The End of Mediocrity (part 2)

0:00Stop me if you've heard this one before. Jasper and Annemarie are out for a hike in the great north woods. and they notice as they turn a corner that there's a very angry grizzly bear standing there. The grizzly bear starts chasing them and they take off in a run. But after about 50 yards, Jasper stops, throws down his backpack and starts putting on sneakers instead of hiking boots. Anne-Marie is incredulous. She turns and she says, what are you doing? The grizzly is gaining on us. Jasper smiles and says, yeah, I'm sorry, but I don't have to outrun the grizzly bear, I just have to outrun you. Hey, it's Seth, and this is Akimbo.

0:50We'll be back in a second to talk about mediocrity, but first, here's a message from our sponsor. The African American Marketing Association is a nonprofit created to galvanize Black marketers across the world. We pride ourselves in providing resources and opportunities in order for our members to grow their career or their business. We've been established since 2019. We have over 400 members, a mix of professionals, freelancers, entrepreneurs, agency owners. Look, please support us by following our journey. Go to our website, aa-ma.org. That's aa-ma.org. Thank you. Yes, it's really me, and I'm really back with a new episode.

1:36I've got a new book coming out. You can find out the details at Seth's blog slash song. And in this rant, I want to talk about mediocrity and how AI changes things. Mediocrity and competition are at the heart of how we can understand capitalism, but we often don't really understand what those words mean. Mediocrity is just another word for average, for standard, for convenient, for the regular kind. And scarcity helps us understand how capitalism and choice even work. If there are two widgets that we can put into a product at our factory, we're more likely to pick the one that's cheaper or has a better delivery schedule or comes with a better warranty.

2:25And if we go to the store and two things are pretty much the same, we'll buy the cheaper one. If I go to hire somebody, whether full-time or on something like Upwork, I'll compare what I get, I'll compare what it costs, and I'll probably buy the cheaper one. The center of any market is average. That's the definition of average. Average means the mean, right in the middle, mediocre. And the problem with mediocre in a world filled with robots and AI and outsourcing, which is often unfairly taking advantage of people in other places, is someone is probably better at being mediocre than you. And if it's not someone, then it's something.

3:16As we learned last week, if I'm just doing my regular voice, a computer can now do it faster and cheaper than me. As we see in so many of the things that we buy, normal is a race to the bottom. And the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win. The thing about this race to the bottom that is now becoming clear to more and more of us, which wasn't clear when we didn't speak up when the steam shovel came to upset the way ditch diggers did their job, which wasn't clear when machines took over the work that was done by hardworking seamstresses or people on the assembly line. But it's now clear to people who have the luxury and privilege of listening to something like this podcast is the machines are coming for us too.

4:08That the race to do mediocre work, more convenient, cheaper, faster, more reliable, that is an exhausting race. So if we consider Amazon, it's reported that in 2021, Amazon gave up one third of its total profit, a third of all the profit that 100 ,000 people made in the course of a year to turnover. That the average person who was hired in 2021 lasted less than three months in the job. That Amazon is concerned that there are some cities where they have hired and lost so many people, they are running out of potential recruits. Then when we seek to mechanize human labor, we have a problem because computers are better, way better at being mechanized than we are.

5:02Last weekend, I went to hear a couple of concerts. The first one was at Juilliard. Juilliard is filled with truly skilled musicians who have been playing since they were two or three years old. This was a recital of kids. They were probably 17 years old. So two people came out and they played a piano duet and it was perfect, played as written.

5:35Unfortunately, we don't have a classical music shortage. Unfortunately, I can listen to that played as written for free anytime I want on my stereo at home. After these two performed, a trio came out, and there on cello was Miles Gutkin-Levine. Miles Gutkin-Levine does not play the cello like a computer. He doesn't play it as written.

6:22He plays it like a human. I would cross the street, I would cross town to listen to Miles play the cello. Because there isn't a computer made, there isn't a CD player made that can play the cello the way that he does. He's not mediocre and he's not playing it as written. The next night, I went to hear a jazz performance from a decidedly amateur saxophone player who came up as a music teacher. And the heart and soul and love and joy he brought to that music was why I was sitting in the Inconvenient Jazz Club listening to Inconvenient Music on a Sunday afternoon at 4 o 'clock. Not because there's a jazz shortage.

7:08Every record ever recorded available to anyone who wants to hear it in high resolution for$19 a month. If you want to make it as a musician, you're not going to make it by being average or by being convenient. The thing that's going on with the mediocrity problem is that we have indoctrinated so many people to become mediocre. From the time you're in first grade or Juilliard, from the time you're four, you are pushed to play it as written. That the question, will this be on the test, is the watchword of 15 or 20 years of education. Will this be on the test is a reasonable and rational way to respond to the education industrial complex, the regime of testing and measuring.

8:00That if you are defective, they move you back a year and they reprocess you. Does that sound like a factory to you? It does to me. And so we produce people, we call them people, but we produce automatons who are pushed to go to work to do as they are told. But work is now filled with people who are under pressure to get a machine to do as it is told. and the astonishing rise of chat GPT. First, freaking out educators because they can no longer use the essay as a cudgel to push kids to prove that they are obedient by writing a not very good essay on demand, taking an enormous amount of their time, an essay that teachers don't even want to read, an essay that doesn't show they know how to write like a person.

8:50It simply shows they know how to regurgitate and prove they spent the time. ChatGPT comes for the blogger who is simply used to regurgitating what they read on some other site. Then when we see news sites admit sheepishly that they were using ChatGPT to write marginal news stories, well, yeah, it's sheepish now, but it will be standard in two years. Two years? Three months. Because the system is getting better and better at doing the mediocre work we thought was our job. Years ago, Broadway had a rule about how many musicians needed to be in the pit if it was a musical. And over time, that eroded.

