Iโm turning 40 in a few months and trying not to thinkย too much of it, but I am getting my bearings a bit.
Yesterday Elisa Gabbert tweeted, โI think I liked magazines more as a kid because the writing was by people older and wiser than me, with different generational interests. Now itโs just, like, writing by my friends, or people who could be? Iโm supposed to pay for this? Lolโ
I had a good laugh at this.ย It made me think that a good move at this age might be to start reading the NYTimes for Kids (which I already do) orย Teen Vogue or AARP.
This would be the publication equivalent toย Kevin Kellyโs advice, โWhen you are young, have friends who are older; when you are old, have friends who are younger.โ
I do feel kind of lucky right now, to be in the middle: I have my kids and their friendsย for youth spiesย and for an elder perspective, I ride bikes twice a week with a 75-year-old who is still mad that Dylan went electric.
Everything changes, always, but Iโm enjoying this age at the moment.
A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with my friend Jamesย and he said, โYouโre someone whoโs so curious about so many things โ why arenโt you curious about this?โ
Itโs become a question Iโve started asking myself almost once a day. Why arenโt you curious about this?
Like many of us, I do a lot of what my friend Alan Jacobs in Breaking Bread with the Dead calls โinformational triageโ โ constantly trying to separate and sort out what the heck I should be paying attention to.
So I shut out a lot. But I also have to be open โ whatย if the things Iโm not interested in turn out to be interesting?
I mentioned this dilemma to Kevin Kelly (we were talking about AI), and he quoted one of the pieces of advice inย Excellent Advice for Living: โFor a great payoff / be especially curious / about the things you are not interested in.โ
This is particularly true if you want to be a curious elder.
It reminded me of the perfect title of Nina Katchadourianโs great show that I saw five years ago: Curiouser.ย Nina spoke about how she liked the idea of โcuriouserโ as a noun, a job title, something you could be.
In the studio talking to my imaginary assistants pic.twitter.com/P7lgqVZQBN
โ Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) March 22, 2023
When Kevin Kelly visited me in the studio last week while he was in town for his SXSW talk, I asked him to tell me about AI, something I am not terribly interested in. (One of the pieces of advice in his forthcoming Excellent Advice for Living is: โFor a great payoff / be especially curious / about the things you are not interested in.โ)
He told me that AI right now is like having a little assistant to boss around and make you some stuff so you can say, โMost of this is garbage, but I can use this part, and youโve given me something to work with or against.โ
Quoting him from elsewhere:
This first round of primitive AI agents like ChatGPT and Dalle are best thought of as universal interns. It appears that the millions of people using them for the first time this year are using these AIs to do the kinds of things they would do if they had a personal intern: write a rough draft, suggest code, summarize the research, review the talk, brainstorm ideas, make a mood board, suggest a headline, and so on. As interns, their work has to be checked and reviewed. And then made better. It is already embarrassing to release the work of the AI interns as is. You can tell, and weโll get better at telling. Since the generative AIs have been trained on the entirety of human work โ most of it mediocre โ it produces โwisdom of the crowdโ-like results. They may hit the mark but only because they are average.
This, so far, has been the most convincing case Iโve heard.
But then, Iโve always resisted having an assistant โ in my experience, doing the โgrunt workโ of researching, writing a first draft, etc., is where a lot of my good discoveries are made. I want my hands on the work, because thatโs how I find it.
(Though I do like bossing Siri around and telling her to remind me of stuff and Iย do like being a good assistant to my future self.)
More notes from our visit: