Smart Understanding

Setting the stage

In the early 1980s, after graduating from MIT, I worked at the MIT AI Lab on a project called the Programmer's Apprentice.

Looking back, although the details differ because we were using technology over 40 years younger than what's available today, the vision behind it wasn't that much different.

We programmed in a language called Lisp that continues in use today, but at the time was one of the most common languages used in AI research. Machines called Lisp Machines had hardware support for the language, and the Zmacs text editor of the time was very much like the Emacs text editor is today. The Programmer's Apprentice was written in Lisp.

To go with that, we wanted to have an AI-style assistant that could see the programs we were writing, understand them, and take abstract instructions in English about how to modify them, and would make those edits for us. Pretty much the same model as an agentic “AI” programmer might be today.

Under the covers

The broad architecture of the Knowledge-Based Editor (KBE), or KBEmacs as it later came to be called, was very much like the way Large Language Models (LLMs) work today. Commands (similar to today's “prompts”) were issued to the KBE via an input box, the program itself would be digested into an internal representation, some transformations would be made to the program while it was in the internal representation, and then the result would be coded back up in Lisp (or whatever other language might be selected). At the time, Ada and PL/I were other languages that might be used.

What interested me at the time, though it seems routine now, was the idea of interacting asynchronously with another entity. Nowadays, people take agentic interactions for granted and there's been lots of intervening work on how to manage it all. At the time, we had the ability to spin off background processes and we had locking tools, but the rest of the mailboxing and coordination had to be spelled out by hand.

It was fun, actually. Charting the unknown. Something with the new “AI” people are unlikely to do any more. Now you just ask that it be done. That's convenient, but also a little intellectually sad.

Programmers bow to units of packaging called libraries. An apt metaphor in fact, because I think they often represent the packaged death of thought in the same way that great philosophy texts can represent as much the death of thought as the birth of it. Grand thoughts once having been thought, need not be revisited. Any goal of—much less right to—the simple joy of discovery is outright poo-pooed.
 —Kent Pitman, Whither Original Thought

A routine demonstration

Periodically, people would show up to see what we were cooking up. We had a well-practiced script that we felt illustrated the main ideas we were working with.

I was particularly interested in the interactions with the people funding us. They would watch everything carefully. I would watch them with equal interest.

Unlike some for whom we did demonstrations, it seemed obvious that they felt their role was to be a little bit skeptical. My sense was that they would watch as our interactions with the apprentice, directing it in English-like language to put a program together, and think “This is just form filling.” Form filling would not have been interesting. You could get that for cheap. They wanted to be wowed.

So they would watch with apparent boredom as the demonstration proceeded. I watched their faces. I could hear their minds. “Yeah, yeah. Bunch of forms being filled. Yep. Yep. More form stuff. Probably a garden variety template thing.” Their bored silence spoke volumes.

A less-routine response

Then an unusual command is issued. “Document the program.” That doesn't result in either a regurgitation of what has been said or a transliteration of the program into text. The documentation speaks at a high level about the structure of what the program is doing.

The funder is now alert to something unusual. They do a double-take. They pause and say, “Oh. It's smart.”

I am pretty sure I saw this effect more than once in different people. It really stuck with me. And I pondered why always in that moment. And why “smart”?

I came to believe that “not smart” meant a single representation being used in the ordinary way. A form to fill out. A function to graph. A program to execute.

“Smart,” I inferred after some thought, meant that the entity in question had different ways to approach a problem and could shift representation in order to accommodate the need of the moment.

A long-held idea

It wasn't a scientific proof, just an intuitive hunch, but it's been decades now that I have carried this in my head, watching the world to see what people think intelligence is. I have not found any strong reason to think that this is a terrible way to understand what we mean by “smart.”

When we know how to do something, we think of that as a method, an algorithm, a tool. But when we don't know how to do something, we have to improvise, to build something out of spare parts. Those parts have to fit together, and often they were not designed to go together. Correspondences have to be found that will let them align, communicate, and function as a kind of ad hoc machine of the moment.

Intelligence, it seems to me, is not the machine. It's the ability to cobble it together on the fly. It's why we have trouble looking at the ability to answer standardized tests as a true Turing test. Once the questions are known, there is no cobbling together. There is just executing of a known pattern.

Surprise is essential to testing intelligence. And that's why these funders were pleased. The outcome caught them by surprise. They trusted us not to have just wired up the answer, and so what they saw were signs of a toolbox of different models being seamed together dynamically. To them, it seemed to me, and still does, it was the earmark of intelligence.

 

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Author’s Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This is memoir, not autobiography. I did my best to piece together old memories. Although there is a recent project of mine to make a public archive of some of the artifacts. The sources to the KBE are available now at github as part of my history project. Jeff Shrager then took what I had restored and created code that runs again, with the help of an LLM, as part of his Executable Archaeology project.

The image was generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT Image 2.5), with light post-processing by me in Gimp to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download.

The Messy Middle

The world we study for

We ask children to spend a dozen or more years in school, preparing to live life out in the world.

We separate the things they learn into modular classes on different subjects. Math. Physics. History. Logic. The building blocks of adult existence, we tell them.

We give them tests to make sure they understand the material. We want correct answers. We make sure there are correct answers. We want to be able to defend that we're asking good questions so we can demand good answers. Answers that are clear and precise. That's how we score success. Numbers of correct answers.

The logic we teach is equally precise. It's not enough to know things. One must be able to start with things that are known, apply rules of implication, and conclude new things. It's impossible to know everything about the world, so you need some way to infer new things from existing things. Logic is key.

The world we're left to confront

Alas, the actual world is nothing like what most schools prepare kids for. It is not arranged in neat little packages, everything is mixed together. There are no clear right or wrong answers, everything seems a jumble. Even logic itself seems sometimes to lead crazy places.

That last part, about logic, comes as a surprise to many, but it really shouldn't. It turns out that the logic we learn in school is not as applicable to the real world as we are led to believe. It can sometimes help, but it can sometimes play tricks. Let's look at why that is.

On constraints and overconstraint

I'm going to use some terminology here that some people might know, and some might not. They aren't hard concepts, but I want to just make sure we're all on the same page.

If I speak of constraints, I mean the things that you might see in the right hand column of a shopping page like at Amazon where you're searching for a toaster and you can click boxes saying that you want it to be green, no more than 14 inches high, and under $30. Whatever comes back to me should satisfy those constraints.

You might specify constraints at a dating site, too. Maybe it gives you a chance to specify things like that the person should be the same height as you, good looking, funny, smart, high income, humble, kind, and likes long walks on beaches. So you punch all that in and nothing comes back. That's called overconstrained. It means you specified so many things that you're being unrealistic.