9:37It eroded because synthesizers, electronic instruments, recordings could do a better job of playing the music as written than a human being could. They were interviewing the folks who sit in the pit at Phantom of the Opera. Some of them have been there for more than 20 years playing the same music every night. There is something special, something powerful about hearing human beings play instruments together. But it starts to fade when the industrial regime pushes us to do it the same way it was done yesterday. And so the name of this episode of my podcast, The End of Mediocrity. What I'm arguing here is that if you think you can make a living, a good living, a happy living, doing as you are told, will this be on the test, meeting spec.

10:32I'm here to tell you whether you are a radiologist or a car mechanic or somebody who writes blog posts, the system is coming for you. That now we know that AI augmented systems of radiology can read an x-ray for most fractures better than a human being can. Not surprising. So what is a radiologist to do? Well, I think the first most critical step is not to insist that only a human radiologist can read a pretty good x-ray pretty well. Because in fact, a computer is certainly going to be able to do it better than you most of the time. No, the opportunity is to do what humans have always done. That when the steam shovel came along, the ditch diggers didn't simply say, I'm unemployed forever.

11:27The ditch diggers figured out that that steam shovel is going to have to have somebody telling it what to do. That as we move our way up, quote, the food chain, we're going to have to go further and further into using real skills, not the easy to measure false proxy hard skills, whether those are things like how many words per minute can you type, or the social injustice and caste systems of, do you look like somebody who looks like the kind of person who can do this job? But instead, the real skills, the human skills, the skills of creativity and persistence and grit and insight, of good taste, of being able to exist happily in the liminal space between here and there.

12:12Does that mean that this is an unalloyed win for all of us? Of course not. The disruptions that are going to be caused by the rise of this sort of AI are huge, but we can't wish them away. They're here. And so if the deal that you honored for 30 years was, give me a form, I will process the form and pay me fairly, I am here to tell you that that deal has now been canceled. We have a machine that can deal with that form. And sure, bureaucracies will fight it, and it will be years before all the bureaucrats are gone. But what we are seeing more and more clearly is that human beings, when given the choice, would like something that is reliable and convenient unless the other option is presented to them, the option of magic and joy and possibility and better than you ever expected.

13:10Go to a typical restaurant in most cities in the world, and what you will be served is something that was heated up, made at a commissary or factory, not where the restaurant is. Order in from just about any restaurant in the world, and what you will get is food. And if you have a food shortage, this will help solve that problem. But if you want to run a restaurant, there's an alternative, and that is to build a kind of place that isn't based on heating something up in the microwave and slapping it in front of somebody who needs food, but instead to create an experience that no one actually expected, an experience that is worth talking about.

13:54So yeah, I've been ranting about this for the last 20 years of my writing, about bringing humanity to our job. But here, right this moment, is the opportunity that many of us have been waiting for, which is we can talk about it. We can sit down with each other, with the boss, with the person who's calling the meeting, and in the words of Manoj Kastla say, let's get real or let's not play. I only get tomorrow once. I don't want to waste it sitting in your Zoom meeting while you take attendance and prattle on for 30 minutes to make sure that I'm actually working from home and not picking up the dry cleaning or something.

14:36If you don't trust me to do great work, I don't trust you to work for you. That what we have is the opportunity for humans who are ready to go beyond being mediocre, to simply not work at places that demand they be mediocre. That it's easy to look at the warehouse worker at Amazon, someone who believes they don't have very many options, and be glad that we are not them, measured with a stopwatch and pushed to do a job just like we did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. Few people aspire to be a fry cook at McDonald's. But what AI is doing, what this relentless march of technology is doing, what our need for convenience, as Tim Wu has so artfully written about, is doing, is pushing all of us to be presented with jobs like that.

15:33Jobs where the keystrokes are measured, where the clicks are counted, where the output is the output, and that's all you get. But if you care enough, you can refuse the deal. But it comes with an obligation. The obligation is taking responsibility, not demanding authority. The obligation is to turn on lights for other people and to realize that what we actually sell is not convenience, but connection and possibility and meaning. And that can happen if you're a clerk at a bakery. It can happen if you're a pastor. and it can happen if you work on Wall Street, if you choose. We can't out GPT, GPT.

16:17It can't be done. I've seen it write things that are almost ready for me to post as blog posts. I've certainly seen it write code or documentation that's better than the typical average mediocre documentation writer. So what are you going to do about it? Well, what we have now is a choice and we can see the indoctrination. We can see how we've been pushed for generations to be part of the corporate industrial complex, to fit in, to be the cog in the system. And now it's over. The system has finally come for us. The system we built is now automated and filled with artificially intelligent bots that don't actually know anything, but are taking all the mediocre slots.

17:05So I think ultimately we have a chance for better to show up and say, I made this, and then to improve it, to find people who will give us the benefit of the doubt and to give them the benefit of the doubt in return, to build a world that is more sustainable, more resilient, and more respectful. But it starts by having the conversation, by talking about it, by asking whether the system we're in is so powerful, we have no choice but to succumb. Because everywhere I look, I find human beings who are weaving together possibility and building something magical, something back to the old days, back before we had a stopwatch to measure every interaction and cared instead about the measure of our days, about the memories we were creating, the possibilities that we were opening for other people.

18:01So yeah, that's a rant. My book is a little bit less of a rant and more of a book, but I hope you'll check it out. SES.blog.song. But most of all, go make a ruckus. Go have a conversation with somebody else and figure out how to make things better because we've already figured out how to be a success. Now, as my friend Shaleen says, will you choose to matter? I hope you will. We'll see you soon.