Gardening

Yesterday when I walked into the Guitar Center, someone was playing "In A Gadda Da Vida." Two things immediately came to mind: 1) "This Sounds Like Rock and/or Roll" and 2) that I had started this post and left it as a draft.

Wiggling Away from Straight Lines

We Need To Think Less Like Engineers And More Like Gardeners (Greg Satell). (Thanks to my colleague Ed Hansen for sharing this article). Given the many "wicked problems" on the current table (unclear or incomplete rules, few if any obvious patterns, no immediate feedback), changing course will be necessary. And trying new things will undoubtedly lead to some mistakes. But that's bound to happen when we're forging a path rather than following a road.

Engineers believe in laws that can be understood and put to specific use, so they build machines to perform specific tasks. Gardeners believe in complexity and emergence. They don’t design their garden as much as tend to it, nurture it and support its surrounding ecosystem. They don’t expect the same results every time, but understand they will need to adjust their approach as they go.

We Had to Poison the Garden in Order to Save it . . .

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI (Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review). I have no idea if this works. But I like the idea of having the ability (agency) to navigate amongst technology tools that don't appear to have any limits whatsoever.

Poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning, for example, that images of hats are cakes, and images of handbags are toasters. The poisoned data is very difficult to remove, as it requires tech companies to painstakingly find and delete each corrupted sample. 

Don't Believe the Garden Can't Be Managed

Autonomous Vehicles are Driving Blind (Julia Angwin, NYT). Of course these technology tools are mind-blowingly complicated. But that doesn't mean that appropriate oversight and regulation are impossible.

In other words, we need to start acknowledging that A.I. safety is a solvable problem — and that we can, and should, solve it now with the tools we have.

A Reminder to Keep Playing (In the Garden and Elsewhere)

Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (James Carse). Not every endeavor has a winner, or the need to keep score.

Gardening is not outcome-oriented. A successful harvest is not the end of a gardener's existence, but only a phase of it. As any gardener knows, the vitality of a garden does not end with a harvest. It simply takes another form. Gardens do not "die" in the winter but quietly prepare for another season.

A Romanticized Garden (of Sorts)

Beyond the Myth of Rural America (Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker). I will not wade into this "discussion" about "Rich Men North of Richmond" and "Try That in a Small Town" (I have never listened to either song). Suffice it is to say that debate over what it means to be legit rural is nothing new. Don't believe me? Hank Jr. released "A Country Boy Can Survive" 42 years ago. And Merle Haggard released "Okie from Muscogee" 54 years ago.

We like to think of "rural" and "country" as representing certain values, but it's not clear at all that perception is accurate.

For the past century, rural spaces have been preferred destinations for military bases, discount retail chains, extractive industries, manufacturing plants, and real-estate developments.

In the Wake of a Trip to the Ryman Garden . . .

I got to go to The Ryman for the first time on Friday night. To see Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit from the pews.