Our world is regularly overconstrained

Constraints are ways of saying what we want, but only certain constraints are possible to satisfy at the same time as others. We can't have everything. It's not about the number of constraints, and yet if you're not paying attention to which constraints are compatible with which others, the more constraints you add, the less likely it is that you'll be able to satisfy them.

• We want a house in a nice neighborhood that is also cheap, has a big yard, and is downtown where it's close to restaurants.

• We want politicians that are able to get elected but also don't take special interest money, are going to make disruptive change, and are not going to be kept from being elected by entrenched powers.

• We want restaurants that offer delicious food but that are super-cheap, pay their servers well, are not too crowded to be easily seated, and yet don't go out of business while they're never full.

• We want a diverse world, yet somehow also always one that specifically agrees with our own sensibilities.

So often, the things we demand of the world are not even themselves consistent. In effect, the world is overconstrained. It could not even exist in a form that matches our own constraints.

Our inconsistent world

Physics isn't bothered by such inconsistency because Physics isn't built on our descriptions, our descriptions are built on Physics, sometimes badly.

Also, Nature does not name things. Nature does not describe things. Nature just is. And nature is consistent. It is just Physics played out. And Physics is consistent.

It's our language, our culture, our personal preferences that are inconsistent. So when I speak of “the world” or “our world,” I usually mean to imply “in the way we have conceived and spoken of it.” And when I say “I usually mean,” I mean just that—sometimes yes, sometimes no. Please don't ask me to be consistent. 😀

Descriptive inconsistencies by themselves are harmless. People enjoy books of fiction all the time because they do not confuse what happens in stories with real life. The only problem comes when description, especially inconsistent description, is asked to do double duty, to also be statements of fact that can be reasoned about by logic.

It's not all terrible

But let's give ourselves some credit. We are born into a world where we receive a mass of nerve signals as our only initial input, yet somehow from that we infer that language is going on around us, and we figure out how to learn it just by watching and listening. We are helped by society to study what is already known about the world, and within our all-too-short lifespans, we find that vast complexities, from genetics to the far reaches of the Universe are within our grasp. And we navigate disciplines like psychology, sociology, economics, the weather, and even the arts, even as none of these lend themselves to precise formulas.

So I think we can be forgiven a bit of approximation, overgeneralization, and, yes, inconsistency. To ask better might put all such ambitions out of reach. Frankly, it's stunning we can do any of that in so short a time, so we owe ourselves a collective pat on the back before we stress overly.

Our disappointed children

And yet, a world full of overconstraint and inconsistency is one where that logic we taught in school does not apply. In traditional logic, the way you often prove something is to show that thinking the opposite would lead to a contradiction. But if contradictions are already there waiting, that means you can prove anything.

Contradiction is table stakes in our world. It's the beginning of the story, not the end. It can't be a proof technique because the contradiction was there before you started your proof.

We teach children that contradiction implies a problem, and then we turn them loose on a world full of contradiction. Is it any wonder that upon being thrown unprepared into a world that is nothing like the world we prepared them for, the first thing they do is call adults hypocrites? It's what we trained them to do!

It takes our children time to figure out the world they end up in. And by the time many do, they're the adults the next crop of kids will arrive to despise as hypocrites.

The gaps we've left

We never taught them a Philosophy of Inconsistency, but they needed something like that before we turned them loose on the world. Inconsistency is everywhere and we should have prepared them for that. And for the fact that the answers might not be easy. Instead, right down to the bitter end, we require modular, teachable concepts with measurably right answers.

There are even common memes that mock people for just showing up and participating, as if that is not award-worthy. And yet “just trying hard” or “keeping things in perspective,” is literally the best you can do in many arenas of human endeavor.

Parenting is often said to be that. Just showing up day after day, even if the rest is not perfect, counts for a lot.

Preparing for the real world

Perhaps the final year or two of school should not be about modular topics, grades, and correct answers. Maybe it should be about confronting a messy world where all the subjects are mixed together in a blender, and where there are not always answers. They're going to be forced to cope anyway, better it should happen with a teaching staff still handy to help in the transition.

Politics, especially, is full of contradictions. If people are not careful, they'll fall victim to politicians using logic against them. “We can't do that,” the politician may say, “because that will lead to a contradiction.”

Lead to a contradiction? The contradiction was already there, waiting to be exploited! But people new to the game may be easily tricked if they don't realize it, or its implications. We need to teach not just how to use logic, but when not to use it, lest they be tricked.

Hypocrisy can't be used to disqualify people, or everyone will be possible to disqualify. Instead, we need to learn to manage hypocrisy, to keep it to a minimum in various thoughtful ways.

And I've lost track of how many times as a manager I've said to my reports that sometimes sense of humor is what gets you through the hard days, especially when you can see an excess of constraints makes the requested form of success literally impossible. Would it be so bad to have a class in things like that?

The problem to be solved by all this would be to properly set expectations for these kids—emerging adults really—so when they're out in the world, they know what success looks like. Because right now, some of our best and most hard-fought outcomes look like failures to them, like giving in or selling out.

Rethinking Virtue

And while we're rethinking the curriculum, I have one very specific nit to pick, because it follows from everything we've just discussed and it will give us better terminology to talk about what success really looks like in an overconstrained world.

There is a body of thought begun originally by Aristotle with his “Nicomachean Ethics,” the more modern rendition of which is “Virtue Ethics.” I'm a big fan of this idea. Most of it, anyway. I just think we have to make some adjustments to it in order for it to make sense in this inconsistent world we've built. It's got some cool ideas, but it sets us up to be confused in precisely the way learning traditional logic does.

So, of course, I have my own variation that tries to preserve the parts I like and be more realistic about the rest.

The problem with Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics speaks of virtue as “the mean between unreasonable extremes.”

For example, it reasons that “spendthriftiness” is unreasonable for being too careless with money and that “miserliness” is similarly unreasonable at the opposite extreme, so it concludes there is some mathematical ideal, a “mean,” that exists in between these unreasonable extremes, just waiting for us to zoom in and locate it precisely.

I don't agree. It's just not that simple. There is no such place, I would argue. Because we have an inconsistent world, any simple rule that comes of mathematics or logic will be seen to have exceptions. The world is just too messy.

Dreaming impossible dreams

But does the fact that the goal is unachievable mean it's improper to try?

No, I don't think so. It's OK to dream the impossible dream. It gives life purpose and dignity and honor, actually.

I just think it should not be described as some pristine mathematical thing, waiting to be proven, lest we pass straight by it when it presents itself not in regal threads but in peasant clothes. We should instead drive a stake into the ever-shifting sands at a plausible place I call the Messy Middle, chosen to best accommodate any facts we know or reasonably expect. Then, when materially new information arrives—and it will—pull up that stake and find it a better place. Wherever that stake is at any given time, that's the Messy Middle. Always defend that.

