September Update

I haven’t blogged in some time. Funny how that happens: I took six weeks off work and, though I was traveling in India, I had enough downtime to blog all the time. Now that I’m back in NYC, and have been for months, I haven’t blogged once. Regular life, it turns out, is busier than travel – what with work (agentic programming has only increased the intensity of my work), socializing, cooking, exercising, clerical work, reading, vegging out, etc, what time is left to share my brilliant insights with you, my giant and devoted coterie of readers?

So, this blog post is me peeking my head up from the chaos, and mostly just saying hi. I have this blog. I should use it. I’m paying for it, anyway.

I can’t promise I’m going to blog a lot. I’m between jobs right now, so I have some time. But I’m starting a new gig next week, and while I’ve spent a lot of time telling myself I will maintain boundaries – and I will maintain boundaries! – I don’t expect the coming months to be an especially chill period. Not, at least, like the past couple weeks have been.

How incredible it is to not work! I am jealous of teachers who get the whole summer off. As adults, are we really OK with only having a few weeks off a year (at most), our whole lives, until we retire? It’s not that I’ve been idle these last couple weeks: on the contrary, it’s been awesome to have time to do everything I want to do. I’m reading up a storm. I’m exercising at least once a day, going to yoga classes and running. I’m cooking most of my meals. I’m walking everywhere. I’m completing a hideous backlog of tasks I’ve let build up for myself, and settling into my new apartment. And yes, I’m vegetating a bit – let there be time even for that.

But no. We owe 1/3rd (if we’re lucky) of our lives to the man. And if we’re good boys for X-many years, then we can enjoy the last 15 or 20 years of our lives in relative comfort. Hopefully our medical conditions aren’t too bad by then.

What am I doing about this? Nothing. As I said, I’m starting a new job. I’m looking forward to it, even. But I am thinking about how things could be different. No brilliant insights have come my way yet.

I will say, this period, in contrast to my time in India, has been deeply restorative. Traveling is interesting and educational, but it’s not always relaxing. Sitting in my new apartment, however, on the couch or on the balcony, walking through the greenery of Brooklyn now that it’s not so hot out, just not rushing… is awesome. That’s not to say I won’t take long trips again, but I will aspire to do them at a leisurely pace, and to make them restorative, rather than educational experiences.

What else is there to report? Not much, really. I was doing these book reports on the blog, and frankly I don’t feel like doing them for everything I’ve read. One might appear every once in awhile, but it’s more likely I’ll just publish an end-of-year reading list. I’ve been reading a lot but nothing that’s blown me away (I did reread Coetzee’s Disgrace, but I already knew that was good). 

And then there’s been the crazy transformation my field of work, and society writ large, is undergoing: the age of AI. I have mixed feelings there. I work in the space, and am about to get more deeply involved in the space (as I said, new job). It’s interesting stuff, and it’s also worrisome. I think of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover often. The industrial revolution increased our alienation from nature, and the digital revolution is increasing it yet further. I do not long for the halcyon days of outhouses and cholera, but I do think there is something lost in the push for more and more automation, as if being a human without these enhancements – mechanical, digital, and soon cybernetic – were insufficient. Is it not enough to see the sun rising at dawn and setting in the evening? I’m being a bit corny, I know, but I also do think we are atom-izing ourselves, cutting ourselves off from nature and each other behind layers and layers of digital glamour, with the end result of… what? Nothing that seems that exciting so far. Maybe, as the Anthropic people say, AI will cure cancer. I hope it does. But it seems likelier to cause a stock market crash currently.

In a way it’s a failure of software that we need AI agents. The fact that it is so annoying to do all the tedious clerical work I must do online (wrangling my medical history, booking appointments, finding places to eat, etc etc) means that our existing software is still not good enough. AI agents are, as we like to say in tech, a step up the abstraction ladder from old-fashioned software (websites, for example). They allow us to stitch together (“compose,” in software terms) all these badly-connected systems, since the agent can just do the tedious busywork for us. That’s a good thing, I guess – or at least that’s what I’m telling myself – but it’s sort of sad that it’s come to this point. What are we that our light is spent crawling through bank statements checking for erroneous charges, or unsubscribing from dozens of spam emails? This is the society we’ve built for ourselves?

I’m rambling a bit, and I might have a more cogent, dedicated blog post on the subject of AI later. For now, I’m just putting this missive out into the void, to say I haven’t forgotten about this blog, and I may start using it more frequently. We shall see.