Nows and Forevers

Writer and human, born 10 years too late

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  • AI’s effect on white-collar jobs like mine (and maybe yours)

    It has been a few months since generative AI like ChatGPT and Bard hit the national consciousness. The concern over what it means for jobs, particularly white-collar jobs, hasn’t died down a bit.

    I was talking with a fellow journalist yesterday, and we joked that AI hadn’t come for our jobs just yet but who knows how long it will be. I don’t claim to know. Nor is it a paralyzing fear. I wonder how generative AI will impact my job and I’m uneasy about it, but I have to say that the state of journalism already was uneasy for us humans and it’s not hard to think of AI as yet another looming challenge.

    The Los Angeles times just published a thought-provoking column from Brian Merchant about this very topic: “What it looks like when jobs disappear in the shadow of AI.” Merchant looks at the rise of AI at the same time the entire news department at Buzzfeed was sacked, and whether journalists will end up being replaced by AI.

    Merchant calls AI “an ambiguity generator” when it comes to jobs:

    “It allows those who hold the power to justify making all kinds of calls, in the name of embracing the future, improving efficiency, and so on,” he writes. “And in this still very young AI-infested moment of ours, we can’t be sure which way many of those calls will break.”

    I think he’s onto something here. I’ve spent half my career covering business, and a fair amount has been chronicling the impact of change on companies and workers. That could have been the decline of industry in the Northeast in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when my traditionally blue-collar hometown started losing its factories and making the painful transition to bedroom community. Or maybe the offshoring of whole industries, like the shoemaking industry in central Maine, where hundreds of workers were jettisoned without the skills (or economy) to find new jobs. Or the rise of technology, biotech, energy and advanced manufacturing industries that were mostly the realm of science fiction when I was in school.

    I cover that a lot today, with the decline of coal mining and steel manufacturing and the rise of so many other things, without the mechanism of transferring employees’ skills to something else. It’s happening in journalism, too. I long ago left the world of daily newspaper journalism, the places where you would see a range of local news, sports and features gathered by reporters and editors.

    I will tell you that I left it before it left me. Community journalism, the kind of work and public discourse that we need in a democracy, is a shadow of it what it was even in the ‘90s. There are plenty of towns and cities where the mechanics of governing rarely sees the sunlight of journalism. It doesn’t pay for newspapers — or any media really — to delve too deeply into those topics.

    Stories about local governance and activities may be critically important to democracy — and they are, really — but the amount of people interested in them doesn’t often justify the amount of time spent to really do it justice. The type of beat reporting I did for school boards and towns and cities 25 years ago, no journalist has the time to spend on that now. Nor do our bosses want them to. We can tell through web and social data how a story does, and these types of stories don’t “do well” in analytics.

    Would AI help that? Doubt it. Maybe if you were to marry the Boston Dynamics physical robots with a powerful journalism-focused AI, then you might be able to construct a Journo Bot that could go to all those meetings that we human reporters can’t. But I find it hard to believe.

    More likely, at least for the time being, is that we’ll see generative AI take up the slack in doing researching and writing the types of stories that aren’t a human worker’s best use of time. It’s already happening. (See CNET and elsewhere.) But it’s going to be a long time if ever, I think, before the bulk of the journalism can be transferred to AI.

    Am I being too optimistic? I don’t think so. Generative AI requires there to be a paper trail, or at least a pixel trail. That’s some of what we do as journalists, but rewriting press releases has never been the best use of a journalist’s time. And staying in the newsroom is never the best use of a journalist’s time. Nope, the news is out there, to paraphrase The X-Files, and I can tell you as a longtime journalist, it rarely comes to you.

    I don’t see the development any time soon of an AI that will be able to do that kind of legwork.

    And then there’s the very real danger of AI getting things wrong or being so prolific that it waters down the value of the printed word on the Internet. Already on social media, and some websites, there are countless lessons in what happens when you don’t have professional reporters and editors to gather and produce news. AI amps up those dangers by orders of magnitude.

    How that will spin out, I have no idea. But I wonder whether that’s the secret sauce, the fly in the AI ointment that there’s no answer to at the moment. We can replace humans with AI in white-collar jobs. But we won’t be able to replace that human connection,and the things that humans bring to the table as journalists, writers and other professions. It’s one thing to automate a production line, which can make for efficiencies and scale that humans can’t reach. Yet what makes us human — and what you want as a human — can’t be provided for by AI.

    That was brought up to me the other day by someone who isn’t a journalist but is seeing the impact of AI on other white-collar fields. He didn’t think AI was going to wreak as much havoc on journalism and storytelling in particular because, at the end of the day, machines and algorithms aren’t people. Nor can they tell a story like a human being can, or like a human being wants.

    I think that’s one of the best arguments I’ve seen about this topic. I’ve read generative AI fiction, even played around with it a bit myself. It has left me wanting. That’s partly because it’s in it’s early stages, but also because the gap between human and machine isn’t easily reached.

    People want to read stories about people, my editor and every other one since time immemorial has said. And people probably aren’t going to want to read a story about people, written by a machine.

