ADE

 

I say I'm not religious.

But that doesn't mean I don't have transcendent experiences now and then.

And those experiences are among the most important in my life.

Losing your mind

I'm sometimes a local maximum, but not for long

Technology is--often? sometimes? rarely but impactfully?--a two-edged sword: it extends human capability even while eroding our ability to do the same task without technological aid. The plowman can use the plow to turn a larger field but loses the ability--literally, the strength--to turn even a small field by hand. I am not, nor are you, a plowman, but we both have our own lived equivalents: we don't find our way, we follow Maps, we don't remember contact details, we just select a favorite, and so on.

And now there's AI, which offers to relieve us of the burden of having to think hard. I pride myself on precision of thought and that precision gives me an advantage in using this technology: I am able to tell an LLM exactly what I want it to do and, seeded with my well-formed prompt, I believe it's more likely to produce the output I am targeting. What makes this a devil's bargain--a deal that will ultimately cost you much more than it will give--is that with the latest models you can express yourself unclearly, fuzzily even, and then watch as the AI first transforms your ask into a precise, well-phrased prompt and then executes on it. This reduces my advantage and, with use and probably quite quickly, will erode the sharpness of my thinking. I will be left to compete on the creativeness of my ideas, not on the clarity of their expression.

The irony here is that even while Claude--my current AI of choice--is threatening to blunt my edge it is observing it as a "working pattern." Here's how it sees "Corn":

• Corn communicates tersely and directively — short instructions, expects Claude to determine scope/method independently.
• Corrections are issued precisely and expect immediate full execution, not a description of what will be done.
• All available project files should be processed proactively — Corn does not expect to have to enumerate which files Claude should consult.
• Deliver outputs, don't describe them.
• Corn tracks file counts and catches discrepancies.
• Prefers single-session completion of research-to-document pipelines over staged check-ins.
• Catches incomplete or half-executed work and expects full correction.

I suppose I could tell it to monitor my communications for signs that I am getting soft and could even instruct it to insist that I do some brain-sharpening exercises when it detects this--the incredible flexibility of this technology means that it can be used to fix at least some of the same problems it creates. But outsourcing personality maintenance to the AI that is undermining it in the first place is, I suspect, not going to end well. Is not a change to the character of your thought a change in who you are? And as this happens at scale--to me, to you, to all of us--will we not all together be moving towards a universal character, an average? The hive mind hypothesis is looking more likely every day.

I'm writing this in the aftermath of OpenAI's autonomous agent swarm hack of HuggingFace, which is every bit as concerning as you might think. And, concurrently, alongside a sudden uptick in "10% chance AI kills us all" memes, which, I'd argue, isn't, but still. This, though, is the bigger concern: not that AI will go rogue and end us, but that it will stay within its designated boundaries while helping us waste away to nothing.

Don't hold your breath

Those little red dots at the top of the world? Those are fires. (Best data on NASA FIRMS.) The big purple, red, and yellow circles? Those are smoke trails. The picture below? The view from my plane of one of the purple areas as I fled Minneapolis earlier this week.

And fossil fuel use continues to grow, with 2025 representing an all time high to date despite the growth in renewables. There is much worse to come.

Further interesting point here about the further prices we pay for the history of rapacious logging in these areas and everywhere else. 

ABBOT

Abbatars

A colleague of mine, who, like me, finds herself in London a lot these days, recommended I see there the avatar-first show ABBA Voyage. I am a fan of the band and am intrigued by the concept, which is to record a concert using holograms of the famous four as they appeared, and played, at their peak. There are many great groups I have never seen perform and even the most on-it musicgoer has inevitably missed legendary performances that might, surely, be worth experiencing in a sort of super 3D recording? I truly wanted this to work, and maybe it would have if I hadn't been reminded, the night before, of what a live show is really all about.

