Alan Jacobs

The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier:

What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking? 

Reuters tries to out Banksy:

We concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency. 

The idea that an artist, like a government agency, cannot be allowed to “operate without transparency” is ludicrous. This is idle curiosity masquerading as social responsibility. 

Cal Newport:

This is a worst-case scenario: you work faster and harder, but mainly on shallow, mentally taxing tasks (because of all the context shifting they require) that only indirectly help the bottom line compared to harder efforts.

It’s not quite clear why AI tools are having this impact. One tantalizing clue, however, comes from Berkeley professor Aruna Ranganathan, who is quoted in the article saying: “AI makes additional tasks feel easy and accessible, creating a sense of momentum.”

This points toward a pattern similar to what happened when email first arrived. It was undeniably true that sending emails was more efficient than wrangling fax machines and voicemail. But once workers gained access to low-friction communication, they transformed their days into a furious flurry of back-and-forth messaging that felt “productive” in the ​abstract, activity-centric sense​ of that term, but ultimately hurt almost every other aspect of their jobs and ​made everyone miserable​. 

I’m increasingly inclined to believe that we’ll soon see a Great Sorting with regard at AI at work: coders and scammers will love it, everyone else will hate it. 

A wonderful essay on Constable’s The Leaping Horse and … other matters. 

I’m in The Dispatch this morning on Christopher Beha’s new book on unbelief, belief, and skepticism. And, I am told, if you use the promo code JACOBS at checkout you can get 15% off an annual Dispatch subscription.