Author’s Note: As AI-generated content grows more prevalent, authentic voices and connections are becoming more valuable than ever. This header is a promise that every word is my own, written without AI assistance. The first movie I ever saw — at least, the first one that stands out as a movie rather than background noise — was The Neverending Story. My first-grade class walked from school to the nearby theater (I’m pretty sure that would never happen today) and, though what I remember most now is the contrast of that bright, sunny walk through a neighboring park and the butter-salt scent and cool, quiet darkness of the theater, the story made a vivid impression at the time, and in all the rewatches since. Near the end of the film, there’s a scene where Atreyu faces down the evil wolf G’mork, who’s been stalking him throughout his quest to stop the Nothing from consuming their world. Anyone who saw The Neverending Story as a child likely knows this scene by heart, and if you haven’t seen it (you really should, it’s a great movie!), here’s the YouTube clip: As for what they say… G’mork: Foolish boy. Don’t you know anything about Fantasia? It’s the world of human fantasy. Every part, every creature of it, is a piece of the dreams and hopes of mankind. Therefore, it has no boundaries. Atreyu: But why is Fantasia dying, then? G’mork: Because people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams. So the Nothing grows stronger. Atreyu: What is the Nothing? G’mork: It’s the emptiness that’s left. It’s like a despair, destroying this world. And I have been trying to help it. Atreyu: But why? G’mork: Because people who have no hopes are easy to control. And whoever has control has the power. I’ve been thinking a lot about that exchange this 4th of July.
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Author’s Note: As AI-generated content grows more prevalent, authentic voices and connections are becoming more valuable than ever. This header is a promise that every word is my own, written without AI assistance. Sometimes the most fascinating ideas in science are the ones that turn out to not be true. There’s a sense of magic, I think, in seeing a vision of the world as it might have been, as we once thought it was. That’s much of the appeal of the multiverse, and of almost every sort of speculative fiction, from science-fiction’s bets on this or that particular future to the fantasy and horror genre’s revisiting of our oldest beliefs, to the steampunk genre’s reimagining of science itself, and of the society that grew from it.
The Victorian era was an exciting time for science. Discoveries were coming in fast and furious, new laws were being discovered, upended, and rewritten within the same year, and seemingly every belief we took for granted about the world was being proven wrong. Marie Curie’s pioneering work with radioactive decay seemed to throw the conservation of energy out the window. Darwin’s observations on Galápagos had cast doubt over the idea of an unchanging creation — not to mention raised awkward questions about where humans actually came from — and dinosaur fossils were revealing a forgotten era of Earth’s history that was vastly older than almost any belief system had described. And, out in the depths of space, astronomers were beginning to find that the universe is much bigger than they’d considered, so big that some philosophers began to worry that realizing the full scope of creation might drive people mad. Nothing was certain, and anything could turn out to be true. Amid the mad scramble of science at the time, all sorts of new ideas about the universe arose that turned out to be wildly imaginative, absolutely untrue, but also surprisingly influential on fantasy and sci-fi stories over the years. They capture that sense of magic in seeing a world that might have been, a vision of a world that briefly seemed to be the one we live in. One of the most mysterious ideas among them is Lilith, the Earth’s secret moon. This is the third and last article about the notorious Clearlink video call that started making the social media rounds last week. The first one dug into the value of human work after CEO James Clarke claimed in the video that automation could reduce an eight-hour day to thirty minutes (and that the solution to this alleged problem is to pile on more work for his employees), while yesterday’s article discussed the tell-tale lack of empathy and social finesse that typically gives away clinical sociopaths (which isn’t to say that Clearlink’s CEO is himself a sociopath, but the lack of empathy and social finesse in his remarks is what earned him such media attention).
For this final article, the viral remark in question is really one of the more innocuous ones in the video; at least, it’s a sentiment expressed time and again by corporate leaders. But like the other two quotes, it illustrates a perspective riddled with some glaring blind spots, in this case concerning work-life balance and the fundamental nature of employment. Clearlink’s town hall video from CEO James Clarke is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to examining myths and misconceptions from the workplace and our everyday lives. Yesterday’s article was about overhyping the value of automation, based on Clarke’s assertion that his employees could be doing eight hours of work in thirty minutes thanks to ChatGPT (his solution was to give them 30–50 times more work — no, that math wouldn’t make sense even if the rest of his claim was correct).
This one, the second of three articles about common myths that his speech brought to light, focuses instead on how the pop-cultural image of the manipulative sociopath measures up against the clinical reality. Last week, Clearlink CEO James Clarke made headlines with his video call to employees effectively declaring the end of remote work for anyone within fifty miles of the company’s new headquarters. That would have been a contentious enough message, given that Clearlink's years-long remote work culture, but really what broke his announcement into the mainstream was a rambling diatribe about everything from ChatGPT to pet adoptions to that old chestnut for every disgruntled CEO, “nobody here works as hard as me.”
