The Writers Room - 10/16/2023
Today in The Teardown Writer's Room: using your hands, and then, not using them much at all.
Today is my birthday, so I’m a bit late to my weekly Writer’s Room post. I also included just two draft ideas this week but will return to my three-item format next week.
As a reminder, The Writer’s Room is where I’ll publish my thoughts on drafts and other ideas for The Teardown. I’m optimistic that I put these little bits of information in your hands once a week.
Work With Your Hands
The New York Times published a piece by Pamela Paul proposing to reintroduce kids to cooking, repairing cars, and building stuff in class. Instead of posting selfies and building TikTok empires, they’ll change oil, learn the art of short-order egg cooking, and craft poorly-designed Jenga towers.
I graduated from high school in 2001, and indeed, we had an auto-shop class during my freshman year. I also took a drafting class, which sparked a serious interest in all things architecture. We might’ve had some sort of wood-shop course as well. Even earlier, in middle school, we did some cooking! We wore aprons!
Unfortunately, I never took auto-shop. Tt was eliminated from the curriculum after either freshman or sophomore year. The article states some possible reasons for that disappearance and the broader trend:
Relatedly, these classes can be expensive for schools to fund; whenever sharp objects or power tools are involved, insurance rates go up
Ah yes, it’s just about money?
Also, there are sometimes ordinary problems lurking under the hood. Students going to shop to work on cars instead of going to their other classes. Instructors smoking in the auto-shop garage. All of that happened in my high school.
Elsewhere, Ms. Paul quotes another author:
In “Building: A Carpenter’s Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work,” which came out earlier this year, Mark Ellison writes: “I firmly believe that most of life passes us by when we avoid mucking about in dirt, or dough, or dark thoughts. Doing anything from beginning to end brings understanding that no finished product can provide.”
I agree with the premise: completing things is great. But those things don’t always require calloused hands, hammers, spatulas, or car-jacks. They can be virtual too. Perhaps your weekend turns into a mad-sprint to finish a software project. Sometimes, we have to be where the world is going.
Not Just AI DJ, AI Music
AI’s meteoric rise in publicity since the 2022 release of ChatGPT is a moment to remember in the still-long road that may or may not end in total AI dominance of all human things.
Spotify recently released its in-app AI DJ feature. I think of it as one of Spotify’s existing algorithmic playlists on steroids. But it’s not especially innovative at the moment.
One potentially innovative path for music is the role of AI in making the music. Today, there’s largely some set of humans involved in any song that arrives on your playlist. But, perhaps we can train models well enough that they create songs entirely from prompts with no direct physical input from humans.
I’m not sure that gloomy future is a good place to be, but I expect more and more of that type of music as generative AI powers into every facet of life.