You have mentioned three important qualities, for none of which we have demonstrable tests or quantitative measures.
I was born, or emerged from the innocence of infancy, with deficiencies in each. It took me nearly sixty years to discover what was “wrong” with me, when I read in a newspaper about the newly- and vaguely-defined “Asperger Syndrome,” and I donned it like a glove. I hope that in the three decades since I have become kinder and more curious. But now, spurred by what you have written here, I cling to my inadaptability like a shield.
Adaptability is conducive to survival, approval, and prosperity, but I ask, “Adaptable to what?”
As the youngest grandchild of an Hasidic rabbi (well, actually, he acquired two more grandchildren after he died) I was raised on stories from the Bible. Not that my mother neglected Hansel and Gretel entirely, but my steady died of bedtime stories consisted of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph the Dreamer and his cruel brothers … up to and including Moses and Aaron, Samuel and Saul, David and Solomon, and of course Daniel in the Lion’s Den (with whom I could not help but identify).
Jacob and Esau was a turning point. Before them, there was only mankind. After them, there were Jews and Gentiles. I was a Jew, one of the good guys as assumed in the Bible. Until, spurred by just a smidgeon of curiosity, I learned enough about the world to infer that much of what I had been taught were lies. Instantly I became an atheist, which I have remained throughout my life except for a brief interlude of deism after reading Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.
Some things have remained with me from the Bible, now viewed as fable. Gideon’s recruitment of an army. The kindness of Joseph, who overfilled the sacks of his cruel brothers when they came to buy grain, not recognizing the vendor. And the cruelty of Jacob.
I had been brought up to honor Jacob, the patriarch of the tribe … or the 12 tribes. This Spring I had occasion to argue with a rabbi about the fable (which he of course regards as fact) of Jacob and Esau. He said that Esau bribed Jacob by offering to trade his birthright for a mess of pottage, I said that Jacob demanded that trade.
I looked up the relevant all-too-brief passage in the Bible. I found two versions, one in the Christian version, the other in a volume of The Anchor Bible with a better translation by E.A. Speiser. Both agreed. It was Jacob who proposed and insisted upon the bribe. Esau accepted the bribe. He was famished, and realized that his birthright was worthless if he starved before he could inherit from Isaac. Both translations ended the story with a thinly-veiled criticism of Esau … for undervaluing his birthright.
But I see Esau as blameless and Jacob as cruel. I wonder now: why didn’t I renounce Judaism at age two when I first heard the fable? And I wonder now, why did the priests and rabbis, the followers of Jesus, and good Christians like Saint Francis and William Blake, let the cruel sin of Jacob slip by without denunciation and renunciation of primogeniture, the original sin, itself?
Adaptation? Adaptation to what? Adaptation to injustice? Adaptation to lies? Adaptation to cruelty? “We, the good Germans, followed orders and survived the Holocaust”
---but did not risk anything to oppose or prevent it.
Give me curiosity. Give me kindness. But keep adaptation on the shelf as at best an often necessary expedient.
My reply:
"The Jacob and Esau reading stops me in my tracks, not because it is surprising, but because it is obviously correct and I had never paused long enough to notice. The text does what you say it does. The editorial gloss blames the hungry man.
You are right and have the precise flaw in my argument, and I want to sit with it rather than defend around it. True, adaptability without a fixed moral object is not a virtue at all. It is a mechanism. 'Adaptable to what' is the question I should have asked inside the essay, not left for a reader to ask in the comments.
What I meant, and did not say clearly enough, was adaptability in method, not in standard. The person who changes how they work while refusing to change what they will tolerate. But I concede that distinction is easier to draw on paper than to hold in a life, especially when the pressure to conform arrives dressed as common sense, institutional loyalty, or survival.
Esau was famished. That is not a moral failure. That is a human condition being exploited by someone with the luxury of patience.
Thank you for sixty years of inadaptability on the things that mattered. The essay is better for your reading it.
Deep thoughts here. “the fatigue of permanent adjustment” well describes the constant feeling of driving a stick shift automobile on steeply sloping and curving terrain. It explains why automatic is restful and agency is surrendered to idle one’s attention energy. Your insights provide a template to study as to what standards need to be chosen.
Thank you Cathie. The stick shift image is exactly right, and I wish I had thought of it first. You have caught something the essay circles but never quite lands: that the appeal of automation is not laziness but the reasonable desire to stop managing gradient. Attention is finite. Of course we reach for the automatic.
The question your metaphor raises is who gets to choose the road. Surrendering the gear changes is one thing. Surrendering the destination is another.
"When the system fails, no one asks to speak to the workflow. They ask for a person." This sentence should be pinned to the office walls and screens of executives everywhere. Thank you, Colin.
Corporations, especially the large publicly traded ones, seem to be run by psychopaths, who like to promote those who remind them of themselves, that is, other psychopaths. The people who move up the ladder the fastest are ruthless cutthroat competitors - not necessarily more competent, just more savage. I suspect these types will adjust readily to AI.
