Minimum Viable Curiousity

I was in the city a few weeks ago and exclusively used Waymo for the entire trip. My biggest complaint? I needed to walk four minutes to a pick-up spot. Other than that, the car just showed up, traversed San Francisco streets easily, and the cost was reasonable1. Sitting in the back seat watching the robot drive through San Francisco, I realized now I was at ease with the machine taking me hither and fro. I’ve been on more than 20 rides, and I think robots can drive a car in a crowded city.

I am dissatisfied when I ask ChatGPT or Claude.ai to write something for me. The writing has no life, no flair. It’s repeating patterns it’s been trained on, and the result is a pretty good imitation, but the voice is tinny and robotic. Anyone exploring AI has a similar experience; they test the robots on topics where they are the expert and quickly find it’s not creative, but impressively derivative. No art, no flair.

The point: there is a whole class of tasks where, job loss aside1, I am fine with robots doing the job with absolutely no flair. I need the job done safely, efficiently, and reliably. Every time. I require no flair for a car taking me from Point A to Point B. I want no pomp and circumstance. The perfect ride is one I forget immediately because nothing interesting happens.

The Trap

Problem is, I like driving. Her name is Audrey. She’s a black Porsche 718, and I love driving her. We love zipping around the small mountain roads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. I like the feel of her wheels on the road, I like how she growls when we decide to go fast. It’s a visceral experience full of colors, sights, and sounds.

In a hypothetical future world where all I ever knew was sitting in the back of a robot car, I would not appreciate the work involved because I’d never had the opportunity to learn to drive. This might be fine for many humans on the planet, but not for me. I learned how to drive on Highway 17, a scary mountain freeway that required me to become a competent driver as quickly as possible. I remember those lessons, they made me… me.

I liked learning to drive.

Better yet, I like learning. It gives me appreciation of the craft.

I recently received a job description from a friend. As I started to read it, here’s the vent that went through my head:

“Robots, really?”

“Well, Rands, not everyone is a writing zealot like you. Many humans are intimidated by writing, so chill. They completed the necessary task.”

“Yeah, but… if they don’t learn how to write well, isn’t that a problem?”

I looked at him when done and said, “ChatGPT?”

“Is it that obvious?”

This is the problem. And it’s large. For every task we’re asking the robots to perform, there was an essential initial step where the robots were trained on data generated by hard-working humans so the robots could perform the task. It’s called machine learning. They need to learn from the hard work of our learning, except it’s not learning, it’s mimicking and repeating patterns. While it’s a joy to sit in the back of Waymo and appreciate the robot doing an effective job, it’s a trap and a familiar one.

Minimum Viable Friendship

Remember back when you first got on Facebook or your first social network. A revelation, right? Everyone is here! Suddenly, you connected with friends from high school, finding long-lost friends, and it all felt very social. Your brain told you you’d found all these valuable friends, but this is a minimum viable friendship.

What does it mean to have a friend? To have a friendship? Your definition differs from mine, but off the top of my head, it includes:

Shared and repeated in-person experiences and achievements that built familiarity and eventually trust. The magnitude and consistency of these shared experiences and stories become embedded in your brain, connecting you. Their presence in your mind moves you, often randomly, to reach out and remind all involved, “Hello. Hi. Remember. We are friends.”

Facebook or other social network connections are humans that you know, but for many, we do the minimum work to build and maintain the relationship. Brief interactions tickle the “I’m being social” bit of your brain, but you aren’t. You’re sitting in your slippers in your Cave doing the minimum viable work, telling yourself you’re being social. These services are not built to help you be social; they are designed to extract data, which ironically is being used to train the robots to help you be less social.

Maintaining any relationship is work, and like all complex skills, you start with no skill. Via repeated failures and successes, you learn the work necessary to build healthy personal and working relationships. You learn over and over again, and the act of doing work is the lesson.

Are you wondering why we’re so anxious? It’s because we’ve never been connected with more humans less. We’re forgetting about the important work of investment in relationships, or we’ve never learned how to create, develop, and maintain relationships because we think those vacuous relationships we’ve made on the Internet are substantive relationships. They are not2. I believe building relationships takes time, patience, and proximity. You learn how to friendship by doing the hard work.

Do The Work

I’ve made a career being a human terrified by becoming irrelevant long before AI showed up to drive my car. You bet I am poking every bit of AI that I can. Daily. I am trying to figure out what it can and can’t do, and this article aside, I am optimistic, just like I’ve been for the last three decades, that revolutionary innovations will knock your socks off in the next few years. It’s still early days for AI. Really.

However, I am deeply suspicious of AI, especially after watching decades of social networks monetize our attention while teaching us to ignore facts and truth, minimizing our desire to understand. Many humans don’t check their facts; they believe what they read in the feed. Most humans believe the manufactured reality is designed to get them to believe someone else’s agenda. The convenience of these services and tools has made us lazy and, worse, not curious.

AI does an incredible job of confidently sounding like it knows what it’s talking about, so it’s easy to imagine what it will do in the hands of those who want to manipulate you. AI does a shockingly good job at programming and other structured tasks we thought were the domain of hardworking engineers, but AI is not curious. AI is trained, but it does not learn.

My primary fear is that, like Facebook before it, those humans empowered to build, write, and create with AI stop with the slop because the act provides an unearned sense of accomplishment. The work is the trying, trying again, failing, finding inspiration in the lessons of the failure, and going one more time. Only to fail once more. Being curious. “Why am I failing?” is required reflection. You ask yourself, you ask your friends, and then sometimes a lightning bolt strikes and you realize, “This is the lesson. I understand now. I know how to improve.”

The value of creation is a function of the effort. Creation without effort is meaningless.

Waymo Paradox

I’ve been working on the ending of this article for a few months because I can’t tell if we’re screwed or blessed. I’m not excited by a world where humans aren’t required to go through trials that require them to learn.

I’ve walked close friends through the arc of this piece to get their gut read, and most have a similar initial reaction. They’re concerned about AI running wild and doing unspeakable things to humanity. Yeah, I saw Terminator, too. This opinion has a valid recency bias, but I also think this is a repeat of a core human reaction — we fear the unknown. Change is scary.

I think we’re screwed, not because of the power and potential of the tools. It starts with the greed of humans and how their machinations (and success) prey on the ignorant. We’re screwed because these nefarious humans were already wildly successful before AI matured and now we’ve given them even better tools to manufacture hate that leads to helplessness. But I have a cure for that helplessness. Curiousity.

I think we’re blessed. We live at a time when the tools we build can empower those who want to create. The barriers to creating have never been lower; all you need is a mindset. Curiousity. How does it work? Where did you come from? What does this mean? What rules does it follow? How does it fail? Who benefits most from this existing? Who benefits least? Why does it feel like magic? What is magic, anyway? It’s an endless set of situationally dependent questions requiring dedicated focus and infectious curiousity.

When faced with change or an aggressive unknown, I take a deep breath, count to four, place my feet firmly on the ground, and ask, “Do I really understand what is going on here? Really?” I start with curiousity because curiousity informs action. Action creates consequence, and when consequence shows up, you start learning.

Here’s the thing. We are equally screwed and blessed. These contradictory states exist at the same time. It’s a paradox, a confusing, in-progress, contradictory mess. It’s a state I understand because I am a human who continues to learn and I’m curious how it’s going to turn out.

Yes, I know humans will lose their jobs because of this innovation. That’s a different important article. ↩

Hey, I know many humans have substantive relationships online. My social circle exploded in the late 80s when I discovered the BBS system in the Bay Area, but the explosion, the satisfaction, and the learning occurred when I began to hang with these now real humans in person. ↩