I recently listened to the “Shell Game” podcast series, hosted by Evan Ratliff. He describes the show like this:
What would happen if you created a digital copy of yourself, powered by AI, and set it loose in the world? Evan Ratliff, longtime tech journalist, decided to find out. He combined a clone of his voice, an AI chatbot, and a phone line—many phone lines, actually—into what are called “voice agents.” Then for the six months, he sent them out… as himself.
It was a fascinating show, and I highly recommend that you give it a listen.
In the final episode of the show, Evan references a 100-year-old article in the New York Times (view on NYT, or view Google Doc) about a shopkeeper who resisted getting a telephone for as long as he could, but he finally relented. It’s not a long article, at right around 1,500 words, so it’s worth giving it a read.
The focus of the article is about keeping humanity in business and “who are in revolt against the mechanisms of the city“. In the article they share a bit about why the slower pace can be advantageous, saying:
“If you use machines, you write a hundred letters where one will do, but not if each word is weighed against the labor of spreading out a drop of ink.”
It feels like something I say a lot on here (such as these thoughts from Blaise Pascal and Woodrow Wilson), though I’ll admit that the concept of a daily blog largely runs counter to that idea. If I were hand-writing all of these posts, they’d certainly come out a bit differently. Even so, I work hard to keep my thoughts concise and I weigh them carefully against the time needed to read them.
I may not always succeed, but keeping in mind the “labor of spreading out a drop of ink” is a valuable idea for all of us.
