Brother, can you paradigm?
Why being funny will save us from a robot invasion
These are scary times for liberal arts majors. We’re being replaced by machines that can create ads, summarize scientific papers, pass reading comprehension tests, and write news articles.
When robots came for the factory workers, we said nothing because we majored in history and Russian studies. When they started building self-driving cars, we said nothing because we were too busy reading Descartes. When the tech nerds created AI to design more effective pharmaceutical drugs we probably made some stupid Cheech & Chong joke to cover our embarrassment that we didn’t understand science. But now the robots have come for our jobs, and a lot of us are asking ‘Siri, what are we supposed to do now?’
Siri can’t answer, not because she’s trying to take over copywriting jobs, but because we’re asking the wrong question. AI is clearly disrupting communications, but at this stage creating emotional connections still rules.
The challenge for creative people is to understand this isn’t an us-versus-them fight for vocational survival; it’s an opportunity to embrace humanity’s role in this disruption by becoming data-literate. In other words, it’s time for kids from the A/V Club to join the Mathletes to help them infuse the data with creativity.
In its current state, AI is what happens when you have emotionally illiterate engineers trying to recreate humanity with data. And the anxiety about being replaced by machines is what happens when creative types never become data-literate.
But the fact is that data is emotionally driven. Buzzy phrases like "data-driven decisions" only reinforce the misapprehension, if not the false ideology, that the best way to make decisions is rationally and devoid of emotion.
Despite the Spock-like ideal of rational decision-making, humans cannot separate emotion from effective decision-making. This was first demonstrated in the foundational case of Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman who survived having a spike driven through the left frontal lobe of his brain. Much of his brain and motor functions remained intact. But he lost the ability to feel emotions and along with it, his decision-making ability. Without emotions, he wasn’t able to assign proper priorities to his actions, and so he made horrible decisions for the rest of his life.
Nevertheless, the belief that the best decisions are made without emotions persists despite the scientific consensus that it is complete balderdash. Antonio Damasio’s "somatic marker hypothesis" says that the decision making process is actually much more impressive than a simple choice between reason and emotion. You need — and use — both.
Here’s how it works: Your brain can come up with a lot of items on a to-do list, but your emotions prioritize them by sending you intuitive signals about what is important. When it’s working properly, your reason listens to your intuition, not suppressing it as frivolously emotional but also not letting it overwhelm things. Most of this happens without your conscious mind being along for the ride, which is why even if you think you’re making a rational decision, you’ve already made an emotional decision to do so.
AI replicates this emotional prioritization by analyzing the data about past actions and decisions that humans undertook with the benefit of emotions. In this way AI is, in a sense, smarter than someone with a steel rod shoved through his brain.
AI can analyze data, look at what worked and what didn’t in the past, and then make competent decisions at a speed and scale that can revolutionize the communications industry. But AI can’t adapt to evolving priorities like you can when emotions inform your choices. And it won’t stop sending you ads for shoes you’ve already bought.
In other words, AI can’t create anything truly new because it’s too good at rational, i.e., higher-order, thinking, and creativity occurs in the cerebellum, the part of your brain that’s located at the back of your skull.
The cerebellum regulates coordination and muscle memory and it, as recent studies reveal, is also where creativity, humor, and musical improvisationoccur. This explains why AI can sift through endless probabilities but can’t think up a single joke.
As one study’s lead author concluded: "The more you think about [creativity], the more you mess it up." In other words, the creative spark is a reflex, not an algorithm. And that spark is exactly what creative pros bring to the data discussion.
Informing data with creativity will inevitably create a new paradigm in communications. AI can, and probably should, replace a majority of what humans do now. But until we understand what we can’t do with data — and what data can do only with our help — we are putting Descartes before the horse. Without informed creativity, we remain vulnerable to a future in which computers are effectively driving steel rods through our brains with endless ads for shoes we’ve already bought.
I wrote this with the considerable intellectual guidance of Peter Zandan, Ph.D., the global vice chairman of Hill+Knowlton Strategies, who received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Massachusetts. (I studied Russian at Lewis & Clark College.) This piece first appeared in PRWeek.
What I’m reading
If you read one thing I’ve clipped for you, read Dan Zak’s fluid analysis of how the Green New Deal is being painted red. It’s breathtakingly good insofar as I stopped breathing so inhaling and exhaling wouldn’t distract me while I read.
Guys! There are two types of creativity: one, conceptual creativity, hits in your twenties, and the other is experimental, which peaks in your 50s. For those of us who might be closer to one than the other, this is promising.
Someone on Twitter shared this study on speech act theory to add context to why Trump’s tweets have significance beyond the literal meaning of the words. It’s going to take me a bit to understand this, but I think there’s something here.
