Notes

I was listening to this podcast while I was riding my bike this morning. One of the points that was made, which Feels very right to me, is that In a world where agentic AI systems become the norm, the things we should be helping our kids develop is judgment.

My attempt to summarize what I heard in the conversation is this: AI systems are going to be very good at making a lot of information available to people. However, we can probably assume that unlike people, AI systems aren’t going to be worried about consequences, because they don’t have bodies that die or that can be incarcerated.

Another way to say this would be that the stakes of making bad decisions, or acting in harmful ways, are higher for human beings than they are for agentic AI systems.

Be that as it may, as agentic AI systems make more information available to human beings, there’s information could help human beings make better judgments that truly in better decisions/actions that affect other human bodies living in the real/material world.

The crux of the argument was that judgment ultimately needs to be something that human beings don’t outsource to agentic AIs too often.

Has I’ve continued to think about this, I think there are a lot of implications for education systems, and family systems, out of which are systems that encourage and discourage children from developing particular skills.

I have four kids. What can I do as a parent to help them develop the best possible judgment skills?

I suspect this is the thing that’s going to be on my mind a lot…

Portishead’s albums never seem played out, regardless of how many times I listen to them.

I asked Perplexity what makes the Pet Shop Bous remarkable and relevant. Part of the answer it constructed that stuck out to me was this:

They make melancholy danceable. Rather than treating euphoria and sadness as opposites, their music frequently makes them coexist

Danceable melancholy! That’s such a great combination of words!

When the day has a certain vibe, the best thing to do is listen to Joe Frank’s voice.

Over on the Disquiet blog, Marc Weidenbaum will post 30 seconds of an interesting sound he encounters just going about his day. (This one is of buzz saws.)

Today, I was walking to the park with one of my kids, and I noticed this small thumping sound, which turned out to be acorns from the oak trees dropping to the ground. I liked the sound and recorded 1:00 min of it. There are is also the sound of lawn mower and birds in the background.

From a post on Michael Easter’s 2% Substack.

We all know we spend too much time on our phones. There are thousands of articles offering tips on how to use your phone less. But these often miss an important point. When people reduce their phone screen time, they often get bored—and immediately replace it with another screen, short-circuiting the very mental state that drives creativity. Taking a couple of hours off your phone screen time only to add in more TV time is like replacing cigarettes with chewing tobacco.

Yeah!

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Easter’s larger point is that, rather than telling ourselves we need to look at our phones less, we should try to increase the time we spend not being stimulated by a screen.

“Instead of less phone, more boredom,” he said in a different podcast/interview.

It’s a simple and obvious observation. One that is so simple and so obvious that people (myself included) don’t think it.

Is Ganzeer.today

Today’s soundtrack is a combination of cafe chatter (played via my phone) and Persian jazz (played via my laptop).

I’ve never heard of anyone doing this kind of two devices to make a soundtrack to the day thing.

This morning, one of my four kids (he’s 5) said, “Today is a good day!” Immediately after he said this, the song Today by The Smashing Pumpkins started to play in my head, and I started to hum it as I made breakfast.

“What song are you humming, Dad?” Asked the oldest boy, he is close to 7.

I told him what it was.

“Can we listen to it?” He asked. I played it for him via Apple Music, and the next song that the algorithm put in the rotation was Pictures of You by The Cure.

The five year old listened to Robert Smith sing and said, “This is a beautiful song.”

In that moment, I felt lots of things.