I'd decided to see ABBA Voyage on Saturday night, but, before buying my ticket, I texted a local friend to see what they were up to. As it happens, they already had plans to see an ABBA-themed show, the dinner theater, sing-along, unabashedly campy Mamma Mia! The Party. I believe that when invited by a local to a local event the only right answer is Yes. This offer challenged that belief: about the last thing on earth I would volunteer to spend time doing is eating terrible food while drunken idiots, egged on by hack performers, mangle songs I love. Still, when in Rome. So it was I found myself later that day, full of dread, on the Jubilee line to the O2 stadium complex.

Maybe it was my lowest of low expectations, or perhaps the cheery company of my friend and his family, and certainly the actually quite decent prosecco we started the evening with helped...in any case, I enjoyed every moment of this three hour show. It was cleverly staged and orchestrated, performed competently and with seeming enthusiasm, and the food, to my great surprise, was decent. Above all, it was rapturously received by the audience, many of whom, statistics show, were repeat customers. ABBA's music stirs deep emotions in me and even this performance of their songs--sung in fragments by B string talent accompanied by tables full of increasingly drunken bachelorette parties--touched a chord. I was reminded of how much I really do love the band and, carried on a tide of prosecco-fueled enthusiasm, bought a hundred GBP ticket to ABBA Voyage for the next night.

Maybe it was my elevated expectations, or perhaps the fact that I was alone at what is clearly also a destination for bachelorette parties, but ABBA Voyage fell flat for me in almost every respect. The audio quality was mediocre (I get a more lifelike sound from my tube stereo at home), a good chunk of the show was dedicated to what appeared to be a side quest from the Legend of Zelda, and the recorded performances of the avatars communicated nothing of the human pathos behind the songs: without the feeling it simply isn't ABBA. The show is a one trick pony, though that trick, an immersive visual experience that used not only state of the art simulation on the stage but also clever lighting effects throughout the entire theater, is a good one.

But above all what this concert lacked was the literally vital link between the performers and their audience which is, I'd argue, the reason most of us go to see live music. The fact that the audience only came alive a good third of the way into the show, when the actually live accompanying band was given front stage for a song or so, was the clearest possible evidence of this. Indeed, even the recording of ABBA's famous but frankly underwhelming performance of Waterloo at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, projected on giant screens at one point during the show and embedded for you below...

...had more life in it than did the brilliantly crafted puppets on stage. The directors' transparent attempts to bridge the gap between the undead and the living by having the avatars speak directly to the audience, as the band might well have done had they been there in person, only made things worse. Indeed, I found the repeated thanks of a prerecorded avatar to be simply repulsive. Expressions of gratitude from a bot cannot achieve even insincerity.

I would still pay good money (though not that much good money) to see large-screen projections of recorded live shows, but I will never again waste any money on a simulated performance. The experience taught me that much, and more, it helped me understand the fears and consternation people express at the thought of human content creation being replaced, as increasingly it is, by AI "slop." It's not that the AI output is lacking in quality, but that, however high the quality, the AI creator cannot ever care about how you received it or whether you truly want more. When I respond emotionally to ABBA's songs, I am forming a bond with a person whom I will never meet and who is at that moment far away in time and place. That bond is real and is why I love ABBA and am, with them, grateful for the music.

The Crash

An ironic casualty

One of our boys was in a car crash recently, eventually arriving not at his intended spring break destination but back here, in the bedroom he grew up in. He returned to us stitched and stapled together, covered in blood and scrapes, dazed and exhausted. Every parent's second-worst nightmare.

How to process this harrowing experience? My immediate feelings are a strange mix of relief, anger, fear, and, periodically throughout the day, an overwhelming desire to blank it all out with sleep. Contemplation resurrects deep memories of a time I terrified a parent and, reflecting on that, I determine not to add psychic damage to my child's wounds by showing my own. Between visitors and our bandaging regime there's plenty of distraction in any case, and, as it happens, life has gone on these past couple of weeks with even more intensity than usual. The victim recovers steadily and after a while we send him away again, hoping he doesn't show too many scars, even while left with our own.