Novelty Left on the Table
I'm infuriated by the use of AI today.
Have you ever been reading some historical account and thought 'They have all the tools to concoct the solution we use today, why don't they just use it solve their Very Big Problem?' This is how I feel about AI today.
With some notable exceptions, every time I have a conversation with people about what's cool in AI these days, it's something people were already doing ten years ago, just with people who were paid to do it. What? Really? Is this how we deal with the extremely-broken-everything-machine?
Where are the Tale-of-Genji-length novels that stenographically encode multiple other novellas inside them?
Where is the educational software that can give you of example problems that cross-reference information about your math and your Latin homework?
Where are the narrative video games with fixed rules but every time you 'die' your dropped into a new plot and can't make use of any of the information you had built up?
Where are the society simulators that explore the maximum number of sub cultures that the world could possibly support?
Where are the cartoon shows that have more episodes than seconds since the earth was born?
Where the 'field reconstructors' that use casual remarks made in talks to backwards engineer the power dynamics in an academic field?
Where is the counter-factual Gossip Girl simulator that shows how it all would have played out if <REDACTED> had been Gossip Girl?
I'm disappointed and appalled at how boring things have been given how much money is in it. I suppose the reality is that the market for novelty is usually low in comparison to the market for 'more of what you wanted yesterday'.
But aren't academics supposed to be better than this? No, not when everyone is publishing faster than they can read their papers.
Jessica Hullman has me thinking about the fact that in this corner of academia, you don't exist if you can't justify yourself as 'relevant' because it is assumed you are getting buried under the stampede[1] of new results (which are usually not that informative).
I am getting buried, but I would like to be a buried gem, if possible. I would like to take with me some knowledge that is too strange to yet be formalized. Hopefully historians will find something strange and delightful in my abandoned projects that foreshadows the media landscape of 2150, given the snails pace at which people are adapting in genuinely novel ways with the shiny new tools they've been gifted.
- Thanks to Niloofar Mireshghallah for this terminology. ↩︎