In the middle of San Francisco Bay sits 22 acres of rock and guano.
One and a half miles from shore and surrounded by frigid waters, “the rock” was good for nothing. Until 1934, when it became great for a prison.
Alcatraz became the perfect place to house some of the worst of the worst. Murderers and menaces to society like “Machine Gun” Kelly and Al Capone.
These were bad men.
The prisoners on Alcatraz weren’t given a lot of luxuries. But they were provided one comfort: hot showers. Lots of them. So hot they could be scalding.
What the captives weren't given was cold water.
This was by cruel design.
If an inmate ever wanted to escape the rock, being acclimatized to hot water would make the bay's icy waters feel even more frigid.
AI is today's hot water. It comforts us. Lowers our threshold for hard work. It will increasingly do our hard thinking.
Over time, we simply forget how to do stuff.
We are being set up for a phenomenon that Daniel Khaneman explains in his legendary book Thinking, Fast and Slow:
“A general ‘law of least effort’ applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and cost. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”
We all worry if one day AI will take our jobs. But when this happens it will happen slowly. Lazily.
A few months ago, Satya Nadella the CEO of Microsoft told an audience that we should not get caught up in the “lump of labor fallacy.”
What he means it that employment in the age of AI is not a zero-sum game. And while some jobs will go away, many new ones will take their place.
Mr. Nadella went on to ask rhetorically and with upended tech optimism, “Then what are all the new jobs and what is the training required?”
Next year, OpenAI will spend a billion dollars training ChatGPT5. (ChatGPT6 is projected to cost 10 billion. Chart below.)
Source: Dr. Alan D. Thompson
Yet one has to wonder what is being spent on the human side of the ledger? And what exactly are the jobs that are being created and just what is the training that is required?
With billions of dollars going into training AIs, it seems the skilling of machines is looking to some to be a better investment than the re-skilling of humans.
As AI does more of the cognitive work, will we lose our connection to the talents that make us relevant in the world of work? Will we forget how to think for ourselves? Will AI make us complacent?
Copious hot water on a chilly Alcatraz provided the ultimate in comfort. Until the day you wanted to get off the island.
Welcome to Nextness. More than a newsletter, a mindset.
This year Burning Man experienced two firsts:
For the first time in its 30-year-old history, Burners were told to shelter in place.
And second, Burning Man’s first AI artwork materialized on the desert floor.
Neither would have happened if not for a few extraordinary events that intervened in the life of Ronnie Allman in the last months of 2022:
“I got laid off right after Thanksgiving and I had some free time so I thought let’s start playing with this AI thing.”
The timing turned out to be fortuitous and shortly thereafter came the second part of the puzzle:
“I got an email from Burning Man saying ‘Hey, if you want to submit to Burning Man art the honorarium deadline is almost here.’ Which was like two weeks out.”
After a quick “oh shit” moment, Ronnie did what most of us knew very little about at the time:
“I just started entering prompts into DALL-E. And I entered ‘flaming thrones at Burning Man.’ At first it came up with a couple of weird things. So I tried a little more. Then came this amazing render.”
Ronnie's original DALL-E render
But a picture was only the beginning. Then began the real creative process. In keeping with the Burning Man ethic, Ronnie and the team didn’t want this just to be a place for Instagram photos. It had to be an experience first:
“I wanted somebody to sit there for 10 or 20 minutes. So we came up with this idea of interactivity. There’s an Arduino running a sound system that is hooked up underneath the throne. Where your hands are, there are four buttons where you can make custom sounds when you hit them.”
The "Flight of Spring” being constructed in San Francisco
But Ronnie was in for a surprise he didn’t see coming. While most Burning Man art is revered for its vertiginous wonders, the throne was low to the ground, making it accessible to everyone:
“One night around two A.M. this guy rolled up on one of those hand pedal bikes. He rides up and says, ‘This was made for me!’ He gets up on his hands and props himself up and sits on the throne. He is paralyzed from the waist down. And I just start bawling. And that’s when it became art to me.”
For people who fear AI will take over, it is clear that in many areas it will be a key contributor, but not the holder of the vision. For that, human artistry, discernment, and problem solving are still very much needed:
“I’ve made commercials. I’ve made films. I’ve made all these things that huge teams. But this one was a group of five builders just kind of being in a woodshop and building something from stuff you’d find at Home Depot.”
