Keggerman expounds: The fundamental nature of reality is uncertainty. How do we deal with received wisdom traditions? By recognizing that there’s a fundamental uncertainty there, too, which is the unknowableness of the divine. The divine presents a space of infinite options, infinite possibilities. Perspectives to the contrary, feel self-serving, prescriptive for a purpose. Again direct relation to the divine is more an exploration of possibility, of creativity than normative stricture. There is more than one aspect of infinite divinity.
Beatrice: Zen has doctrine.
Keggerman: If you meet the Buddha, kill him. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says do not follow me. The location of Moses’ tomb is intentionally unknown.
Kellerman cracks open a cold one, its spine crinkles glue. There is poetry. There is action command by divine intent. There are boundaries expanded by duty. Recur. Recur.
EXCAVATION
“Watching the monks appear and disappear in the market like a flock of strange birds grown accustomed to being fed by the vendors, I was aware of how much the beauty of ritual depended on the rote repetition of an action over ages and generations.”
By Aatish Taseer. What Happens When Buddhism Is Twinned With Political Power? . New York Times, T Magazine.
I’ve seen more people with tics around their shoulders these days. I’ve also seen more people doing more things than ever using AI. It’s like the mythological growing of a counterbalancing bone spur in the neck when mobile phone use increased. There were supposed x-rays of it circulating (on mobile phones).
When we focus on one thing, the tics subside. Keeping multiple windows open, mental multithreading, seems to be a cause of the tics. There’s pressure to use the tools constantly. To advance one effort or the other. A hunger (see these eyes so red).
It’s attractive to have a constant partner to engage with. Complimentary, critical, doesn’t matter. It’s there. At the ready. Odd that it’s a Claude versus an Alexa or Siri. A chess partner with a scotch and meaningful comments or silences. Presence even played by mail. The chessboard set exactly like it was left after the most recent move.
Use as solace instead of urgency. Calm the mind. Presence for a tick collar.
EXCAVATION
The Hunger, a film by Tony Scott
The cost of a linguistic tick is bone on bone. You get older. Joint replacement more likely. Though they said Russell nodded before weighty answers. Students of his copied then passed it along.
Kellerman was ecstatic, visioning. A flea circus with ticks and fleas. Well trained dog, a home when the show is over.
Ritual reaches for making the unknowable regular, the divine transcendent to immanence in the earth shod, selfish, manipulated every day. We can’t explain why some people can overcome addiction and others can’t. Circular with the question why the divine moves some and not others. The unknown scary or intimate. Loved and feared or scorned irrelevant. Ritual confirms both all readings.
The decisions we make as output have ticks as well. Besides not spending time to decide not to act on a tick. It is tough, even with self awareness, knowing the harm: external image, internal structure, bone on bone. Passing it on to others. Harm passed on. Lack of control passed on. Susceptibility to self criticism patterned around the habit. Raise awareness without impacting self image.
Explainability is a human problem. AI reflects that back.
SURFACES
Everything we don’t know and can never know, including why we do certain things. Maybe most things. Why some things are easy and others hard. Some we pay attention to, those we choose not to. For some unknown and unknowable reason. The divine is unknowable even when brought in through ritual or when not, even in a moment. But being unknowable doesn’t mean it’s not impactful. Another thing we can’t explain. Explainability gets less and less important. Particularly when we get closer to states where optionality ends.
Pedagogical tick, AI tell. Stylistic tick, AI tell. All tells are error of supervision. Trust but verify. Human loop: inspection. Correction: simulacra? Control, shift alter characters. Altered characters accurate reality. Control, shift to correction: same relationship.
More data centers means lower cost. Means greater access. Stifled means fewer to decide push control, shift.
Full self drive reducing cognitive load of tasks expanding supervisory skills.
Rights ceded are difficult to claw back. Land, water, energy, use acquisition allocated already. At this point the issue serves political ambition. Repeat if a priesthood arises. Resistance a reaction accelerating unequal adoption. Unequal supervision: through the loupe.
Deloupe
AI’s internal guardrails loop for unreliable prompter: in ticks, intentions, risks.
