The Contented Being first showed up on this blog in 2016 (as Contented Organism) discussing an entity that would have no need to communicate. With years of experience it seems the Contented Being would have no need for jealousy or to push people aside, down. The person that wants to take and limit others is not contented.
Ms. Pennington opened Charlotte Simmons’ eyes to more, to difference. So she sought more, difference. (Tom Wolfe)
Intellectualism seeks universals, dichotomies. (Merleau-Ponty)
The jealous want an environment where people compete on jealousy. Conviction against the competition feels like giving up, rationalized weakness. In that environment. Conviction that there’s more than whatever someone is jealous about | feels valuable. Feels like something transcendent, real. Transmutable to others to make the world happier. Opens surfaces to see others’ happiness. What others value. What’s valuable in others, in themselves. Not as instruments or threats or angles at play.
When we are not content, we communicate something different. We see and want clones. Mirrors.
Contented we create space.
Can we be motivated to produce, to compete, to innovate out of love for others? Fight for who we love (rather than fight for want). Invading armies | repelling armies. Leaving places for the betterment of what we love. ||asking others to leave||
EXCAVATION
I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
Phenomenology of Perception (the Introduction, section III) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“The power to destroy something is the absolute control of it.” Dune by Frank Herbert
A king or local leader imbued the first written words with collective meaning. Or probably a mother, or father. Previous feeling and knowledge, bonds and norms in those symbols. It was certainly governments with slogans. Corporations with kleenex. Social media with memes (after mimetics). Citing AI output would we call to everything digital and the analog in the digital? Sense making attribution for an aggregate collector, pouring patterns through individual prompts where the output varies. By so much. By so many.
REFERENT
Ted Chiang. The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
We have trouble contemplating the size of the universe. Something as personal as surgery takes place among strangers, on the recommendation of strangers, in a building that fills rooms twenty four hours a day, with strangers. Each doing their tasks, each caring for people. Each person their own world.
Expectations for what comes next. Vague. The shower is frightening.
The rate of information accumulation is less than the rate of expansion of possible states. Entropy. If our lived self is subject to the same dynamics, every future state includes greater possibility. The challenge becomes communicability.
Or the end of the lived self accelerates information accumulation to pass some supersonic boundary. Future possible states collapse. Or we punch through them to something comprehensive.
Or the lived self is not subject to the same dynamics and we can have futures of fewer possibilities. This feels like it’s true for some.
Or the lived self ending is the end of information. And entropy becomes irrelevant. Communication impossible. Collapse to object.
Kellerman: explore an interplay between lived self ending, future states and for whom the lived self would become object.
Fable 5, like Opus 4.7 and 4.8 before, is disappointing. Or rather, you can’t swap it into existing projects that have been using a different model already for, say, months, without feeling like something’s not working. It’s like changing the scaffolding of a project mid-project. Often results in something being torn down. Or like changing a programming language in production software mid-stream (pre-AI). Hard to justify.
At first it felt like swapping in a new model could be more akin to upgrading OS. But it’s not. The model chosen and used in a project locks in an interaction pattern. Changes in models, and even version iterations, seems to disrupt that pattern. That means for the models to gain adoption the work involving AI has to increase. Is there more greenfield work still to be had? Or will the LLM producers be on a path of price increases only? Another path would be waiting for the ecosystem to more fully expand, bringing more novel applications, killer apps, to the market. On the positive, it means the ROI on older models that already had many workstreams starting to be built with them, should grow. But it feels like the hyperscalers are looking for hockey sticks and not dividends.
APPLICATION
The lock-in described here is a form of option foreclosure, but not a clean one. Choosing a model and building work around it narrows the option set incrementally, through accumulated interaction patterns rather than a single commitment. This has implications for how organizations think about AI adoption and speaks to the kind of department or infrastructure thinking that needs to be involved in governing, pattern setting, for AI adoption. By the time an organization evaluates whether to switch models, the switching cost may already be structural. The greenfield question then becomes central to AI economics. If existing work compounds around its original model, growth requires new work, not upgrades. That is a constraint the hyperscalers may not yet have priced into their growth narratives.
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.