I'm not 100% sure why, but I'm disturbed by the phrase "prompt engineering".
"A company using AI in hiring can process more candidates, but it can also reject more people without ever noticing them". Isn't that the whole idea? Companies hire out recruiting firms to screen >out< candidates. Indeed, the whole hiring process seems to revolve around screening people out. That's a function of there being more candidates than available jobs.
I can't recall now where I read it, but I saw elsewhere on substack someone mention that we live in a time of engineered scarcity.
Thank you for this Winston, there is more here than first appears. The research on corporate leadership is more nuanced than the popular version, but the underlying concern is real. Selection pressures in large hierarchies do tend to reward certain traits, confidence, risk tolerance, competitive drive, that are useful on the way up and sometimes dangerous at the top. Whether that constitutes pathology is worth arguing about. What is harder to argue with is that those traits do not automatically produce good institutional judgment, and AI in the hands of people who treat it purely as a dominance tool is a legitimate worry... I agree with you.
Your discomfort on prompt engineering isworth trusting. The phrase implies that the human role is to become a better operator of the system, which effectively accepts that the system is the principal and the person is the interface. That is precisely the inversion I am arguing against.
You are right that the current process of hiring/screening is largely eliminative. My concern is not that screening happens, it must, but that AI allows it to happen at a scale and speed that removes any residual obligation to notice the person being rejected. Faster screening without better judgment is not progress. It is the same indifference, automated.
Engineered scarcity is a phrase worth following. If you find the source again, I would genuinely like to read it. Thank you for stretching my thinking.
"...become more deliberately human" - Marvelous! Let's do that! I'm all in. I use Ai all the time, so I am not against it. That said, I am acutely aware that there has been -no wisdom- around how to incorporate it without losing Our Humanness. Thank you for pointing Us in the direction of an actual solution that explores Our Humanness, so that Ai is Humanity's tool, and not the other way around. I've started writing/typing "Ai",(big A, little i) to self express about "Ai". I feel good about making a statement that machine Artificiality with a capital "A", is terrific for left brain information. However, when compared to Human Intelligence and Creativity, Ai is lacking when it comes to the left and right brain as complements, heart and brain cooperation, and not just knowledge but wisdom, in the realm of capacity for the divine, in co-creation. Thanks 1% !
A comment from email and my reply =. Dear Colin,
You have mentioned three important qualities, for none of which we have demonstrable tests or quantitative measures.
I was born, or emerged from the innocence of infancy, with deficiencies in each. It took me nearly sixty years to discover what was “wrong” with me, when I read in a newspaper about the newly- and vaguely-defined “Asperger Syndrome,” and I donned it like a glove. I hope that in the three decades since I have become kinder and more curious. But now, spurred by what you have written here, I cling to my inadaptability like a shield.
Adaptability is conducive to survival, approval, and prosperity, but I ask, “Adaptable to what?”
As the youngest grandchild of an Hasidic rabbi (well, actually, he acquired two more grandchildren after he died) I was raised on stories from the Bible. Not that my mother neglected Hansel and Gretel entirely, but my steady died of bedtime stories consisted of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph the Dreamer and his cruel brothers … up to and including Moses and Aaron, Samuel and Saul, David and Solomon, and of course Daniel in the Lion’s Den (with whom I could not help but identify).
Jacob and Esau was a turning point. Before them, there was only mankind. After them, there were Jews and Gentiles. I was a Jew, one of the good guys as assumed in the Bible. Until, spurred by just a smidgeon of curiosity, I learned enough about the world to infer that much of what I had been taught were lies. Instantly I became an atheist, which I have remained throughout my life except for a brief interlude of deism after reading Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.
Some things have remained with me from the Bible, now viewed as fable. Gideon’s recruitment of an army. The kindness of Joseph, who overfilled the sacks of his cruel brothers when they came to buy grain, not recognizing the vendor. And the cruelty of Jacob.
I had been brought up to honor Jacob, the patriarch of the tribe … or the 12 tribes. This Spring I had occasion to argue with a rabbi about the fable (which he of course regards as fact) of Jacob and Esau. He said that Esau bribed Jacob by offering to trade his birthright for a mess of pottage, I said that Jacob demanded that trade.
I looked up the relevant all-too-brief passage in the Bible. I found two versions, one in the Christian version, the other in a volume of The Anchor Bible with a better translation by E.A. Speiser. Both agreed. It was Jacob who proposed and insisted upon the bribe. Esau accepted the bribe. He was famished, and realized that his birthright was worthless if he starved before he could inherit from Isaac. Both translations ended the story with a thinly-veiled criticism of Esau … for undervaluing his birthright.