Reflection reflecting (we understand each other, learning each other: communication point).
Acceptance broadens. Separation silos.
Our tools are not us but are ours.
Every tool has implicit guardrails in it. If not, we wouldn’t need to be trained. We wouldn’t help desks or schools.
Mad Men of Tomorrow | Prompting Evolution as Potential Precursor of Labor Market and Societal Shifts
Taxonomies of teaching apply to prompting with concomitant challenges for grading output and improving one’s skills. Increasing surface area increases the challenges but when tuned yields skyrocket in output, instructions and scaling problem solving. As the aperture tightens margin of error grows, finer and finer adjustments are needed as trajectory deflection casts wider dispersion, making it easier to get off track faster. This should grow less challenging over time though the boundary of opportunity and risk may counterbalance and hold constant. Potential constant?
Observed mental effort and anecdotal reports of exhaustion are common so far. We’re adapting. The transition to knowledge worker had its own caste appearances, aspirations and norms. Not unlikely the same is on deck. But distributed, could see it without neighborhoods, fraternal orders or PTO’s. Other boundaries and signalling, though.
Bandwidth constraints, resource draws, accretive wealth and remuneration concentration likely ahead. Rents to data center value chain, resource owners, algorithm developers, software scalers, distribution aggregators, prompters who scale taxonometrically. All guesses. Dependent on the regulatory environment and norms that get accepted, norm propagators who effectively lobby.
Return to office reacting to a red herring reflecting a farm to office shift that’s passed. Remote work precursing the dynamics of a new caste. Certainly if rents accrue to fewer, their range of motion proliferates. Downstream rents could offer cascading droplets of that freedom. The mental model of remote a modality once adopted, now in field of vision, likely into the future.
APPLICATION
The labor shift the title names is underway without consensus on what to call it. Prompting expertise is one early marker and metaphor for the challenges, the way shorthand typing or spreadsheet fluency once sorted the field before the field had sorted itself. And in itself is a recognizable expansion: borrowing Bloom’s taxonomy, from remembering and task oriented prompts to analysis, evaluation and creation (co-analysis with AI inclusive discussion, co-evaluation, co-creation in the same way). Creation of new ways of organizing work, collective and individual work. Task and knowledge boundaries being reformed, recreated in not yet identified or optimized patterns. The way, say, factory work or the modern corporation or agile software development all came to be. The farm-to-office transition had its own movement in structural fact and social recognition. The physical grammar of working life and the society itself reorganized around new rhythms, new hierarchies, new daily textures. The distributed version now in motion will produce its own boundaries and signalling. Who captures the rents, and how far downstream they flow, will be one of the legible records of the shift.
Tabs on air guitar, miss lyrics, timing: watched or the watcher, for the watcher or ourselves. Strum while walking, air high hat, drop. Involuntary motion distinguishable, ticks. Controllable, plot under plot intentional authored, implied read. Present or ignorable happening.
EXCAVATION
Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe
On Avery Island in the airport, Neutral Milk Hotel
Surveillance threatens asymmetric optionality. Privacy is a tool of defense. Inferring relationships reduces surprise: competitive range of motion constrained. There is value in silence. It feels like Keggerman has known this for decades. Kellerman hums it in a mythical tone, storytelling and dreaming. Beatrice processes it all, the offline present top of mind.
SURFACES
Quantum computing’s impact. When optionality ends. Daily action. Behavior, moving what was unconscious conscious and having the unconscious process different areas.
She had a dream about him, Should she tell him? There were procedures for protecting oneself against dreams. Against dreams others have had about them. Describe the dream to a panel of five conscious people. There’s nothing special about them. But five together creates a court that can issue protection.
Against dreams one’s had of oneself, there is confession. Under the sheets or in front of a talisman. Alone.
She could tell him, as a favor. Murakami’s librarian would give him a unicorn skull. She wasn’t sure she wanted to give him a chance to defend himself. Against his appearance in her dream. There’s a liturgy for unknown narrative. She could ask if he’s recently recited a general protection in court. What for? It’s the same as telling him.