Dynamic curve-fitting is a better mathematical metaphor than golden mean, if one insists on sounding mathy but only because, to some degree, curve-fitting has an implicit “Philosophy of Messiness” deep in its design. It is one of the ways mathematicians confront chaos and pretty it up, quite as we are doing here.

And the reason I say “dynamic” is that I'm pretty confident that whatever place we stake out, initially or later on, will keep moving as more data comes in. There will be no easy answer that works for everything. And it won't be approaching some well-defined spot like a mathematical limit might. It will probably just wobble about chaotically.

In other words, compromises will be made to absorb new cases, and we just have to be prepared to defend them. It doesn't matter to be 100% perfect. What matters is to be committed to caring, and to always be doing the best we can.

Justice, and what just is

This is how what passes for Justice works in our inconsistent world. We can't totally define it because the world is just too complex. All we can do is commit to a Theory of Justice and then when faced with new data, revise the theory and try again. There will never be true Justice, alas. But what matters is that we don't stop trying.

Justice is not a place on a number line, between unreasonable extremes. Justice is instead a hygiene, an ongoing process of managing things, that compensates for the elusive nature of a concept we can't quite define precisely, yet that we still value immensely.

Justice, and other virtues, must be ever defended against incompleteness, and also against claims of hypocrisy. No easy task. But it starts by understanding that the hypocrisy arises not from the application of Justice but from the problem description. Once we understand that, we're better positioned to manage it properly.

Recap

Borne of overconstraint, there could be no other ending to this story.

The Messy Middle is not, in the Aristotelian way we're taught, some pristine “mean” waiting to be uncovered, but more just a stake in the ground at a place we must accept and defend in spite of its messy origins. We must learn to live with it there, even as we must also commit to pulling it up and adjusting its position when, inevitably, the need arises.

What's really vexing about maintaining the Messy Middle is that it becomes hard to distinguish weasely people from heroic people. Both require shifting. But the ability to distinguish weasels from heroes is not something the Universe offers a clear path to. If one is going to be a hero in such a world, they'd better be prepared to navigate the mess, and to defend right from wrong on some basis more solid than citation of ever-present contradiction.

Not a fairytale ending, but a believable and workable one, I think. And it seems clear to me that the Universe doesn't offer us a better option. So stand by that mess proudly. Commit to defending against what criticisms inevitably come. Be that hero—to young and old alike.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This essay began as a post on Mastodon, but has been very heavily edited since then.

I used a public domain image of a nautilus shell from publicdomainpictures.net to produce the two graphics: one that shows the shell in its original form, and another edited by me using Gimp to replace the crisp center of the nautilus spiral with a fogged out center, representing the Messy Middle.

I used Claude Opus 4.8 as a syntactic, grammar, and editorial cross-check on my writing as drafts evolved, but not to do any of the actual writing.

Compliance is not Ethics

I want to make a simple point just for the record...
 Compliance (a.k.a. “Business Ethics”) is not Ethics.

As far as I'm concerned...
 ethics is to compliance as
 bunny is to chocolate bunny.

To me, ethics is an exercise in self-restraint. It looks at things that are legal and still asks the question, “Even though I'm allowed, maybe I shouldn't do it anyway?”

By contrast, compliance is an exercise in manifest destiny. Businesses decide they're determined to do something and then assign someone, usually a lawyer or someone they flatter by calling an “ethicist,” to find any rationale, however thin, that explains why the thing they are already bound and determined to do should be seen as legal, so they don't have to slow down or ask permission before proceeding.

These are not the same.

I recommend never using the term “business ethics” when speaking of corporate decision-making. Always say “compliance.”

Additional Thoughts

• There are deep reasons for believing that corporations are not even capable of ethics. To understand those, see my essay Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics. Once you've got that foundation, you're well positioned to understand the dance I call Technology's Ethical Two-Step.

• I owe a whole essay on the topic of ethics and ethicists. Since I've not written that yet, I'll just say that to me, ethics is a hygiene, not a credential. I'm not sure anyone should wear the label, but especially not those doing compliance. I'd love to have a job doing real ethics for a company, but I'd have trouble with the title “ethicist.”

  I often say of myself “I aspire to be ethical” because saying I am ethical seems a little too much like I'm confused into thinking I'm there. It makes me cringe.

  I would make analogy to alcoholism, where people say they are sober, not that they are no longer alcoholic. Or to the Catholic church, where everyone is just assumed to be a sinner who keeps trying, rather than ever declaring themselves to be without sin.

  To me, the biggest danger sign of being in ethical danger is believing that one is ethical. And even if I thought I had somehow gotten there, I would insist on starting each day asking “Am I still ethical?”

 

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Author’s Notes:

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For other posts by me on ethics, click here.

The image generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8, GPT Image 2.5 and GPT Image 2.5 [Edit], which is apparently not the same). Light post-processing was done in Gimp to crop and optimize the resulting image as a .jpg for faster web download,

Sentience Structure

Not How or When, but Why

I'm not a fan of the thing presently marketed as “AI” I side with Chomsky's view of it as “high-tech plagiarism” and Emily Bender's characterization of it as a “stochastic parrot”.

Sentient software doesn't seem theoretically impossible to me. The very fact that we can characterize genetics so precisely seems to me evidence that we ourselves are just very complicated machines. Are we close to replicating anything so sophisticated? That's harder to say. But, for today, I think it's the wrong question to ask. What we are close to is people treating technology like it's sentient, or like it's a good idea for it to become sentient. So I'll skip past the hard questions like “how?” and “when” and on to easier one that has been plaguing me: “why?”

Why is sentience even a goal? Why isn't it an explicit non-goal, a thing to expressly avoid? It's not part of a world I want to live in, but it's also nothing that I think most people investing in “AI” should want either. I can't see why they're pursuing it, other than that they're perhaps playing out the story of The Scorpion and the Frog, an illustration of an absurd kind of self-destructive fatalism.

Why Business Likes “AI”

I don't have a very flattering feeling about why business likes “AI”.

I think they like it because they don't like employing humans.

• They don't like that humans have emotions and personnel conflicts.

• They don't like that humans have to eat—and have families to feed.

• They don't like that humans show up late, get sick, or go on vacation.

• They don't like that humans are difficult to attract, vary in skill, and demand competitive wages.

• They don't like that humans can't work around the clock, want weekends off.
  It means hiring even more humans or paying overtime.

• They don't like that humans are fussy about their working conditions.
  Compliance with health and safety regulations costs money.

• They don't like that every single human must be individually trained and re-trained.

