it’s value as a community has all but vanished. It’s not really their fault either - it’s the problem of all communities when they cross a given tipping point.

I guess you can liken it to a small village. When only a few people live there, you get to know one another. You meet each other in passing from week to week. Friendships are forged - not by design, but by happenstance. Once the village grows to the size a thriving metropolis, the community drowns. You rarely see the same person twice, no matter how clever the algorithm - which causes everybody to retreat within bubbles of a few friends - rarely stepping outside for fear of the rampant mansplaining, hate, division, and rhetoric being spread far and wide by the usual soap-box-lunatics that ruin all public platforms eventually.

Don’t even get me started about “the algorithms” - that watch your every move - expertly narrowing that which you see to all of your prejudices or predilections. If you stop scrolling, then you must like what you’re seeing. If you keep scrolling, you’ll never find the last thing you read ever again.

I’ve written in the past about concordant feedback. I think the thing that worries me most is that the people most likely to be manipulated and radicalised by algorithmic timelines are the most vulnerable - the least aware of the poison they are teaching the machinery to feed them.

It’s probably time to get off my own soap box.

Perhaps the resistance against the social platforms is another siren song from the distant past - the beginnings of the world wide web - when we actively searched for and found one another, rather than trusting an unseen algorithm to do it for us.

I wonder if people that are accepting in the belief in creator figures that govern our every-day lives are also accepting of the algorithms that drive the social networks? No doubt they’ll claim we invented the social networks, whereas creators are divine - except if you wind the clock back far enough, you discover we invented the creators too.

On reflection, perhaps this whole “stepping back and thinking” business isn’t such a good idea after all. Once you start questioning one thing, you end up questioning everything.