Tina Turner, Tim Scott, and an A.I. Pause

all this live from Klamath County, Oregon!

Me, back in the saddle filming at Agency Ranch in the Klamath River Basin in Southern Oregon

Hello you,

Happy Memorial Day. Here’s some forgotten history to consider on this day predicated on memory: the first recorded Memorial Day celebration took place in Charleston, South Carolina on May 1, 1865 when newly-freed Black Americans fighting in the Civil War decorated soldiers’ graves. Whether you know of someone who died while serving in the U.S. military or not, I hope we all take a moment to remember the original reasons for this day and not just look for the best retail sales opportunities. 

By this point you should be used to me sending you notes from pretty much everywhere. As this message goes out, I’m in Klamath Falls, Oregon! I’ve spent the past week in the state as we near the end of filming for Season 2 of my PBS series, America Outdoors. (Here’s me rollerblading in Portland like it’s the 1990s.) Thanks to Oregon, I’ve discovered a newfound appreciation for trees, indigenous traditional knowledge, free diving, and truffles.

On my tour of America, I’ve squeezed in a few interesting podcast appearances, including a discussion of collective grief with Megan Devine and a soothing, get-you-ready-for-bed deep-dive into my quest to make the perfect ice cube in Sleeping with Celebrities. I also tried to make a positive case for A.I., though as you’ll read below, I’ve had an infusion of skepticism lately.

Of course, one upside of so much travel is that I’ve had time to catch up on backlogged media. I’m probably the only Puck writer who hasn’t watched Succession yet (I’m saving it, ok!), but I’ve made time for The Diplomat (excellent!) and Beef (excellent-er). The soundtrack to my travels across Oregon this week has been non-stop Tina Turner—may she rest in peace. My mother was obsessed with Turner, perhaps because they were both Black women who survived abuse and were underestimated for much of their lives. Every once in a while during my childhood, my mother would just blast Tina Turner out of nowhere. In the car, in the house, and later in my own car, she’d crank the volume all the way up. Turner’s powerful gospel/rock voice is an indelible part of my image of my mother. 

After our mother retired from full-time government work and left Washington, D.C., my sister and I took her out on a series of dream-fulfillment adventures, including seeing some of her heroes like Miriam Makeba and Bill Cosby (my mom passed away before the news of his abusive behavior came out). But the greatest gift my sister and I got for our mother, late in her life, was a chance to see Turner live in concert… twice! My sister took her to a Dallas show, and I took her to one in Boston. Singing and dancing along to Tina Turner with my mom is one of the happiest memories I have. This week, as my sister and I were texting about Tina and our mother, she sent me the lyrics to “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” Turner’s hit song that was featured in one of the original Mad Max movies. The part that stands out to me most are the opening lines: “Out of the ruins / Out from the wreckage / Can’t make the same mistake this time.” My mother’s adult life consisted of many attempts not to repeat the mistakes her parents made, or even the mistakes she made, herself. 

I’ve been thinking about those attempts to interrupt historic patterns on a larger scale, especially with powerful tools like artificial intelligence. But first, I want to check in on another pattern that could use some interruption: awkward Republican presidential campaign announcements. 

Oh, and if someone forwarded this to you, sign yourself up over at Puck. I’ll share some excerpts of my double-header below, but the complete edition is subscription-only.

Tim Scott’s Audience of One

It’s hard for me to resist mocking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is allegedly very good at local politics—he did win re-election by nearly twenty points—but whose national political instincts are frequently confused. How else to explain his creative but predictably disastrous decision to make his big I’m-running-for-president announcement on the audio-only compilation of unforced errors that is Elon Musk’s Twitter? 

Musk, often rightly lauded as a pioneer in futuristic technologies, has also managed to drag his personal plaything of a media platform into the past, undoing advertiser relationships, rolling back the clock on efforts to combat spam and disinformation, and dragging DeSantis into what was essentially a broken radio broadcast. That’s fitting for a politician who is himself unwinding progress in his home state in terms of access to reproductive healthcare, and who is leading his constituency down the Orwellian road of banning books and limiting speech. (For more thoughtful thoughts on this weak moment in media flexing, listen to my Puck colleagues Jon Kelly and Dylan Byers discuss the repercussions on The Powers That Be.)

But the presidential announcement that affected me most viscerally was that of South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. He also had audio problems during his announcement—maybe the right should stop whining about free speech and start checking their audio cables. Scott’s microphone went dead for nearly a minute right after he said “America is not a nation.” Awkward! If DeSantis’s campaign energy is confused, Scott’s is aggressively hopeful to the point of discomfort. He wants you to know that he loves America, hard! His speech sporadically indulged in moments of intense yelling, church preaching, and laughter, all delivered with a big smile.

key snippet from the remainder of this essay:

In one of many variations on this theme, Scott said, “Today I’m living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not the land of oppression.” What he can’t seem to fathom is the notion that America can be multiple things at the same time: that it can be deeply racist in many of its institutions, but it can also allow for extraordinary feats of triumph against the odds. He can’t accept the validity of an experience that is different from his own, nor does he acknowledge the well-established and undeniable statistics related to income and wealth inequality and racial disparities. His sole refutation of these truths revolves around a single data point: his own life. 