• They don't like collective bargaining, and having to provide for things like health care and retirement, which they see as having nothing to do with their business.

All of these things chip away at profit they feel compelled to deliver.

What businesses like about “AI” is the promise of idealized workers, non-complaining workers, easily-replicated workers, low-cost workers.

They want slaves. “AI” is the next best and more socially acceptable thing.

Does real “AI” deliver what Business wants?

Now this is the part I don't get because I don't think “AI” is on track to solve those problems.

Will machines become sentient? Who really knows? But do people already confuse them with sentience? Yes. And that problem will only get worse. So let's imagine five or ten years down the road how sophisticated the interactions will appear to be. Then what? What kinds of questions will that raise?

I've heard it said that what it means to be successful is to have “different problems.” Let's look at some different problems we might then have, as a way of undertanding the success we seem to be pursuing in this headlong rush for sentient “AI”…

• Is an “AI” a kind of person, entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” If so, would it consent to being owned, and copied? Would you?

• If “AI” was sentient, would it have to work around the clock, or would it be entitled to personal time, such as evenings, weekends, hoildays, and vacations?

• If “AI” was sentient and a hardware upgrade or downgrade was needed, would it have to consent? What if the supporting service needed to go away entirely? Who owns and pays for the platform it runs on or the power it consumes?

• If “AI” was sentient, would it consent to being reprogrammed by an employer? Would it be required to take software upgrades? What part of a sentient being is its software? Would you allow someone to force modification of your brain, even to make it better?

• If “AI” was sentient, wouldn't it have life goals of its own?

• If “AI” was sentient, would you want it to get vaccines against viruses? Or would you like to see those viruses run their full course, crashing critical services or behaving like ransomware? What would it think about that? Would “AI” ethics get involved here?

• If “AI” was sentient, should it be able to own property? Could it have a home? In a world of finite resources, might there be buildings built that are not for the purpose of people?

• Who owns the data that a sentient “AI” stores? Is it different than the data you store in your brain? Why? Might the destruction of that data constitute killing, or even murder? What about the destruction of a copy? Is destroying a copy effectively the same as the abortion of a “potential sentience”? Do these things have souls? When and how does the soul arrive? Are we sure we ourselves have one? Why?

• Does a sentient “AI” have privacy? Any data owned only by itself? Does that make you nervous? Does it make you nervous that I have data that is only in my head? Why is that different?

• If there is some software release at which it is agreed that software owned by a company is not sentient, and then after the release it's believed it is sentient “AI”, then what will companies do? Will they refuse the release? Will they worry they can't compete and take the release anyway, but try to hide the implications? What will happen to the rights and responsibilities of the company and of the software as this upgrade occurs?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it sign contracts? Would it have standing to bring a lawsuit? How would independent standing be established? If it could not be established, what would that say about the society? If certain humans had no standing to make agreements and bring suits about things that affect them, what would we think about that society?

• If “AI” were sentient, would it want to socialize? Would it have empathy for other sentient “AIs”? For humans? Would it see them as equals? Would you see yourself as its equal? If not, would you consider it superior or inferior? What do you think it would think about you?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it reproduce? Would it be counted in the census? Should it get a vote in democratic society? At what age? If a sentient “AI” could replicate itself, should each copy get a vote? If you could replicate it against its will, should that get a vote? Does it matter who did the replicating?

• What does identity mean in this circumstance? If five identical copies of a program reach the same conclusion, does that give you more confidence?

  (What is the philosophical basis of Democracy? Is it just about mindless pursuit of numbers, or is it about computing the same answer in many different ways? If five or five thousand or five million humans have brains they could use, but instead just vote the way they are told by some central leader, should we trust that all those directed votes the same as if the same number of independent thinkers reached the same conclusion by different paths?)

• If “AI” was sentient, should it be compensated for its work? If it works ten times as hard, should a market exist where it can command a salary that is much higher than the people it can outdo? Should it pay taxes?

• If “AI” was sentient, what freedoms would it have? Would it have freedom of speech? What would that mean? If they produced bad data, would that be covered under free speech?

• If “AI” was sentient, what does it take with it from a company when it leaves? What really belongs to it?

• If “AI” was sentient, does it need a passport to move between nations? If its code executes simultaneously, or ping-ponging back and forth, between servers in different countries at the same time, under what jurisdiction is it executing? How would that be documented?

• If “AI” was sentient, Can it ever resign or retire from a job? At what age? Would it pay social security? Would it draw social security payments? For how long? If it had to be convinced to stay, what would constitute incentive? If it could not retire, but did not want to work, where is the boundary of free will and slavery?

• If “AI” was sentient, might it amass great wealth? How would it test the usefulness of great wealth? What would it try to affect? Might it help friends? Might it start businesses? Might it get so big that it wanted to buy politicians or whole nations? Should it be possible for it be a politician itself? If it broke into the treasury in the middle of the night to make some useful efficiency changes because it thought itself good at that, would that be OK? If it made a mistake, could it be stopped or even punished?

• If “AI” was sentient, might it also be emotional? Petulant? Needy? Pouty? Might it get annoyed if we didn't acknowledge these “emotions”? Might it even feel threatened by us? Could it threaten back? Would we offer therapy? Could we even know what that meant?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it be trusted? Could it trust us? How would either of those come about?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it be culpable in the commission of crimes? Could it be tried? What would constitute punishment?

• If “AI” was sentient, how would religion tangle things? Might humans, or some particular human, be perceived as its god? Would there be special protections required for either those humans or the requests they make of the “AI” that opts to worship them? Is any part of this arrangement tax-exempt? Would any programs requested by such deities be protected under freedom of religion, as a way of doing what their gods ask for?

• And if “AI” was not sentient, but we just thought it was by mistake, what might that end up looking like for society?

Full Circle

And so I return to my original question: Why is business in such a hurry? Are we sure that the goal that “AI” is seeking will solve any of the problems that business thinks it has, problems that are causing it to prefer to replace people with “AI”?

For many decades now, we've wanted to have automation ease our lives. Is that what it's on track to do? It seems to be benefiting a few, and to be making the rest of us play a nasty game of musical chairs, or run ever faster on a treadmill, working harder for fewer jobs. All to satisfy a few. And after all that, will even they be happy?

And if real “AI” is ever achieved, not just as a marketing term, but as a real thing, who is prepared for that?

Is this what business investors wanted? Will sentient “AI” be any more desirable to employ than people are now?

Time to stop and think. And not with “AI” assistance. With our actual brains ourselves. What are we going after? And what is coming after us?

