Do Keep Up

"Innovation is racing ahead exponentially—it's time to adapt quickly or be left behind."

This is a message that I've seen on LinkedIn quite a bit since Generative Automation tools started becoming big. And there are a number of different variations on it, as one might expect, like: "Ai is the future. DO NOT get left behind," "It's time to embrace the change or risk being left behind," or "Are you ready to embrace AI, or will you get left behind?"

What I've found interesting about all of these messages over the past several months or so is that they all focus on the individual. The march of technology is treated impassively, like a force of nature, and it's up to the reader to do what they need to do to keep up.

But I'm not sure that this is an accurate way of looking at it. Because people, communities and societies drive technological change. People aren't going to be somehow simply left behind; everyone else is going to make the choice to leave them behind. This isn't something that's out of everyone's control; it's a choice that people are making. And while it's true that not everyone is going to have an equal say in that choice, and as individuals, many people will have no say at all in it, there's nothing that prevents groups of people from deciding that making this into a rat race, with the hindmost being overtaken by unemployment and poverty, is a bad idea.

The point behind technology should be to make it easier to bring people along, not to make cultures of scarcity even sharper and less forgiving. The political moment we find ourselves in right now is almost entirely due to people feeling that they were deliberately left behind. And rather than blame themselves for that, they blame those that moved the technology and culture forward from underneath them. What about this present situation is so wonderful that it's going to bear repeating in another few decades or so? (If not sooner?) American society has yet to find a way to do anything positive with the level of anger and resentment that currently roils the United States (even if the currently levels are overrated), why decide that more of the same will somehow be helpful?

Another industrial revolution, where many people saw their incomes plummet, and it took generations for their families to recover, may be the future, but not because it could turn out no other way. If people are left behind, it will be because their fellows chose to leave without them. Acknowledging that may be what's needed to head it off.

Carrying On

The strange thing about Nobody In Particular is that it is no longer what it started out as. It's not really a means of communication with anyone; it's simply another in a vast sea of other blogs, and so I don't really have much of an audience to speak to. It's not really writing (or typing) practice; I'm not sure that I've gotten any better at either in the time since I started this project. (On the other hand, my handwriting is nowhere near what it used to be.) And it's not really a hobby or a pastime; in the sense that it's not something that I do for the enjoyment of doing it.

Partly, it's a discipline, although it's one that's starting, I think, to shade into compulsion. I set this course for myself, and I'm seeing it... Well, "through" really isn't the right term. After all, there wasn't a genuine goal for Nobody In Particular that I set out to achieve... I was simply feeling that I wasn't keeping up with the latest trends. It took several years, but eventually I did find my way to buying a smartphone and a tablet computer, so I could claim to have kept up with things. More recently, I've dabbled in experimentation with generative "A.I.," and have learned the awesome power of a really sophisticated auto-complete system. And throughout it all, I have relatively frequently, if not regularly, updated the weblog with a meandering series of random thoughts.

One of the original rules that I set for myself when I started this was that I wouldn't write about myself, primarily out a conviction that I wasn't an interesting enough person to read about. And, to be sure, I'm still mostly convinced that's true. But I also suspect that it's beside the point, because I write this blog mostly for the sake of writing it, not simply for other people to read it.

2025 is a bit less than two months away, and at this point, I find myself starting to make plans for whatever random project I'm going to embark on come January. And I think that this time around, it will have something to do with this blog. Perhaps I'll try to make it more of a photoblog, at least for a year. I like to take pictures, but I've noticed that without a convenient place to post them, I take fewer of them. Maybe I'll be deliberate about revisiting old topics. Given that I've been at this for nearly eighteen years now, there are a lot of options, and surely some of them could do with an updated take.

The thing about projects like this, however, is that they take on lives of their own. I find my general tone to be too much in the vein of complaining about aspects of the world that irritate me, and I've attempted to change that, to no avail thus far. So maybe whatever happens will simply happen, without any real direction from me. In any event, I will do my best to make it interesting.

Theorized

The idea of "the American Experiment" is a way of invoking the idea of the United States as being somehow exceptional, and I've already noted my general discomfort with the whole concept. But if it's taken seriously for a moment, that raises, at least for me, a question: What is, or was, "the American Hypothesis?"

American patriotism (and perhaps this is true of patriotism everywhere else, for that matter) tends towards the idealistic; it sees the United States as an ideal place, and views invocations of the reality of the situation as a form of slander. For many self-styled patriots, the idea that they have the same incentives, good and bad, as people anywhere else in the world may as well be blasphemy. And this lends itself towards a hypothesis that Americans are, or should be, simply better than everyone else. And that this state if being better translates into be more deserving.

The general problem with hypotheses of virtue is that it's difficult to cast them as aspirational; if I see myself as aspiring to, say, honesty, I first have to concede that I am not an honest person, even if I must necessarily think that I can get there. And so I think that to the degree that "the American Hypothesis" is one that a nation can ensure that strength, unity, self-reliance and virtue occur naturally in its people, it has to already have come about. And so "the American Experiment" is, more than anything else, simply the proof of that.

Which, as I noted, often means treating the messy reality of humanity as either fabricated or a characteristic of an unworthy other in the midst of the "real Americans." Election cycles have become times when those segments of the American populace with the most distrust of one another make their presence known. In part, because this how elections are won. Here in Washington State, the top-two primary system means that it's possible to have two candidates of the same party face off in a general election. And so I've been receiving mailers from backers of one Democratic office-seeker accusing the other Democratic candidate of being in league with the forces of conservatism and "special interests," because it's their candidate's only real chance of winning the contest. Still, however, the effect is to call upon people to see themselves as one of the "good ones," and to cast others as "bad people," over what are likely very minor differences in policy.

With this general election cycle coming to a close (and maybe there being a breather before the next one) the current set of arguments over what the nation is attempting to prove, to itself and/or the rest of the world, are winding down. But there still won't be a consensus on what the overall hypothesis is, and whether it's still current. So it will simply be fought out again in the run-up to the next time the polls open.