    Not in the long run.

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  • Road safety

    Seen on the road a few days ago: “This could be your last text.”

    Passed this sign several times on my trip to Ohio. It’s apparently part of a road safety campaign that also includes an electronic tally of how many days since the last serious crash on that stretch of road.

    Four days on one section, 247 for another.

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  • The road rarely taken

    Somewhere on Interstate 70 in Ohio

    I’ve driven this side of Interstate 70 only a handful of times in my life. But they’ve been for significant reasons, so some of the memories remain, no matter how long ago. It’s funny how that works.
    On the trip out of Pennsylvania, and for much of the trip to Columbus, it doesn’t look too much different than Pennsylvania. Miles and miles of, well, miles and miles. Eastern Ohio, at least, here, isn’t flat. It is the Midwest, no doubt. But that’s really a glance at the map instead of the look out the window. It’s remarkably green and hilly. If it weren’t for the unfamiliar and unmistakably Ohio names, I could be anywhere east of here.
    It’s only when you get past Columbus do you reallize you’re no longer in the Northeast. That’s where the land flattens, the farmland starts to grow, and all the other parts of the countryside morph into what East and West Coasters call flyover country.
    I’ve certainly flown over it a lot, both for business and personal reasons. It’s by this time, when I fly out of New York, that I am not really looking outside anymore. But now that I live in Flyover Country, I have a different perspective.
    This stretch of road, where I ride now, reminds me of a part of my life, long gone, but also pretty important even though I didn’t know it at the time.
    My first time here was in September 1981, when my family left New England to drive to my uncle’s wedding in Indianapolis, where his bride grew up. The trip from Connecticut to Scranton wasn’t that remarkable. I have spent more than half my life living in that stretch from central Connecticut to the Hudson Valley of New York, and I knew it well even then as a 12-year-old. And I spent a lot of time in the car as a kid, visiting my maternal relatives in the Scranton area.
    But Pennsylvania, that vast commonwealth, I had never driven the length of it all the way before. I don’t remember a ton, but I do recall seeing oil derricks off the highway, poking and rhymthically swinging up and down.
    I was fascinated by that. It isn’t something you see where I grew up.
    We stayed the first night in Cambridge, Ohio, which my grandfather told me was near the hometown of John Glenn, the famous astronaut. That was cool, but other than that I don’t remember anything else of the trip. At least not in Ohio.
    The Buckeye State was, through no fault of its own, unremarkable. What I remember next is crossing over into Indiana, and a sign that said it doesn’t follow daylight savings time. It’s funny, again, how you remember that.
    I was only in Indianapolis for four days, and we left that Monday and drove all the way back home after the wedding so that I could start school that Tuesday and my mom could go back to work. I had no idea that I would be going that way again, only four months later, when my mother, stepfather and I drove all the way across the country to our new home in San Diego in January 1982.
    That became a signature event in my life, and it partially began with this stretch of road, from Connecticut through Ohio and a great way on Interstate 70.
    That was 41 years ago. It took a long time for me to come back to Ohio. I flew over it a lot, but didn’t drive I-70 here until the spring of 2009, when my father and I visited the Air Force Museum in Dayton, and again in 2017 when he and I went to Hamvention, a big amateur radio convention they hold here annually.
    And that’s why I’m there again, on my own for the first time when I drive this way, in 2023.

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  • Trapper Keeper, revived

    A 2023 Trapper Keeper, just like I had in 1980.

    Some things from the ’70s and ’80s play better in 2023 than others. Looks like the Trapper Keeper might have been better in the past.

    It pains me to say that. I loved my Trapper Keeper, which I brought proudly to Griswold Junior High School in September 1980. My dad bought it for me, probably at either Bradlees or Caldor, along with extra folders for each of my 8th grade classes. It kept me relatively organized that year, as I remember. And I wasn’t the only one: You could hear a lot of Velcro open and close all around me in every class.

    I moved to southern California for high school and promptly forgot about my Trapper Keeper. Maybe it wasn’t cool. Maybe I had too many classes to take, with too much paperwork. I liked them and now to change up organizing systems.

    Between the early ’80s and two years ago, I had really not thought about or seen Trapper Keepers. I have bought school supplies for my kids for a long time now. But it wasn’t until two years ago, while getting stuff at Staples that I saw the OG Trapper Keeper again.

    I couldn’t get my kids to bite. But I couldn’t help picking one up and opening it for old time’s sake. But it wasn’t something I was gonna buy.

    Apparently a lot of people felt that way, at least on my corner of the world. They display stand remained full, and then moved to the back, then a few months ago moved to clearance. The price for the longest time was $10 for the binder and three folders. They had all the colors I remember.

    Yesterday, though, as I went to pick up something at my local Staples, I walked by the clearance table. They were marked down to $3 each.

    I couldn’t resist. I picked up this green one. It’s the same color I had in 1980. Funny how you remember that.

    I have no idea what I will do with it. My Welsh classes are over, and I don’t have another class that I take notes for. In fact, professionally, I usually take notes on a computer because it’s faster and easier to collate. It’s rare that I use a reporter’s notebook.