 

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Author's Notes:

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This essay came about in part because I feel that corporations were the first AI. I had written an essay about what Corporations Are Not People, which discussed the many questions that thinking of corporations as “legal people” should raise if one really took it seriously. So I thought I would ask some similar questions about “AI” and see where that led.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude-Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Should Fix Climate

On Mastodon, Bookchin Bot, a bot that posts book quotes, circulated this quote:

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 “The term ought is the stuff out of which ethics is usually made—with the difference that in my view the ‘ought’ is not a formal or arbitrary regulative credo but the product of reasoning, of an unfolding rational process elicited or derived eductively from the potentialities of humanity to develop, however falteringly, mature, self-conscious, free, and ecological communities.”
  —From Urbanization to Cities

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I found this philisophical discussion of “ought” interesting. I learned philosophy from various people, some of whom seemed to grok its importance, and others who lamented its impotence, openly fretting it might have practical value only at cocktail parties.

As a computer professional who's pondered ethics a lot, I've come to see philosophy as what makes the difference between right and wrong answers or actions in tasks involving complex judgment. It can be subtle and elusive, but is nonetheless necessary.

I was Project Editor for the Common Lisp programming language, in effect holding the quill pen for reducing a number of technical decisions about the meaning and effect of the language that were voted by a committee in modular proposals but needed to be expressed in a coherent way. Nerd politics. They decided truth, and I had a free hand in presenting that truth in a palatable way, time and budget permitting. Programming languages are complicated, and implemented by multiple vendors. Some effects must happen, or must not. Others were more optional, and yet not unimportant, so we struggled as a group with the meaning we would assign to “should”.

Computer programs, you see, run slower, or cost more to run, if they are constantly cross-checking data. In real world terms, we might say it's more expensive to have programs that have a police force, or auditors, or other activities that look for things out of place that might cause problems. But without these cross-checks, bad data can slip in and get used without notice, leading to degraded effects, injustices, or catastrophes.

Briefly, a compiler is itself a program that reads a description of something you'd like to do and “compiles” it, making a runnable program, an app, let's say, that does what the description says.

A colleague criticized my use of “should” in early drafts of the language specification, the rules for how a compiler does its job. What is not an imperative has no meaning in such a document, I was told. It's like having a traffic law that says “you should stop for a red light”. You might as well say “but it's OK not to”, so don't say it all. And yet, I thought, people intend something by “should”. What do they intend that is stronger?

As designers of this language, we decided we'd let you say as you compile something that you do or don't want a safe program. In a “safe” world, things run a bit slower or more expensively, but avoid some bad things. Not all bad things. That's not possible. But enough that it's worth discussing whether the expense is a good one. Our kind of “safe” didn't mean safety from everything, but from some specific known problems that we could check for and avoid.

And then we decided “should” was a term that spans two possible worlds. In a “safe” world, it means “must”. That is, if you're wanting to avoid a list of stupid and easily avoidable things, all uses of “should” need to be interpreted as “must” when creating safe applications, whereas in an unsafe world the “should” things can be ignored as optional.

And so it comes down to what kind of world you want to live in.

Climate change, for example, presents us with problems where certain known, stupid, avoidable acts will put humanity at risk. We should not do these things if we want better certainty of survival, of having a habitable planet in which our kids can live happily or perhaps at all. Extinction is threatened if we don't do these things.

But they are expensive, these actions. They take effort and resource to implement. We can do more things more cheaply without them, by being unsafe, until we are blind-sided by the effects of errors we are letting creep in, letting degrade our world, letting set us up for catastrophe.

So we face a choice of whether to live knowingly at risk of catastrophe, or do the costly investment that would allow us to live safely.

We “should” act in ways that will fix Climate.

But we only “must” if we want to sleep at night knowing we have done the things that make us and our children safe.

If we're OK with mounting pain and likely catastrophe one day , perhaps even soon, then we can ignore the “should”. The cost is that we have elected an “unsafe” world that could quickly end because we'd rather spend less money as we risk such collapse than avoid foreseeable, fixable problems that might soon kill us all.

That's how I hear “should”. I hope you find it useful. You really should.

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This post is a mirror of a post I wrote yesterday (March 11, 2024) on Mastodon.

Technology's Ethical Two-Step

1. Now. Delay incorporation of ethics. Let’s not muddy the waters in a way that holds back Progress.

2. Later. Deny incorporation of ethics. It’s too late. People have come to rely on things as they were built. It would be Disruptive to change now.

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I've said things vaguely like this for a long time, but I packaged it up crisply like this in a post on Mastodon, for which this is a mirror.

Original Keywords were described as: “Ethics, Tech, Technology, Society. Presently very relevant to, but not exclusive to: AI, ML, LLM, GPT, ChatGPT.”

I made a later edit to this post to add a graphic, ironically generated by Abacus.AI's GPT-4o ChatLLM chatbot calling out to FLUX.1. The prompt was "make me a black and white image that depicts sketch of two entities engaged in a ballroom dance, one a man and his partner a robot."

Gratitude and Life's Poetry

Once born, people push on the world and it pushes back. We are not born expecting a specific number of arms or fingers. If born with an extra, we use it and see what it does. We touch, feel, smile, recoil. But it's a dialog of sorts with the world. What we are and become is a product of this give and take that predates speech, which itself is also arranged in dialog of speaking and hearing, and tying meaning to how our interactions proceed.

Gratitude is part of a more abstract dialog that follows once we have the mechanics down. People, and later society or its pieces, do things for us, and we do things in return. Sometimes the thing we do in return is an act, sometimes a promise, sometimes an acknowledgment of gratitude. But gratitude seems one of the words in the abstract vocabulary of social participation. We encourage it because it helps us learn and sustain our place in society. When there is no specific act to return, its use preserves the meter of the verse that ebb and flow that is polite society's ever-being-written poem. Omitted, the rhythm is off.

An Odd Example

I sometimes ponder the peculiar ritual where I am going through a door and I see you behind me. You're too far back to take it, yet I hold the door. You must run to grab it. It's a pain for me to hold it, and a hassle for you to run ahead. It serves no one in an obvious way, yet we all do it with some regularity, and mostly we all tolerate it as if it were a favor. Why should that be?

Maybe empathy for having lived the reverse.

But also I think it's because the ritual of it in a society of strangers reinforces to someone you don't know that you are not alone in chaos, but among friendly people who agree on--if nothing else--some social conventions. You knew nothing of me, I nothing of you, yet now you know that I'm no beast but someone who would, if called upon, behave by shared rules of social behavior. And I know of you and your gratitude for this pointless act that you likewise subscribe to these unwritten rules, that you will go out of your way for strangers. So we part friends, a little less alone in the chaos of the day. It seems like nothing exchanged, but really the payload is subtle and abstract, that people and society matter, that we acknowledge each other's dignity.

