Read the Tea Leaves Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson

Oprah Winfrey and I have something in common, which is that our favorite album is Paul Simon’s Graceland.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the opening track, “The Boy in the Bubble”. The song can be read a few different ways, but I read it as an aging man amazed by modernity but also kind of frightened by it, and comforting his loved one with:

These are the days of miracle and wonder, and don’t cry baby, don’t cry, don’t cry

If these are “the days of miracle and wonder,” then why would anyone want to cry about it? Well, a few different reasons:

These are the days of lasers in the jungle, lasers in the jungle somewhere

Staccato signals of constant information

A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires

Sound familiar? It was written in 1986, but it could have been written today.

One thing I’ve noticed during our recent technological turbulations is that some people seem to have lost the capacity for wonder, or are willfully ignorant of the wonders around them. And if you can’t acknowledge that something extraordinary has happened, then you can’t start grieving for what has been lost (the subject of my last post). To me, this is the opposite of what Paul Simon is advocating: awe for the future combined with reverence for the past.

For example, I have a lot of conversations on Mastodon that start with me acknowledging some flabbergasting feat that coding agents have accomplished lately, like one-shotting a browser API that passes 77% of the relevant Web Platform Tests, or building a rudimentary browser that can render basic web pages, or building a C compiler that can compile the Linux kernel, etc. Then the interlocutor says something like, “Sure, but are the Web Platform Tests really representative of a working browser?” (Short answer: yes, it’s the entire basis of cross-browser projects like Interop.) Or: “Well sure, but is the code maintainable and bug-free?”

I find these conversations kind of baffling. It’s as if you’ve been shown a talking dog that can also sing the blues and play steel-string guitar, and your first response is, “Yeah, but the second verse was a bit off-key.” I understand skepticism – being skeptical is good, and there is a ton of hype and hogwash out there in the “AI era,” but like… can we just take a moment to be amazed? None of this was imaginable even three years ago, and now it’s practically worthy of the snooze button.

In fact, some of my more AI-adept colleagues are actually not much impressed with these stories, precisely because they know that even more amazing stories are likely around the corner. The lasers in the jungle have become so commonplace that we hardly notice them anymore.

Personally, I’m trying to maintain my skepticism as well as my sense of wonder. There’s so much breathless hype out there that it clouded my judgment for a while, but I’m also humbled by how fast things have moved, defying my early expectations.

I don’t consider myself a tech optimist – I seriously doubt we’ll ever travel to Mars, let alone colonize it, and I think predictions of the singularity or uploading our brains into the cloud are fun science fiction but hardly a bet I would take on the optimists’ side. But I have to admit that I was wrong on AI coding, so I’m prepared for my expectations to be defied again.

In many ways, I feel like the last year has been a victory for the techno-optimists – LinkedIn bros, Elon Musk stans, former NFT-peddlers – over artists, tech critics, and left-leaning intellectuals, which has been a bitter pill for me to swallow, since I identify with the second group much more than the first. This is what I was trying to get at with “AI tribalism”, although in retrospect I was a bit clumsy about it.

So if you’re feeling like me, and a bit bitter that the tech bros are taking a victory lap right now, and maybe hoping that they realize their shoelaces are untied and fall flat on their faces, I’d suggest taking a different tack. Disregard the hype, ignore the breathless prognostications of eternal abundance, and just look around and ask yourself if you would have been impressed by any of this three years ago. If so, take a moment to be amazed. It doesn’t make you a stooge or a credulous mark; it just makes you human.

And if you have to grieve, grieve. Technology is changing in scary and unpredictable ways, and not all the changes are positive. (Far from it – I wonder if someday we’ll look back on the invention of LLMs like the invention of the atom bomb.) But eventually we should move on from our grief, because the world is not ending; it’s just turning, as it always has.

In other words:

These are the days of miracle and wonder, and don’t cry baby, don’t cry, don’t cry