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I’m turning 40 in a few months and trying not to think too much of it, but I am getting my bearings a bit.
Yesterday Elisa Gabbert tweeted, “I think I liked magazines more as a kid because the writing was by people older and wiser than me, with different generational interests. Now it’s just, like, writing by my friends, or people who could be? I’m supposed to pay for this? Lol”
I had a good laugh at this. It made me think that a good move at this age might be to start reading the NYTimes for Kids (which I already do) or Teen Vogue or AARP.
This would be the publication equivalent to Kevin Kelly’s advice, “When you are young, have friends who are older; when you are old, have friends who are younger.”
I do feel kind of lucky right now, to be in the middle: I have my kids and their friends for youth spies 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 I’m enjoying this age at the moment.
A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with my friend James and he said, “You’re someone who’s so curious about so many things — why aren’t you curious about this?”
It’s become a question I’ve started asking myself almost once a day. Why aren’t 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 “informational triage” — 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 — what if the things I’m 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 in Excellent Advice for Living: “For a great payoff / be especially curious / about the things you are not interested in.”
This is particularly true if you want to be a curious elder.
It reminded me of the perfect title of Nina Katchadourian’s great show that I saw five years ago: Curiouser. Nina spoke about how she liked the idea of “curiouser” as a noun, a job title, something you could be.
In the studio talking to my imaginary assistants pic.twitter.com/P7lgqVZQBN
— 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: “For a great payoff / be especially curious / about the things you are not interested in.”)
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, “Most of this is garbage, but I can use this part, and you’ve given me something to work with or against.”
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 we’ll get better at telling. Since the generative AIs have been trained on the entirety of human work — most of it mediocre — it produces “wisdom of the crowd”-like results. They may hit the mark but only because they are average.
This, so far, has been the most convincing case I’ve heard.
But then, I’ve always resisted having an assistant — in my experience, doing the “grunt work” 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 that’s how I find it.
(Though I do like bossing Siri around and telling her to remind me of stuff and I do like being a good assistant to my future self.)
More notes from our visit:
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