There’s a lot to cover with the video (which has now been scrubbed from YouTube, though Vice still has a clip), and a lot of articles have detailed the worst of it, so I’ll just go over one element that jumped out at me, a minor but still awful — and revealing — take. Author’s Note: As AI-generated content grows more prevalent, authentic voices and connections are becoming more valuable than ever. This header is a promise that every word is my own, written without AI assistance. Everything Everywhere All at Once might not be the first movie about the multiverse ever made, but by now it has to count as the most critically successful one, with 264 awards, among them seven Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.
It really is a fantastic movie, and, amidst such a chaotic decade that seems to pivot on so many singular decisions and what-if questions, perhaps the multiverse’s time has come. The MCU has also tackled the concept, in a more muddled way that seems to reinvent itself with each entry (Loki is probably its most successful attempt so far), and Rick and Morty has taken what at first seemed to be a goofy parody of the multiverse and tied it into a more and more intricate philosophical knot with each season. Before that, we had Jet Li’s The One, and the TV show Sliders, and Marvel’s assortment of Earths and the “Elseworlds” of DC, and Star Trek with its mirror universe, and, before any of them, Jorge Luis Borges’ classic 1941 short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which many consider to be the original multiverse story — although Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time,” about an apocalyptic time crash that merges countless alternate timelines into a patchwork world, managed to beat it by just a few years. To get an easy question out of the way first, how does Everything compare? I’d call it a Rick and Morty story without Rick or Morty, which is more of a compliment than it sounds. Some of the best R&M episodes are the ones that drag the rest of the family, Beth, Jerry, and Summer, into the duo’s universe-hopping exploits, and explore their strained relationships and reconciliations through that anarchic lens. EEAAO could easily be a story about those three characters having their own spinoff adventure, so if you like the idea of alternate timelines, absurdist comedy, and dysfunctional family drama, but can do without the abusive alcoholic mad scientist and his increasingly traumatized grandson, this is the movie for you. But what is the multiverse? Is it time travel? Another dimension? A string of parallel universes? And does it have any merit in real life? It’s a concept so deeply embedded in science fiction these days, and so mixed up with other scientific ideas, that teasing out the core premise can be tricky. But what it really comes down to is how we look at the world around us. Author’s Note: As AI-generated content grows more prevalent, authentic voices and connections are becoming more valuable than ever. This header is a promise that every word is my own, written without AI assistance. The last article talked about how the mystery of "rods," one of the most intriguing cryptids ever proposed, was eventually solved, and the reader may have noticed something odd about how the riddle was presented. Among the problems that the existence of such invisible animals posed for skeptics was the fact that it's impossible to be "too quick to be seen" if the moving object isn't crossing the field of vision, and that the photographic evidence didn't suggest that rods were moving particularly fast.
The questions that the article didn't consider, however, might seem more obvious at a glance. An animal as large as a dog or cat wouldn't seem to be able to stay airborne the way rod enthusiasts proposed, at least not with the small lateral wings suggested by the photos. Their metabolism would have to be very high, and their corresponding caloric intake enormous, but we don't see any evidence that they're eating anything. Why wouldn't the rod skeptics bring up these more concrete problems instead? Some did, of course, but there's a reason why, when confronted with a controversial new theory, scientists typically examine that theory on its own terms and the predictions it makes rather than how well it fits into our existing beliefs. That reason is confirmation bias, the tendency to look at new data through the lens of what we already expect, or want, to discover. Confirmation bias can't be entirely avoided; after all, learning builds on the foundation of the knowledge we've already learned. But it can lead us to a dead end when we start with a mistaken premise and then refuse to give up on that premise, even when the facts have stopped supporting it. Author’s Note: As AI-generated content grows more prevalent, authentic voices and connections are becoming more valuable than ever. This header is a promise that every word is my own, written without AI assistance. It’s easy to forget that ancient people were, individually, just as intelligent and rational as anyone today. The “superstitious peasants” weren’t just coming up with crazy stories for the sake of livening things up: they were making sense of the world around them using the best evidence available to their senses. People couldn’t see fly eggs, and maggots seemed to appear by magic as food rotted, so spontaneous generation was suggested to explain them. We didn’t learn otherwise until Louis Pasteur’s sterilization experiments in 1859. Barnacle geese never seemed to lay eggs, and goose barnacles resembled them, so it made sense that the geese hatched from the barnacles. Even mermaids aren’t entirely fantasy: sailors did, in fact, see strange humanoid figures with fishlike tails frolicking in the distance or swimming beneath the waves. They were seeing manatees.