It’s a little bit like jazz with one member taking the leading and the other following. In this case sometimes it’s the artist and sometimes it’s AI:
“We had the image before we even had the idea on this one. We sort of backed ourselves into a corner. But it turned out making the experience ten times better. I think that is what is special about this medium.”
For people who are confident in their creative abilities, they see tools like Midjourney as an extension of their craft. Ronnie is no exception:
“The rewards of AI are so much bigger than the downsides. Using it have been 10X more than not using it. The idea is to use it in a way that empowers creativity and teambuilding and individual creativity.”
The connection between creators and the community they are part of is only growing stronger. People will continually seek out experiences that resonate, that connect, that share their values. More of this can only be seen as a positive trend. If AI can enable more of this faster, it seems we all benefit.
AI will streamline traditional processes, but it will also contribute mightily to experiences and art that never would have been possible without its emergence.
“I think just building art was really the catalyst to making it the best year ever. It’s just this constant high of I’ve done something that that is going to be received by 70,000 people.”
Earlier this year Matt Rivitz did something highly counterintuitive. Against a backdrop of generative AI, large language models and ChatGPT, he launched a business called the Quills – a writing service.
The Quills is a confederation of the old-fashioned type of living, breathing writers of circa, say, 2022.
Organized and vetted by Matt, the mission is to offer a non-obvious business advantage: the power of human writing.
As much as tools like ChatGPT or Jasper can offer AI copywriting, Matt believes all their very best they bring a rehash. These new tools are a product of all the writing that has come before. Sometimes it’s surprisingly good, but in Matt’s world nothing compares to human-crafted prose.
Matt is what you would call a highly committed writer, and AI-generated output just didn’t sit well with him:
“And I was like, you know what, like, I'll be damned if this thing that's been out for two months is going to take the work of people that have been working at this for decades.”
For companies that want to create marketing that stands out, words, and the minds behind them, still matter.
It’s not unusual to see websites that declare “Written by humans” or “100% non-AI.” The most successful marketers have always zagged when others zig.
So has Matt.
A career ad copywriter, Matt has been selflessly drawn to causes that most of us, in well-calculated acts of self-preservation, wouldn’t touch in a million years.
In 2016, Matt started something called Sleeping Giants.
After the election of that year, he began to wonder how things had gone so wrong. He began to investigate things and came across Steve Bannon and Breitbart news.
Corporate America was unintentionally funding hate and division. Sites like Breitbart were publishing racist articles. Alongside them ads for things like Huggies and Vitamin Water.
Matt was dumbfounded.
But unlike anyone else in America at this point, he decided to do something about it. He grabbed a screenshot of what he saw and posted it on Twitter under the name Sleeping Giants. He then linked it to the advertiser. A response came back in less than an hour:
“I just tagged Sofi, and also their CEO, and he got back to me within 30 minutes, and he said, ‘Hey, I had no idea this is on there. I don't even know if I can do anything about that. But I'm going to try.’ So that started everything.”
Media is mostly purchased at arm’s length. All the media buyer sees is demographics. It’s called retargeting:
“Basically, set your price, just like social media, you set your parameters on who you are trying to reach. What the demographics are, what they you know what they're into, and then it will look around the internet for a place where those targets are. And they'll place an ad there, regardless of what the content is.”
Matt built a social media presence and kept executing on the same strategy. Making corporate advertisers aware of the toxic content they were unwittingly supporting:
“I just kept tweeting. I had a friend who was a New York Times best-selling author, and he had 60,000 followers, and I said, ‘Hey, will you throw this out to your followers?’ And suddenly, I had 1000 people then 2000 and then 3000 people following within the first couple of weeks.”
The first tweet from Sleeping Giants
It didn’t stop there; Sleeping Giant’s influence and following kept growing. As the public became more conscious of media’s role in fueling sexism, bias, and racism, Sleeping Giants went on to unseat some of the biggest names in media:
“So, two years went by Breitbart had pretty much lost all their ad income. Steve Bannon had actually done a video for a documentary where he acknowledged that Sleeping Giants had basically torn them apart. Five months in, there's a big article about Bill O'Reilly in the New York Times saying he was sexually harassing all these women at Fox and not only was Fox not doing anything about it, but they're settling these suits for him. And they're all these female-centered brands that were on his show.”