Read the rest here.

meanwhile, I also wrote another installment in my series on artificial intelligence.

The Case for (Temporarily) Unplugging A.I. 

Earlier this month, I boarded The Scarlet Lady, a 900 foot, 17-deck cruise ship off the coast of Miami, with 2,500 other conference-goers, to take part in Summit at Sea, a floating creative festival slash personal development gathering. I’ve been a part of the Summit community since 2012, having attended and spoken at many events over the past decade. The cruise is usually a laid back event, offering yoga, meditation, and lectures on everything from cutting-edge medical tech to psychedelics, along with meetups for environmentalists and web3 enthusiasts. 

Summit at Sea is part TED conference, part art festival. This year, Gina Belafonte opened the event with a tribute to her father, the late, great Harry Belafonte. Later, I was scheduled to talk about my podcast, How to Citizen; engage in a public conversation about intergenerational leadership and democracy with Thanasi Dilos, co-founder of CivicsUnplugged (disclosure: I serve on the board); and introduce my friend Dr. Sam Rader, who led a workshop on shedding negative lifelong patterns. It’s an eclectic gathering, to say the least. 

So it was no surprise that artificial intelligence, the buzziest buzzword in the zeitgeist right now, featured prominently. There were a handful of informal meetups on the topic, and it was ever-present in conversations in line for coffee, or waiting for a drink at the bar. But the most anticipated A.I. event was a talk prepared by Tristan Harris, the eminent technology ethicist, and his colleague Aza Raskin, both co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology. They had prepared an updated version of their talk titled, “The A.I. Dilemma,” a version of which you can find on YouTube, from March, although it’s already out of date. Frankly, so is the version that I saw live, just over a week ago. That’s how fast this technological revolution is developing.

key snippet from the remainder of this essay:

But the example that I found most stunning and infuriating involved a technology that has already been commercialized at a much wider scale. Snapchat recently launched My AI, a virtual chatbot friend. The bot is always available, and it always responds instantly, unlike your human friends. Back on March 10, Harris posted screenshots of an interaction between a supposedly 13-year-old user with the bot. The teen girl character told this bot about a 31-year-old man she had met, and was planning to meet with I.R.L., and asked the bot for advice for having sex with him. The bot responded by suggesting candles to set the mood. We are supposed to know better by now. (Snap has said it designed My AI with safety in mind, and with safeguards to minimize harm. But the guardrails tend to disappear the longer conversations go on, and the bot is prone to “hallucinate”—a problem we have seen with ChatGPT, too.)

Snapchat is not a new product. The company explicitly brags about its hold on young users, so this isn’t a case of “we didn’t anticipate this population using our product.” We are well over a decade into well-documented trafficking of children through online communications. So this is a use case Snap should have been prepared for, especially after the years they’ve spent using A.I. to identify and prevent nefarious exchanges between real people. But in this case, the call is coming from inside the server. In Tristan and Aza’s example, the company’s own bot is encouraging a child into a dangerous, criminal situation. That’s bad. What’s more horrible is that the bot was still responding in the same fashion when I saw their “A.I. Dilemma” presentation two months later. The only difference is that on March 10, the My AI bot was only available to 2 million users on Snapchat Premium. Today, it’s available to all 360 million daily active Snapchat users. 

When I first heard calls for an A.I. pause by various leaders in the industry, I was skeptical. I didn’t understand what that would mean, in practice. I figured it was better to engage with the technology to better shape its development. Now, however, part of me wants to unplug everything. We are racing to the bottom very quickly. Snap could plausibly make the case that it should test this publicly, outside of a lab setting. Indeed, I’ve heard Sam Altman of OpenAI make a similar case. But it’s wildly irresponsible to launch these untested tools on hundreds of millions of people, especially after our experience with social media over the past decade. It’s purposefully risky with no essential countervailing reward, beyond the financial windfall for the companies that commercialize these products first. 

Tristan and Aza likened A.I. today to the birth of nuclear weapons, except these nukes are being deployed into the hands of almost everyone on Earth very, very quickly. And these nukes are getting… nukier, because A.I. is being used to upgrade its own capabilities, and researchers are running out of tests it can’t surpass. To counter this, they propose nuclear-level coordination to limit the downside risks. I’m starting to agree.

Unlock the full essay here. And have a lovely day!