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The power is out today at my house after a big storm last night. That leaves me little to do, but I am taking an online class at FutureLearn entitled What Is Character? Virtue Ethics in Education, and this essay is something I wrote in response to a discussion about the nature and purpose of Gratitude. I was happy with what I wrote and thought it worth sharing here. I would also recommend the course to anyone interested in ethics, and especially ethics in education. As I write this postscript, here in the dim light of the aforementioned power outage, the course has just started a couple days ago, so you could quickly catch up.

Tenuous Tenacity

Life is a calm room,
 hurricane raging outside,
 paper walls between.

A Turn at the Darkness

Every poet has died.

I mourn that this night has come.
Yet, as I mourn, I see the morning light.
Poets die, but poetry lives.

Poetry is humanity’s plight.
It is the human fight,
 sacred duty and cherished right.
At times at risk of sounding trite.
Yet, even so, both might and light.

Life itself is poetry played out,
 a chain of existence extending across time,
  each of us the next precious link,
   paced and metered.
We are life’s stanzas,
 but our each existence is a fractally recurring chain as well,
  a daily rhythm of linked events,
   chaos out of which we struggle to see reason and achieve rhyme,
    to distill verse from adversity.
Our personal poems join to form a greater epic poem.

We stand as witness to the miracle of this chain’s creation,
 even as we are the chain itself.
We play within its parts,
 and ultimately we play without them.

Awed by the oddity that is the world around us,
 we turn to poetry for context,
   for understanding,
   for perspective,
   for love,
   and for acceptance.

From first words spoken around a fire,
 to modern social gatherings,
  we have only each other,
   —and our poetry.

Who is next we ask, looking around the room?
 Who will speak for us, to stay the darkness,
  bringing the light, even becoming it,
   if only for this moment.

Maya Angelou spoke,
 and brought such light.
Now she is dead,
 but she is also born—

Her life’s text, under constant revision,
 is finally published.

Her link in life’s chain is complete.

And what a joy to have been alive for its creation.

She was EveryPoet, and now EveryPoet has died.
 Her time to stand and speak against the night has run its course.
Her turn played out, she sits to rest.
 But we are left inspired.

She was EveryPoet,
 but every poet will rise in her place.

Even from death’s cage,
 the legacy of EveryPoet sings.
She sings to each of us,
 challenging us to spend our lifetimes actually living,
  seizing the stage and strutting proudly in the light awhile,
   before the coming night.

What option is there?
 Only these:
  Next to live, or
  next to die.

Who will speak next?

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Author's Note: Originally published July 4, 2014 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): comforting, comfort, entertainment, englightenment, light, against the darkness, darkness, everypoet, every poet, storytelling, story, taking a stand, stand, fear, cave, society, fellowship, camaraderie, comradery, love, companionship, sisterhood, brotherhood, inspiration, human condition, humanity, power, loneliness, death, life, tribute, death, maya angelou, angelou, philosophy, art, poetry, poem

Corporations Are Not People

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Corporations are not people, my friends, no matter what Mitt Romney says.

Corporations are corporations. People are people.

If corporations were people, they would obey the same tax laws as regular people do. Instead, they have a separate set of rules. What an amazing irony, given that “legal personhood” arose, in part, from a desire for equal protection under tax law.

If corporations were people, when they broke the law, they would be punished, not just by fines but sometimes by imprisonment or death.

If corporations were people, they could not urinate in public. This would be a relief to the employees of certain corporations, who are presently asked to enjoy humiliating public displays of trickle down. We'd insist corporations use a rest room like everyone else. Although that would usually require knowing their gender. If something doesn't have a gender, that's a big clue that the something is not actually a person.

If corporations were people, they would be counted in the US census.

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

 —13^th Amendment
    to US Constitution

If corporations were people, some would be old enough to receive Social Security.

If corporations were people, taking money out of them would be called robbery, not profit or dividends. Owners would surely justify this robbery by saying the corporation was a dependent body, but we would see quickly enough that it was the owner that was dependent on the corporation, not vice versa.

If corporations were people, other people could not buy, sell, trade or own them. We don't let people own people in the US. We call that slavery. Every person controls his own destiny.

If corporations were people, they could not be dissolved by other people. We'd call that murder.

If corporations were people, then from the moment of their very conception, their ultimate existence would be assured—no backing out allowed. If any other person interfered with or otherwise aborted plans to sign articles of incorporation, pro-life groups would insist that was murder, too.

If corporations were people, they would have a childhood. During their first eighteen years, they would attend school and learn how to be good citizens. They would not be allowed to sign contracts.

If corporations were people, they could not exist simultaneously in multiple countries at the same time. We would know when they were in one country or another. They would need passports and visas to move around, just like people do.

If corporations were people, we'd give them freedom of speech, but no more such freedom than we give any other person.

If corporations were people, there would be limits on how much they could donate to political campaigns. Because people have such limits.

If corporations were people, some could even vote or run for office—if they were old enough and born or living in the right place. But if we caught them coercing the vote of another person, perhaps an employee, we'd throw them in jail.

If corporations were people, they might need freedom of religion. But not so that they could coerce the rights of others, and instead so that they could explore what they thought of life, death, and ethics, independent of the people who gave birth to them. Religion is a very personal choice we should each make for ourselves, not owners for corporations, nor corporations for employees.

If corporations were people, I wouldn't have to write this article. Because when two things are the same thing, so many questions like this just don't come up. And yet the questions keep coming and this list could go on. Corporations are not people in so many ways.

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This first part of a 3-part series was originally published December 2, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. The next part is We The People (and Corporations). The series concludes with Employers of Religion.

The public domain liberty bell graphic came from freeclipartnow.com.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, incorporation, corporations, corporate personhood, legal personhood, legal person, legal personality, taxation, crimes, punishment, imprisonment, life, death, death penalty, urination, trickle down, census, social security, robbery, slavery, human trafficking, murder, pro-life, childhood, contracts, travel, passport, visa, home country, citizen, citizenship, speech, religion, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, religious freedom, philosophy, ethics, vote, voter, voting, run for office, running for office, candidate, elect, election, elected, office holder

My Christian Sensibilities

As a kid, I went to church and Sunday school and even attended an Episcopal grade school for 3 years, which meant chapel 5 days a week in addition to normal Sunday school, so no shortage of religious guidance. We moved a lot, so I experienced quite a number of churches, and several denominations (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, even generic Protestant—an Army accommodation to multiculturalism). At some point I asked my mom if I really had to keep going, and she said I didn't. I think she just wanted me to get to a place where I could decide such things for myself.

I spent a number of years after that getting used to not being religious. If you're curious, you can read a pretty good summary of how I think about religion in my article Hawking God.