But I see Esau as blameless and Jacob as cruel. I wonder now: why didn’t I renounce Judaism at age two when I first heard the fable? And I wonder now, why did the priests and rabbis, the followers of Jesus, and good Christians like Saint Francis and William Blake, let the cruel sin of Jacob slip by without denunciation and renunciation of primogeniture, the original sin, itself?
Adaptation? Adaptation to what? Adaptation to injustice? Adaptation to lies? Adaptation to cruelty? “We, the good Germans, followed orders and survived the Holocaust”
---but did not risk anything to oppose or prevent it.
Give me curiosity. Give me kindness. But keep adaptation on the shelf as at best an often necessary expedient.
My reply:
"The Jacob and Esau reading stops me in my tracks, not because it is surprising, but because it is obviously correct and I had never paused long enough to notice. The text does what you say it does. The editorial gloss blames the hungry man.
You are right and have the precise flaw in my argument, and I want to sit with it rather than defend around it. True, adaptability without a fixed moral object is not a virtue at all. It is a mechanism. 'Adaptable to what' is the question I should have asked inside the essay, not left for a reader to ask in the comments.
What I meant, and did not say clearly enough, was adaptability in method, not in standard. The person who changes how they work while refusing to change what they will tolerate. But I concede that distinction is easier to draw on paper than to hold in a life, especially when the pressure to conform arrives dressed as common sense, institutional loyalty, or survival.
Esau was famished. That is not a moral failure. That is a human condition being exploited by someone with the luxury of patience.
Thank you for sixty years of inadaptability on the things that mattered. The essay is better for your reading it.
Stay well"
Deep thoughts here. “the fatigue of permanent adjustment” well describes the constant feeling of driving a stick shift automobile on steeply sloping and curving terrain. It explains why automatic is restful and agency is surrendered to idle one’s attention energy. Your insights provide a template to study as to what standards need to be chosen.
Thank you Cathie. The stick shift image is exactly right, and I wish I had thought of it first. You have caught something the essay circles but never quite lands: that the appeal of automation is not laziness but the reasonable desire to stop managing gradient. Attention is finite. Of course we reach for the automatic.
The question your metaphor raises is who gets to choose the road. Surrendering the gear changes is one thing. Surrendering the destination is another.
"When the system fails, no one asks to speak to the workflow. They ask for a person." This sentence should be pinned to the office walls and screens of executives everywhere. Thank you, Colin.
Corporations, especially the large publicly traded ones, seem to be run by psychopaths, who like to promote those who remind them of themselves, that is, other psychopaths. The people who move up the ladder the fastest are ruthless cutthroat competitors - not necessarily more competent, just more savage. I suspect these types will adjust readily to AI.
I'm not 100% sure why, but I'm disturbed by the phrase "prompt engineering".
"A company using AI in hiring can process more candidates, but it can also reject more people without ever noticing them". Isn't that the whole idea? Companies hire out recruiting firms to screen >out< candidates. Indeed, the whole hiring process seems to revolve around screening people out. That's a function of there being more candidates than available jobs.
I can't recall now where I read it, but I saw elsewhere on substack someone mention that we live in a time of engineered scarcity.
Thank you for this Winston, there is more here than first appears. The research on corporate leadership is more nuanced than the popular version, but the underlying concern is real. Selection pressures in large hierarchies do tend to reward certain traits, confidence, risk tolerance, competitive drive, that are useful on the way up and sometimes dangerous at the top. Whether that constitutes pathology is worth arguing about. What is harder to argue with is that those traits do not automatically produce good institutional judgment, and AI in the hands of people who treat it purely as a dominance tool is a legitimate worry... I agree with you.
Your discomfort on prompt engineering isworth trusting. The phrase implies that the human role is to become a better operator of the system, which effectively accepts that the system is the principal and the person is the interface. That is precisely the inversion I am arguing against.
You are right that the current process of hiring/screening is largely eliminative. My concern is not that screening happens, it must, but that AI allows it to happen at a scale and speed that removes any residual obligation to notice the person being rejected. Faster screening without better judgment is not progress. It is the same indifference, automated.
Engineered scarcity is a phrase worth following. If you find the source again, I would genuinely like to read it. Thank you for stretching my thinking.
"...become more deliberately human" - Marvelous! Let's do that! I'm all in. I use Ai all the time, so I am not against it. That said, I am acutely aware that there has been -no wisdom- around how to incorporate it without losing Our Humanness. Thank you for pointing Us in the direction of an actual solution that explores Our Humanness, so that Ai is Humanity's tool, and not the other way around. I've started writing/typing "Ai",(big A, little i) to self express about "Ai". I feel good about making a statement that machine Artificiality with a capital "A", is terrific for left brain information. However, when compared to Human Intelligence and Creativity, Ai is lacking when it comes to the left and right brain as complements, heart and brain cooperation, and not just knowledge but wisdom, in the realm of capacity for the divine, in co-creation. Thanks 1% !