Modern science hasn’t come close to discovering everything, but the scientific method is usually very good at marking the limits of our knowledge so that we don’t find ourselves wandering down such blind alleys again. In 1996, however, reports of an incredible new animal made the headlines, an invisible, airborne creature unlike anything most of us had ever imagined. While the truth behind “flying rods” turned out to be less exciting, they offer a modern example of how a sincere but mistaken effort to explain what we see can lead to the wildest folk tales. When I was fourteen years old, my mind traveled through time.
At least, that’s what it felt like at the time, and if I were more prone to flights of fancy it might be what I’d call it. And, who knows, maybe that’s what happened. But what it really resembles is a very brief but powerful moment of déjà vécu, meaning “already lived.” It’s a psychological phenomenon that’s closely related to déjà vu and a testament to our mind’s ability to twist our sense of time and memory into knots. It was on a Saturday and I’d just finished a late-morning shower. I’d dried off with a towel, put on my pants, and was just pulling a T-shirt over my head when something about my perception flickered and subtly changed. The bathroom was still there, as bright and steamy as ever, and the T-shirt was still hanging loose around my shoulders, but somehow I’d seen all of this before, many decades ago (a neat trick in itself, considering that I was only fourteen). The bathroom, the house around me, my family, the young teenage body I looked down and saw. It all had a feeling of nostalgia and distant familiarity, as if I’d traveled back in time to this moment. “Interesting,” I thought with a feeling of detached curiosity. Then the moment passed and I was myself again, and the world was just as vividly real as ever. My next thought was a stunned “what was that?” Barring the (increasingly remote) possibility that I’m going to someday become a mad scientist who invents time travel and decides to pay a brief visit to my middle-school days, that was my personal brush with déjà vécu, the feeling that you’ve already lived through your present life. In my case, that’s the only time I’ve ever experienced it and it only lasted a fraction of a second. Some synapse tripped the wrong way and, for just that one instant, the present became the distant past. For some people, though, that illusion never subsides, and the feeling of déjà vécu can turn into a serious mental illness. Patients can lose their will to do anything at all, since they feel like everything’s already happened, and become tangled up in delusions of time loops or reincarnation while trying to make sense of the feeling that they’ve somehow become stuck in their own past. How does that feeling come about? What’s the connection between déjà vécu, the more familiar déjà vu, and other tricks of the brain’s internal chronometer such as jamais vu and presque vu? It all comes down to how our minds process information, and how, far from being static data stored on a neurological hard drive, memories are really living, evolving mental phenomena that we experience anew each time we think of them. Note: It’s become something of a blogging trend lately to let ChatGPT write part of the text and then pull off the mask to make a point to readers. I'll never do that. Every word came from the same person typing this right now. I don’t think anything’s gained by muddying the human/AI waters other than a very unfair “gotcha.” Most of my articles are very detached and professional, following formal essay structures written AP style while avoiding sentence fragments, slang, and first or second-person pronouns. Not this one! Why not, I hear my readers asking (in all our first-person glory)? Because this opening section has one purpose: to prove it’s written by a human being.
That’s right, human “beans,” homo sapiens, people with eyes and fingers typing on keyboards that go clickety-clack when you press them, and why am I suddenly talking like a Dr. Seuss narrator, and why is this sentence running so endlessly on and on? Because (and see, there’s another sentence fragment) it’s something that ChatGPT wouldn’t do. Welcome to the 21st century. Ever since ChatGPT came out late last year with its unprecedented ability to craft detailed essays based on simple user prompts, I’ve noticed a growing prevalence of articles in Medium from new users that all have the same dry marketing voice and essay structure applied to lifestyle advice. They state a thesis at the beginning, restate it a number of times in a number of different ways, with varying levels of relevance and congruity, and then state it once more at the end for good measure. “Drinking coffee is good for the soul. Coffee helps you wake up. Coffee is best in moderate doses. Everyone should try to drink more coffee.” To say that it’s robotic isn’t just a tone critique: it’s a very literal observation. (As a coffee addict, however, I wholeheartedly approve of that message.) I won’t call out any particular writers, because this tone could very well come from someone who’s just following the standard school essay format to the letter. And therein lies the rub. We’ve all been taught to follow rigid rules and organize our thoughts when it comes to informative and persuasive writing. That isn’t a bad thing: being concise really is important, as is having some common framework and ground rules when we communicate. But all those things play to AI’s strengths, and now computers are getting close to the point where they can do it better than us. How do we tell the difference between humans and bots? Do human creators have anything to offer that machines can’t match? |
AuthorContent writer, ghostwriter, editor. Production assistant and writer for Audio Branding: The Hidden Gem of Marketing. Professional geek. Archives
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