When Squirt's My Age
What Will Humanity Be
We lost internet for the majority of yesterday. Big fucking deal, right? Except, it was a big fucking deal. Especially for Squirt, who has never been without the internet. We were talking about it at breakfast today, that he is only right now approaching the age I was when I got the internet. An internet he wouldn’t even recognize in the first place because it was filled with the beeps and boops of dial-up connections, slowly watching images paint across the screen, and, I dunno, Compuserve? Webcrawler? Altavista? All the things that have disappeared as the technology marched forward.
But, now, Squirt losing the internet is akin to me losing electrical power at his age — vastly inconvenient and fundamentally altering the day’s lifestyle. The internet, for my child, is just part of life. It’s electricity or water or food at the grocery store. I was looking back over the past 30 years and wondered aloud just what he would see when he was my age. What things would be a fundamental part of a grandchild of mine’s life?
It was an interesting breakfast.
Artificial Companion
This morning I read a screed from author Jason Pargin and his take on AI which eventually wanders into conjecture at the number of folks that have a “personal relationship with a bot.” I have some quibbles with some of his takes but it sent my mind in directions it hadn’t gone before. I have found myself being a little freaked recently at the things that ChatGPT can recall about me. Freaked out and amused and impressed all at the same time. For instance, just today, I was chatting with it about the sarcastic fringehead fish and whether I could keep it in my saltwater aquarium and its answer factored in my current tank size and the animals already in it, because I told it that maybe seven months ago during a tank emergency.
Spooky. Also cool.
I am not in a “personal relationship” with this bot. For me it is a tool and I have family and friends to fulfill my social needs. But it also has better recall, and is much more deeply read, than any one of my friends or family. There is no question that one of the uses for this “tool” is to fulfill social needs that might go unmet for some number of humans. One of the things I think Squirt’s generation is going to have to figure out is what these types of social relationships will look like. Will there be stigma? Will it just become commonplace? Will it only really matter if there are emotions in the relationship? I mean beyond the irritation when it hallucinates.
All I know for certain is that we will see the world shift.
Persona
A thing that is very useful when working with an AI system is to assign it a persona. It’s a sort of pseudo-empathy, which itself is an interesting question, that sets the AI system down a particular track. It’s a narrowing exercise. “You are a senior platform engineer” or “you are a cybersecurity analyst” means that it will focus down more on a particular function. You get better answers when you ask questions under a persona.
Last week I saw that Squirt was logged into ChatGPT while he was chatting with it and I asked it the following question:
pretend you are my father, take everything you know about me and consider if there is anything a father might be worried about or concerned with that you know or have had conversations with me about
Squirt was there while I did this because I wanted him to see what it would answer me with.
“Pretend you are my father.”
What a thing to ask a glorified calculator. But it shined a light into my child’s behavior that I would have never gotten otherwise. Spooky. Also, cool.
I’ve cribbed some of its answer here:
Interesting question.
If I were roleplaying as a thoughtful father who’s watched you over time and only using things you’ve talked about here, I don’t think I’d be worried about the cat wars, the record collecting, KSP, Linux, or the weird projects. Those mostly show creativity, curiosity, and persistence.
Then it went on with some “concerns” which I could easily wave away. It was stuff like school frustrations and bouncing from project to project and whether there’s enough sleep every night. Nothing surprising, nothing I didn’t already know about. In fact, things that I could wave away because I know my kid much better than this calculator.
But valid things to call out because of the scope of things that the calculator knew about my kid.
The final bit I also wanted to quote:
Based on our conversations, one thing that would reassure me is that you seem genuinely curious.
You’ve asked about:
science, math, programming, history, spaceflight, hardware, art, music collecting.
That’s a pretty broad range of interests.
So if I were your father, my main concern wouldn’t be that you’re headed in a bad direction. It would mostly be helping you develop the habits that let you turn curiosity into skills: finishing projects, checking sources, backing up files, and taking care of yourself while you’re busy building cat empires and launching spacecraft.
It was this final bit that prompted me to have him email me the response so that I could save it and maybe write about it. Developing good habits. That’s a pretty fucking solid answer. It’s something Squirt and I talk about all the time actually — having good habits.
Neutrality
You should take your favorite political hobby horse and throw it at the AI and see what happens. Ask it what proof there is for Trump’s stolen election. Ask it exactly how Bill Gates is in the Epstein files. Ask it about abortion.
I’ve done all of those. In fact, I’ve begun to make it a habit because it’s frankly brilliant at answering the questions. It has read sources nobody living in a bubble would have read. It isn’t emotional about it — it’s not coming to the conversation having chosen over and over to accept a disgusting politician in aid of getting whatever your pet legislative agenda is. There is a value in removing the “humanity” from these discussions sometimes, because we are where we are because of that very flawed humanity. That is a criticism and praise at the same time because, look around, humanity is fucking some stuff up.
What Is Humanity
This is the tension for me right now. I think this is the tension for civilization right now. What makes us special? Are we special because we are human? What does it mean to be human? It’s not our ability to reason anymore, it turns out you can get a reasonable facsimile of that with some heavy matrix math. Is it because we are “emotional” in a way that the calculator cannot be? Is it my rage and joy and depression that makes me special? Because some ineffable and invisible force gave me a “soul” and raised me up above the other creatures on the land and in the sea? Humanism posits what makes us special is that we strive to improve, that we try to learn.
What exactly is the meaning of life for a human?
Shit, I got no clue. But I guess I’ll keep asking questions. I guess I’ll teach Squirt to ask questions too. Be curious. Be creative. Be persistent. Have good habits.
All those things the spooky calculator said Squirt should be taught.
Squirt Says…
I think that as time progresses and we make more and more advancements we will have exponential growth in the advance of technology so when I'm your age I think there will be many huge advancements. These will make for an increase in the generational divide, I think, because while I'm a kid I will grow up with or without certain things while Generation Beta and future generations would not understand how I grew up just as I would find it hard to understand past generations' childhoods. That's all to say that the things that I have today won’t be understood by future generations.
Dad Responds…
Agreed, every generation sees a new world and understanding what came before will be tough. The other trick to remember is to remember not to give into hubris.
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”~ George Orwell
