We took Rufus to our downtown YMCA for his first toddler swim class, which was perfectly scoped to half an hour. He made a valiant effort to blow bubbles in the water (ended up licking the surface), laughed when I flipped him from chest to back to chest again, and didn’t try to run off to the adult pool. The night prior we went bowling, also a first, and it was all we could do to keep him from dancing into the adjacent lanes. In the past month he’s had his first ice cream cone, rode his first choo-choo, and saw – and touched! – an in-service firetruck at our local fire station, where a firefighter nicknamed “Foxy” gave him his first cookie. He’s a happy, mischievous (we call him “Asian of chaos”), and deeply funny kid. I’m trying my best to savor these moments.
Work-wise I was out in Mountain View for a few days covering Google I/O (their annual developer conference) for Every. On the flight there I read Sebastian Mallaby’s thrilling The Infinity Machine, a profile of DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis (which I recommend to the much-puffier documentary The Thinking Game).
Being there gave me the impression that there’s a growing chasm between what researchers at the frontier labs see in their most advanced AI models’ impacts on scientific research and robotics, and the error-prone results that the most people see in the AI summaries tacked onto the tops of search pages. I believe that Hassabis believes, based on the progress he’s seen working on AlphaGo and AlphaFold, that – as he so casually said during the keynote at I/O – we’ll in our lifetimes “cure all disease.” I also believe that of the frontier labs, Google is maybe the one most cognizant that they need to prove that people’s lives aren’t going to get worse on the way there.
That said: I also had a hand in editing this essay by Dan arguing why the fears of AI automating away human jobs underestimate our own intelligence. It’s a pragmatic counterpoint to both the hype and doom on either extreme, and Dan’s advice in this weird – maybe weirdest – moment in time is to “surf the models.” The piece is a brisk 8,000 words, and took a huge effort across the company.
My last night in California, I stopped at Books Inc. in downtown Mountain View and, as one does in Silicon Valley, picked up a copy of Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas for the flight back—my first Culture novel.
But I’ll save my thoughts for when I finish.
Jack
p.s. June’s digital mending circle is next Tuesday the 9th at 7:30–9:00pm Eastern. I’ll be working on my website. Reply for the Zoom link if you want to join.