There’s a social epistemology theory called the Four Effects. When a new technology is introduced, four things happen: something previously obsolete is retrieved, some original characteristic of the new technology is reversed, the technology makes something obsolete, and it enhances something. This applies equally to zippers as it does to artificial intelligence, but I’m more interested in the latter.
My friend Scott likes to “have a sit,” as he puts it. He will go home and just sit. No TV. No music. No phone. No book. Just typing this makes me tense, but doing nothing is apparently so popular that the Dutch have a word for it: niksen.
Ideas take hold in a culture when they are both familiar and surprising. Which might explain why toxic masculinity has entered our lexicon so seamlessly. Thanks to Maggie M. for sending this New York Times Magazine piece along. It’s a harrowing, long read, but it deserves your attention. My friend Lucas likes to comment on social media that “heterosexuality is a nightmare.” He’s not wrong, but he’s playing it for laughs because he’s not straight. Some of us live the nightmare, and it’s not that funny.
Did you know that Dollar Shave Club has a print magazine? Turns out magazines are making a comeback as brands try to cut through the digital clutter.
This is so cool: Rolling Stone is going to have a, ahem, rolling top 100 songs chart that will change daily based on sales and streaming data.
A majority of Americans who have never taken out a student loan support Elizabeth Warren’s student-loan forgiveness plan. A slightly bigger majority of those who have repaid student loans (/raises hand/) also support Warren’s plan.
Whoa: "An American mom today is 50% more likely to die in childbirth than her own mother was."
Is it wrong that I think I could pull this off? (Spoiler alert: It is.)
Ha, ha. The Wall Street Journal picked stocks by literally throwing darts at a board and did better than professional investors. This has been another edition of “Jason Mocks the Monied Because He Ain’t, Honey.”
What it’s like to date Beto, in which Beto’s boyfriend-by-proxy campaign becomes sentient. This is well written, and though I just can’t with Beto right now I’m grateful to have read it.
Speaking of politics, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders each have three times as much support from young (under 30) black voters as Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have combined.
CAROL! Counties where Black Lives Matter protests took place saw a bigger decrease in racism by white people than in counties that did not have BLM protests, and their Democratic vote share increased about 5 percent.
I would kill for Budweiser’s polling operation. Yes, polling.
Ironically, it was someone’s responsibility to catch this typo.
Wasps are capable of transitive inference, which we once thought only humans could do. To be fair, scientists have also figured out that birds, monkeys and fish also have this ability.
Figuring out a framework to work an idea is crucial; here are 20 frameworks just sitting there for you to pick and choose from.
This is either surface-funny or a devastating parody of the advertising industry; either way, it’s funny.
Also, you’ll never guess what happened when Spain gave men paternity leave.
Oh god. The backseat of your average ride-hailing vehicle is “more than 35,000 times germier than the average toilet seat."
What I’m watching
The wife and I Netflixed and chilled last weekend. Christina Applegate’s depiction of self-directed rage in Dead to Me grounded what could have come across as merely a frothy copy of Big Little Lies. And I’ll let my wife’s review of Netflix’s Someone Great stand: A- soundtrack, C+ movie.
This ad made me clap and laugh like an idiot. As the wife said after watching it, “That’s kinda fantastic.” I’m not saying it’s better than a feature-length rom-com on Netflix, but it sure is more effective at the com part. Read about the campaign here if you want background.
What I’m listening to
Mac DeMarco has a new album coming out, and the first track, “Nobody,” sounds like he’s taking a step with his sound. The song plays with the theme of inevitability of time’s forward march (and the folly of looking back) with a beat that sounds like the ticking of a clock.
There's no turning back
To nobody
There's no second chance
No third degreeI'm a fixture
A split decision
A pretty picture
A superstition
I was going to embed the video but it’s… a little strange. Just looking at the image creeps me TF out. It’s as jarring for such a sweet-sounding song as the comfort of the inexorable beat is to the fatalistic lyrics.
Instead, I’ll give you a new song I’m listening to with a video from a teenager who is killing it on YouTube and TikTok. She records under the name mxmtoon. To film this, she put on a dress and actually sat out front of some school’s prom.
Let’s go out on a happy note, literally.
What do you think of today's email? I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback. I might even put ‘em in the newsletter if I don’t steal it outright: jason31170@gmail.com
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We get letters.
From S.O., who is someone’s S.O.:
Jason,
I look forward to reading these emails every week and this was no exception. I'm so glad you are writing these now.
Your article about taking Henry on a college visit was lovely and I may have cried a lot reading it. Parts of it reminded me of the passage about children in The Prophet.
"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable."You have been an incredible bow. It's so exciting to see that Henry is doing so well. I still think of him as the remarkable middle schooler interviewing me for a class project and its hard to believe he's become a remarkable adult so quickly. I hope to do half as well when I have my own kids someday.
I'm going to go call my parents, now, to tell them I love them.