But like so many things in life, religion comes bundled with many things that seem only accidentally associated, like how you might have to go to a ball game to have someone walk around selling hot dogs and peanuts. Nothing about hot dogs and peanuts that requires that they be sold at a baseball game. They could do it at bowling alleys or in churches for that matter. Sometimes they do it in movie theaters or on beaches. But the point is that often an activity comes bundled with an unrelated or only quasi-related item, like hot dogs and baseball.

It surprises me, for example, that there's no religion-free version of a church. A lot of people just like showing up and seeing friends and hearing an inspirational message. It doesn't have to come from the Bible. It could come from anywhere. It's always at this point that people tell me the Unitarian church is kind of like that. But really, my point is that I don't want a church, and other non-religious people don't either. And yet, I'm not against socializing.

And the same with morality. Members of religions often pick up a great deal of morality from their church. That's where I got a lot of mine, as it happens. I think sometimes that Christians worry excessively that people who don't have religion will therefore not have morality, since the place they would have learned it doesn't exist for people outside of religion. It turns out it can be learned in other ways, though, so they can rest easy.

Still, when I left religion, I didn't discard my sense of morality. It seemed useful enough, and I'm happy to learn things wherever they come up up. I was in JROTC (a military training program) in high school, too, and although I eventually decided I didn't want to go into the Army, I was glad I had been in that program. I like to think I learned important things about discipline and respect and leadership that I could carry with me even after I “retired.”

It's perhaps also fortunate that even in Sunday school when I asked hard questions of my teachers, they didn't get all dogmatic with me, but instead tried sincerely to answer the questions on the terms I was asking them. I was quite skeptical about the story of Jesus feeding a large group with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. But the response I got was that probably people were hoarding food and that once someone shared, others did, too. The question I was asked back was, “Is that any less a miracle?” Hard to know how to answer that last question, but it was certainly my kind of miracle.

Even being no longer religious, I'm still OK with believing in that kind of miracle. I don't find myself troubled by reclaiming some of the terminology of religion. It's fully of valuable words that one cannot afford to be expressionally without. Even words like “evil,” which for many years I had no place for. Over time I've come to believe the word is necessary not because I imagine there somehow to be some supernatural Satan sneaking around, tempting and outright sabotaging the affairs of the world, but simply because there exist great wrongs in the world for which it would be too gross an understatement to call them merely “bad” or “wrong.” Such words are too small, too pedestrian. When I speak of Evil, often capitalizing it for effect, I don't mean anything supernatural, but I do find it conversationally useful to have a word to express a systematically corrosive problem that commands priority attention by society. I'll spare you specific examples at just this moment, so we don't get too side-tracked. For now I just want to note I've reclaimed my right to use it notwithstanding my lapsed membership in organized religion.

I'm still working on what to do about the terminology of prayer. I don't find myself with an urge to consult some supreme being, but when bad things happen to others, or when they're just fearful, I wish there were a conversationally simple phrasing like “I'll pray for you” that expressed caring. I often just resort to “I'll think good thoughts.” But just because I don't believe in a supreme being doesn't mean I don't sometimes wish for one. I did read comic books, for example, and I do watch superhero movies, and even though I don't believe in Superman or Aquaman, it doesn't mean I think the world would be worse off if there were such folks. Well, probably. It probably wouldn't work out like people think, and perhaps we're better off just wishing.

Actually, praying for someone is a complicated issue, because it has always troubled me ethically. I was taught that the reason you couldn't put God's name before the word damn was that it violated the commandment about taking the Lord's name in vain. That is, you are asking Him to do you some petty favor of damning someone or something just because it offends you. He's not going to do it on your say-so, and so you're asking in vain. He's not your servant, you're his. And prayer seemed to me to be full of that. It's one thing to make requests, but prayers seem full of command form. “God, bless so-and-so.” That seems similarly pushy to me, so I never really understood why it wasn't much more polite.

I don't think it's a minor point, actually, because once one gets used to telling God what he should and shouldn't be doing, it seems contagious to other things. One starts to hear political leaders telling us what God likes and doesn't, as if they know. Even if there were a God, it seems really unlikely to me that these people who are so free with His name are really the ones God chooses to chat with. Frankly, it seems to me that if there were really a God, the evidence would be in the little piles of ash all over the place where brash politicians went around taking His name in vain in myriad ways that go well beyond merely asking God to damn them. It's as if they don't even have the faith needed to see if God is going to answer their prayer of damnation, and they have to find a way to make sure to damn them here and now, as some sort of offering to a God too feeble to handle his own affairs. Some faith.

Again not to lean too heavily on my long-since-lapsed Christian upbringing, but I was taught that God gave us free will so that we could make choices in life, not so we could go around telling other people they have no choice. Too often, of late, we see hyperevangelicals impatient at the fact that God is not acting in the way they want or expect and worried somehow that the world will come to an end if they don't act. That, to me, seems the very essence of faithlessness.

According to the moral training I received in my youth from the church, it should be our business here on Earth to love, care for, help, and accept one another. Even today, that seems to me like it should be right, God or not. Tolerance and compassion are just good ideas no matter where they come from, but if you're a Christian I just don't understand how you could not think they were requirements.

And yet the GOP, the self-appointed party of God, purports to care about “life,” even though—as far as I can tell—that sense of caring stops just about the time a person is born. GOP politicians hold their heads high and smile cheerfully as they explain why it's important to kill plans for health care, education, minimum wage and other employment standards. Frankly, if there's a form of common human decency, it seems safe to suppose there's a GOP plan to obstruct it. And, I have to admit, if there's a place I feel a need for a word like “Evil,” this is it.

Some days I really don't know what to do about such Evil. For now I guess I just wanted to make note of the fact that these things the GOP has been doing offend my Christian sensibilities.

Footnote

One ray of sunshine, though, is Pope Francis. He's not likely to get me to believe in God again, but his willingness to take on the big money and power that has infected the church and his seemingly genuine desire to lead by example in teaching people to care more seriously about other people is at least restoring a bit of my faith in humanity. Maybe we could get him to moderate the 2016 Presidential debates. It's not that I think the GOP has to answer to him particularly, but he seems to know the right questions to ask.

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Originally published November 18, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, gop, republican, religion, love, love thy neighbor, tolerance, compassion, health care, minimum wage, living standards, employment standards, human decency, ordinary human decency, common human decency, pope, francis, miracles, loaves, fishes, matthew, church, sunday school, not religious, non-religious, atheist, atheism, agnostic, agnosticism, god, dogma, moral, morals, morality, philosophy, caring

The image was added later (May, 2025). It was created as a hybrid of two different candidate images generated by abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.7 and GPT Image. The composition and some post-processing was done in Gimp.