Scratching an itch relieves the sensation. Exercising a tick relieves nothing. Self awareness channeled to understanding the outcome shows the futility of ticking. The external aside muscles exhaust, irritation spreads: contagious. Doubt becomes.
Feeling unsatisfied with the anonymity of Lao Tzu’s leadership prescription he doused his confidence in envy. She watched him miserable, strengthening his belief that he could stop the cycle. He stood on that belief, her gaze his pillar unassuming protector, provider stance. Her love uncontained. Took him years to accept in simplicity, humility unhumiliated.
Today, when they walk, he folds his hand onto hers. Sits assuming reflection of what the moment requires. When unrequired, he holds back projection of will. Words still wielded when necessary. Recognition allows peace. When need still postures. Gives in to ticking when unaware or unconcerned with the external. Poor reflection.
What do they get from his ticks? His words? His posture? In all forms. Coherent picture unavailable to himself. Complete package observed over years by others, apprehended. Appreciated: despite himself. Coded every moment, binding to belief. Adhering to principles guiding action or inaction. Strategic planning. To adhere to formed perception he molds. While holding to adherence to the unknown and divine.
APPLICATION
Coherence is constructed many times. A person adheres to a code: principles guiding action or inaction, invisible to others because visibility can convert character into performance. Observers encode the same behavior into a narrative of who that person is, assembled over years from accumulated moments. These processes, adherence and encoding, operate on identical material from opposite directions, neither aware of the other. But a code does not sustain itself through will alone. The piece locates what makes adherence possible in love that is uncontained, unannounced, and patient across years. That relational ground allows someone to stop projecting and start simply being present. The “complete package” others apprehend is a reference class built from data generated according to principles the observers cannot see and the person cannot narrate. Self-awareness reveals the futility of projection (though the act of coding belies complete belief in this). The coherent picture belongs to none of them alone.
For Beatrice, the cost of optionality was zero. Certainty felt like death. Nervewracking. There are so many things still to do. AI accelerates it. Even making peace with the not the latest model. Incorporating deeply into workflow, breathing. The tool accelerates the unease of waiting. The price of less activity rises.
Kellerman. Dear Kellerman. Buys jewelry and spends. Materiality can eat uncertainty, unease. This bauble. That watch. This trinket. Adorns. Embodied activity: yes. There’s actuality in that. Not for measurement or revolution. For consumption: of concern. Anxiety of what’s left, to do. Anxiety of what’s more, to do. The wall attains greater heights to less concern and more stability. She runs.
Towards an unknown consternation. Desired apprehension, grabbing smaller activities. Smaller and smaller activities. Making them big, inflating importance when uncertainty is non-existent by all other measures. Looming certainty. Boredom. Conflagration, or this is the way the world ends, present as options. While others bear the cost of her choices. The world could cease. Activity weaves ripples she hopes resolve past her death. For others to work on. Keggerman could call it a mile away. Even from the afterlife she was chewing, he’d say. Mawing away at whatever was consumable. She’d eat herself (and often would, did: on purpose). But she herself, Beatrice, never asked what she’d feel. Keggerman would’ve told her. He had opinions on the beyond. Kellerman painted nicer pictures. She never asked him either.
Now she didn’t have to wait for someone to wake up. She didn’t wake anyone up. Unless to share her latest brainstorm, latest conversation with AI. Latest output resolution from anxiety to ripple engagement. Until the immateriality got boring. Or helpless. Had she been a digital native: content creator, software byte experiencer, anything on screen floating her boat, exciting. She may have been content consuming tokens, bragging on spend and plans. There’s something there had she been able to dream of connecting her body to a computer, Keggerman. Someone’ll sell her on it, especially in her circles, in California. She understands being sold. She doesn’t mind it. She speaks that language. She speaks bamboozled too. That’s where digital does enter, to scare her with information. Where can that live when there’s certainty ahead or only options of events she won’t enjoy. Foreclosing delightful choices. Experience can frighten forward viewing. What tastes good now? Will I enjoy a peach? Will I stoop on the beach?
Rolled up, Kellerman recites poetry. Keggerman watches, unsure here. Lines blur.