As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. It all came to a crescendo after he was doxed:
“Tucker Carlson's website, The Daily Caller, did an article exposing me, and it just got super hectic for a couple of months. I got a lot of death threats, and my kids got death threats online. And, you know, it was super scary.”
Somehow this has just increased his appetite for setting things right. Today, he is focused on something that is very close to his heart. The Quills is his next cause.
“Coming out of sleeping giants, I didn't just want to have this capitalistic endeavor. I wanted it to mean something and have a mission. And that's what it became.”
The Quills combines Matt’s passion for making a measurable impact with what he most loves: writing.
As he listened to those in business around him, he realized that even in the AI-dominated world of ChatGPT and Jasper, precise and perceptive writing still mattered:
“I have so many friends, within startups, and bigger companies, that have said, writing is a logjam. That it's like a lost art. That they didn't know how to find people anymore. And I was like, 'Well, I know a bunch of them and they're all fucking awesome. And maybe we should try to put you guys in touch.'”
Matt has already enlisted as many writers as he can currently offer gigs to. He would like to add more as soon as the marketing climate thaws and some AI shortcomings become even more apparent:
“I’ve seen some of the jokes ChatGPT has written. I’ve seen some of the things it has put out there for blogs. It’s good. But it’s based on previous work. If you believe in creativity, you believe there are things it cannot come up with.”
When Matt thinks about writing, it's not only the world of advertising and marketing. Matt imagines The Quills as being a place that delivers genius writing more broadly:
“I want to do all of it. There's legal writing. There’s writing for sitcoms and all that. I would like to get to a point where we're representing all different kinds of writers for all kinds of work. I think that would be the coolest thing ever.”
It’s not an either-or world we live in. AI will always play an increasingly significant role. But there is still a place for humans. Thankfully, still at the top.
As much as Matt believes in the unlimited power of the writer’s craft, he is a realist. And he is the first to point out that writers probably need to sell themselves as never before:
“When I got into advertising, I always thought the people that came up with the biggest ideas and the best ideas would win and get promotions and be rewarded for it. It is not what happens. It’s who can sell the ideas and bring them to life that matters.”
The debate about AI replacing human creativity will continue to rage. As much as Matt would love to jump into the ongoing and seemingly endless debate, it’s time for more pressing business:
“Right now, I'm just focused on getting people back to work and getting them payable hours. That’s it. That’s all that matters.”
In 1997 computer scientist and robotics specialist Hans Moravec wrote a paper entitled “When will computer hardware match the human brain?” What followed read almost like science fiction. To some it was outlandish. Whether you took it seriously or not, most found comfort in the fact that things like human creativity would be the last things to fall to AI.
A few paragraphs into his paper he crystalizes his metaphor of "The Great Flood":
“Imagine a ‘landscape of human competence,’ having lowlands with labels like ‘arithmetic’ and ‘rote memorization’, foothills like ‘theorem proving’ and ‘chess playing,’ and high mountain peaks labeled ‘locomotion’ ‘hand−eye coordination’ and ‘social interaction.’ We all live in the solid mountaintops, but it takes great effort to reach the rest of the terrain, and only a few of us work each patch.”
The idea is that the sea level of AI is inexorably rising.
Moravec was on to something. But as we are learning lately, AI sea-change is not necessarily following the prescribed route.
As Sam Altman tweeted over a year and a half ago:
“Soon, AI tools will do what only very talented humans can do today. (I expect this to go mostly in the counter-intuitive order--creative fields first, cognitive labor next, and physical labor last.) Great for society; not always great for individual jobs.”
As usual, exceptionally smart people like Hans Moravec and Sam Altman saw it all coming. The rest of us only recognize change when we notice water collecting around our boots.
Generative-AI is creating alternatives to human expression. Some outputs even rival what humans can accomplish.
Two weeks ago, an AI-enabled song “Heart of My Sleeve” was included for consideration in the Grammy’s. Everyday, generative-AI grows exponentionally.
How much longer until AI reaches levels that we thought were impossible just a few years ago? And how will we know when AI has surpassed us? Moravec leaves us with this:
“As the rising flood reaches more populated heights, machines will begin to do well in areas a greater number can appreciate. The visceral sense of a thinking presence in machinery will become increasingly widespread. When the highest peaks are covered, there will be machines than can interact as intelligently as any human on any subject. The presence of minds in machines will then become self−evident.”
The Great Flood, as envisaged by Hans Moravec
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