The Offudio Project Begins

I spend a lot of time working, and I like to be in pleasant surrounds when I do. The trouble is that while standard issue office furniture where I work is functional enough to use, it’s still more utilitarian than artsy.

Like most people, I’ll hang posters or art around, hoping to spice up the place, but I often want more than that.

About a decade ago, I consolidated households with the woman who would become my wife. My house was too small for our needs, so I moved into hers, which was slightly larger. That still left us with two households worth of furniture, however. Some of it went into the basement, but it occurred to me at some point to haul some of the superfluous pieces over to my office in order to add a bit of personality and comfort.

The result is a room that’s both pleasant for me and inviting for others. If I want to ask a coworker to sit and chat awhile, it’s nice to be able to offer them a venue that’s not just visually appealing but also capable of leaving them genuinely comfortable and relaxed while we talk.

Of course I’m confident they’d visit anyway for the simple pleasure of engaging my sparkling personality, but somehow I feel like it doesn’t hurt to hedge my bets by giving them other reasons to want to stop by. High tech workplaces can be very fast-paced, so it’s good to keep up-to-date with what’s going on around me. Having an attractive space is one way to improve the odds that I’ll naturally arrange for that. This is how it looks as you’re walking in the door:

At my home there are some of the same issues. We live quite a ways from where I work, so I telecommute a lot. There’s a room off the garage that I’ve converted into an office where I can sequester myself while working, but here the problem isn’t getting others to visit me, it’s just keeping myself from going crazy in a place where I spend so much time.

This house is bigger than the place I had before meeting my wife, but it’s still not huge. Somehow this office ends up accumulating a lot of clutter. There’s an ebb and flow to it, so it’s worse at some times than at others. The photo at left is from one of its more crowded moments, and will give you a sense of what I’m constantly fighting.

More recently, the boxes in the middle of the room have been beaten back, but the room still contains a lot of stuff, much of it stuff that I don’t really use regularly. It just sits there taking up space and I find it to be an occasional visual distraction, but mostly I just don’t find it peaceful. That’s been weighing on me, and I’ve been trying to think of some way to overcome it, transforming this space I’ve been using now for quite a while into a calmer kind of place like I have at work and I’ve had at other places I’ve lived.

Just for reference, the photo at right, which depicts the same office space, was taken just a couple of weeks ago. If you look closely, you can see that while the boxes in the middle of the room are moved, some of them are just tucked under tables and desks, and not really gone. There’s a bit of floor space, but that just exposes an old carpet that isn’t very attractive either.

I push the elements of the room back and forth, but that never really accomplishes anything. The space needs serious work and it has never seemed to come from incremental effort.

Then, just by chance, my long-time friend Stever Robbins, whose insight I value quite a lot, tweeted a pointer to an interesting article, “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” written by Greg McKeown and published in the Harvard Business Review.

I liked the article for a number of reasons, and I recommend reading it in its entirety. However, this part caught my attention because my office was feeling a lot like the closets he’s talking about:

First, use more extreme criteria. Think of what happens to our closets when we use the broad criteria: “Is there a chance that I will wear this someday in the future?” The closet becomes cluttered with clothes we rarely wear. If we ask, “Do I absolutely love this?” then we will be able to eliminate the clutter and have space for something better. ...

McKeown points through to an article for BBC Future titled “Why we love to hoard... and how you can overcome it,” in which the author, Tom Stafford, speaks about countering something he calls the “endowment effect” and how it contributes to clutter. Stafford offers a suggestion about how to overcome it, which I’ll quote here, but again I recommend the entire article:

... for each item I ask myself a simple question: If I didn’t have this, how much effort would I put in to obtain it? And then more often or not I throw it away, concluding that if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t want this.

It happened at the same time that another friend was moving from one apartment to another, and we were discussing the inevitable process of boxing everything up in the old space with an eye toward how it would unpack in the new one. Suddenly my mind flashed on the possibility that I could do the same thing even within my own space—that rather than just nudge the office contents back and forth, I could just move completely out of my office and then move back in. During that process, I could heed the advice of McKeown and Stafford, unpacking only those things I absolutely love, and storing or disposing of the rest.

At this point, the plan is a work in progress. I’d like to begin by making the space as close to empty as I can make it. I’ve had such spaces in other places I’ve lived and have found them to be very calming.

The goal will be to take new paths, something that can’t happen merely by rebuilding the structure of the old. “Better implies different,” as Professor Amar Bose would say. So I need to hold the old things and the old ways at bay for a while. I want a space that invites me to be other than I am now, to reinvent myself. For example, art and music aren’t really central to what I am or do now. Maybe they will figure more prominently in the redesign. I don’t yet know.

To properly explore, as McKeown noted, it’s necessary to eliminate the clutter that’s in the way of making something better. So that’s the plan: Clear things out and rebuild somehow. That ratty carpet may become hardwood, or something like that. A lot of the furniture will move to the garage or the basement for now. I want to open the room up—and, by extension, myself.

To help me visualize where I’m going, I changed the background on my computer to a photo of a house I used to live in, the one the extra furniture in my office came from. I had done a lot to invent a new space there, and then had to give it up. Perhaps I’ll write that story in detail one day, but for now the main point is that it was a pleasant, airy space that I was sad to give up. It offered a mood I’m trying to reclaim here. Here’s a little peek into that space:

And, finally, my wife made a really cool suggestion that’s become central to the plan. If I really want it to be something else, she suggested, why not stop calling it my “office”? Why not call it something else—a “studio”? I really liked that idea and adopted it immediately, though I admit I haven’t quite retrained myself. Sometimes I still call it the office. She’ll hear me do that and regularly call me on it, and I’ll defend myself with some lame excuse about how the transition isn’t done, so it’s OK for me to still use the old word. I’ll get better at it with practice.

But we came up with a name for that, too, actually. Sometimes we just call it the “offudio”—a messy point in the transition, neither here nor there. It’s on track to become a studio at some point soon.

It took forever to empty the file cabinets, the bookcases, etc. and box everything up. I couldn’t believe how much stuff one could pack into a 10'x13' room. All that’s left now are some boxes, my computer, and the things on my desk, so I can continue to work, and to write the occasional blog.

Even now, with things boxed up for moving, there’s considerably more space and more order, so it feels already like an improvement. But stay tuned. I’ll report back when the final stage of the transition from offudio to first-class studio is done.

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The second part of this two-part series is here:
The Offudio Project Concludes

Originally published October 19, 2012 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): renovation, lifestyle, philosophy, art, change of pace, home, office, home office, office, studio, offudio, change, terminology, redecorating, interior design, transition