Better Living Through Literature

What Science Knows About Grief, by music writer Amanda Petrusich, is a long piece in the New Yorker about, well, what science knows about grief.

Petrusich lost her husband suddenly and unexpectedly so there are passages talking about dealing with the aftermath, from finances to well-meaning friends:

I got very good at sensing when the heft and finality of the loss was making someone uncomfortable. I found this both relatable (I surely wouldn’t have known what to say, either) and alienating. Grief can’t be “fixed”—death is famously irreversible—so conversations about it require both parties to abandon problem-solving and accept a kind of unpleasant stasis. When well-intentioned friends or colleagues asked me how I was doing, I felt dread. What I wanted to say was This feels exactly as bad as you think it feels. What I usually said was Yeah, I’m O.K. 

There’s also the science promised in the title, which is fascinating–covering everything from giving grief a clinical diagnosis to experimental drugs to EMDR therapy–but the concept that interested me most was “two-person neuroscience”:

When I asked [Katherine] Shear [founder and director of the Columbia Center for Prolonged Grief] about the biological aftermath of grief, she brought up two-person neuroscience, an emerging discipline that studies how our brains affect other brains. “Our closest relationships, especially when we’re living together—in particular, when we’re living together—have an impact on our immune system, our cardiovascular system, our sleep, our eating, probably the whole body,” she said. “I think we have to understand what happens, neurologically, when we’re with someone to really understand what happens when we lose them.”

There was another 1.5 hour meeting at work yesterday about using AI “because other agencies will be.” I am not a CEO but I have worked in advertising for 20 years and surely there’s a way we could brand ourselves as a “human-first” agency and go the other direction? No, we’re going all-in on AI instead?

Too bad AI is a loser machine, as posited in this essay is by Garrett Bucks–“You will never win at AI.”

We should say it loudly and proudly and at every possibly opportunity: Generative AI is loser technology and it doesn’t deserve you. The more you use it the more we all lose. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. You will give more of your data, trust, money, water and critical thinking skills to the consumption robots, and what you’ll get in return won’t ever belong to you.

AI is a loser machine. And I hope you don’t use it, not because you need to prove your morality to me, but because I don’t want you to lose. I think you deserve better than a resource-guzzling, death-causing, random word generator.