Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Soul Train

Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt is astonished that by feeding the text prompt: “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI” into Suno, an artificial intelligence music production app, it generates an instant song – and even titles it “Soul of the Machine.”

Most AI-generated art so far is, at best, kitsch, à la the hyperrealistic sci-fi junk, heavy on form-fitting spacesuits, that so many Midjourney users seem intent on generating. But “Soul of the Machine” feels like something different — the most powerful and unsettling AI creation I’ve encountered in any medium. Its very existence feels like a fissure in reality, at once awe-inspiring and vaguely unholy, and I keep thinking of the Arthur C. Clarke quote that seems made for the generative-AI era: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” 

You can listen to the AI-generated song here.

2. Older, Poorer?

The annual letter from Blackrock chairman Larry Fink focuses on the dark side of longevity: as people live longer, they may not have enough money for the later years. Social security systems never anticipated this:

Think about someone who was 65 years old in 1952, the year I was born. If he hadn’t retired already, that person was probably getting ready to stop working. But now think about that person’s former colleagues, all the people around his age who he’d entered the workforce with back in the 1910s. The data shows that in 1952, most of those people were not preparing for retirement because they’d already passed away. This is how the Social Security program functioned: More than half the people who worked and paid into the system never lived to retire and be paid from the system. Today, these demographics have completely unraveled, and this unraveling is obviously a wonderful thing. We should want more people to live more years. But we can’t overlook the massive impact on the country’s retirement system.

However, there is a ray of hope: “In America, 70% of disposable income is held by people 60 and over,” says Michael Hodin, CEO of the Global Coalition on Aging.

3. Ode to a GE Radio

Clare Coffey offers her proudly Luddite sentiments about the ancient GE radio that still sits in her kitchen: 

Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.

4. Is Vision Pro the Next iPhone?

Among the dozens of reviews of Apple’s Vision Pro, there has been one persistent question: will a headset computer one day replace the smartphone, the iPad or the computer? Ben Evans, who spent a month playing with it, is skeptical:   

I don’t think the future of computing is seeing several apps at once. I don’t think the future of productivity is seeing more rows in your spreadsheet, or more emails at once, or more records in Salesforce at once, on one big screen. I think the future, as seen for the last 20 or 30 years, is task-specific UIs that reduce complexity and data overload and focus on what you need to see. And obviously, I think the future is AI systems that show you less and tell you more.

5. Writing Fast, Writing Slow

J.D. Salinger spent a decade writing Catcher in the Rye. John Steinbeck invested 11 years churning out East of Eden. It took Tolkien a dozen years to finish Lord of the Rings. Lauren Alwan, a plodding author herself, envies the successful writers who “work best at a clip.”

Anne Rice wrote Interview with a Vampire in five weeks and Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in less than four. Kazuo Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks—achieved, he’s said, by implementing a process he calls The Crash: “do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday.…One hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone.”

6. We Are All Toxic

A group of researchers, writing in Nature, examined more than 500 million (!) online conversations and comment sections to determine why so many of these exchanges “degenerate into offensive comments or mockery, undermining the potential for productive and democratic debate.” They conclude that neither the platform nor the topic is to blame. It is simply the way human beings behave when they disagree with one another.

Although long conversations consistently exhibit higher toxicity, toxic language does not invariably discourage people from participating in a conversation, and toxicity does not necessarily escalate as discussions evolve. Our analysis suggests that debates and contrasting sentiments among users significantly contribute to more intense and hostile discussions. Moreover, the persistence of these patterns across three decades, despite changes in platforms and societal norms, underscores the pivotal role of human behaviour in shaping online discourse.

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