    I don’t think I can I treat my kids in a Trapper Keeper, not now at the end of school nor next September.

    And that’s a shame. 13-year-old me had a good school year with his green Trapper Keeper.

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  • When you live in the worst city in America, but you disagree

    Another year where I don’t live in any of the top 10 “Best Places to Live.” But I have lived in what one of those high-profile rankings called the worst.

    At least when it came to another annual outlook, from Money magazine.

    Waterbury, Connecticut, received the bottom-ranking, No. 300 out of 300 cities ranked, not once but twice when I lived there: 1991 and 1992. That was an affront to the city of 110,000, which is tucked away in the hills of Connecticut between Boston and New York City and has a large place in history. The Brass City, as it was called, was deeply upset by this indignity.

    As The New York Times put it in an article after the second ranking: “Wounded Waterbury: No Place to Go But Up.”

    I was living in Waterbury at the time and was an editor at the daily newspaper, the Waterbury Republican-American. It was, in fact, my first professional newspaper job. I remember how angry people were, in and out of the newsroom. There was a front-page reaction story, and an editorial about how wrong Money was. As I remember, it fed stories and the editorial page for a long time.

    I thought then, and now, that Waterbury was getting a raw deal.

    It was easy back then to dump on the industrial cities and towns of Connecticut, not only Waterbury but also Bridgeport, Torrington, New Britain, Naugatuck, Danbury and Meriden. The de-industrialization of the United States in the ’70s and ’80s left a lot of empty buildings and economic pain in its wake, and I saw it firsthand in Connecticut, which is my home state and where, between Connecticut and New York, I’ve spent half my life.

    So it was easy to say that Waterbury had seen better days, especially in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Drivers passing by Interstate 84, which cuts through Waterbury, probably had three overwhelming impressions back then: The big yellow cross of Holy Land USA that overlooked the eastern part of the city, the clock tower (modeled after Sienna’s and part of American literature, mentioned in “A Death of a Salesman”), and then the sprawling ruins of the brass plant that took up so much acreage in the middle of Waterbury.

    Yet few people would have given Waterbury higher marks over Bridgeport, about 20 miles down Route 8 and along the coast. Bridgeport had filed for bankruptcy, had been hit by crime and economic decline, and was an even more inviting target. (Bridgeport’s woes even made a laugh line or two in “Cheers,” where Cliff Clavin was played by a Bridgeport native, John Ratzenberger.) Yet Waterbury came up at the end of the line in the Money magazine rankings, not just once but twice.

    I’ve thought about Waterbury every time I see a “best/worst” cities ranking. I don’t have a problem with calling out the “best” of the many ways to look at a city or metro region. That’s a point of pride for many people, and it’s boring just to name San Diego No. 1 all the time. But the “worst” ranking, for Waterbury, was the worst, in my book.

    I’ve got a fond spot in my heart for Waterbury. It’s near where I grew up and I drove by there a lot, before and after I worked there. Waterbury doesn’t loom as large for me as New Haven does, but that’s because my parents both worked in New Haven and it’s where we naturally gravitated.

    I gained a better appreciation of it when I worked there, and got to know many of its people and understood its place in history. It was a great news city, then and now. The Waterbury Republican won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1940 covering mayoral corruption, of which it unfortunately has a history. Lots of stuff happened, good and bad, in Waterbury. And a colleague and friend of mine told me long ago that just about everything that happened in the world had a Waterbury connection. (He was right, but that’s another story.)

    I moved out of Waterbury and then the Naugatuck River Valley a few years later, and I have to say I haven’t been back as much as I would like. But Waterbury has often shown up in my life, even today, where I often professionally run into people who either were born and grew up there or have it on their resume. That’s not just where I live and work now, but all around the country. It’s amazing where you find Waterbury people.

    Waterbury itself has changed, too. The former manufacturing plants, which would sometimes catch fire and were almost always something people remembered about Waterbury, are long gone. They’ve been replaced for more than 20 years by a retail and entertainment complex known as Brass Mill Center that makes Waterbury a place people go.

    And in the end, more than 30 years later, I still don’t understand why Waterbury struck the bottom of the list two years in a row. I’ve traveled all over this country and found places that you would want to live, and others that maybe you wouldn’t. Things that you can’t necessarily find in a ranking or an algorithm. Just about everywhere has its good points and bad points.

    Waterbury was just being kicked when it was down.

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  • One for the travel record books?

    I’m not planning to travel anywhere Memorial Day weekend. And it looks like that might be a good choice.

    The post pandemic travel boom is set to heat up further this Memorial Day weekend, with AAA Travel forecasting 7.7% more travelers on the road, rails and air than in 2022.

    And it goes on from there.

    “This summer travel season could be one for the record books, especially at airports,” said AAA SVP Paula Twidale.

    Airports could be the busiest they’ve been since 2005.

    Yikes.

    I took two sets of flights in 2022, both in the spring and summer, one overseas and the other domestically. My traveling back from the United Kingdom took place Memorial Day week, and it was a doozy. And that’s even with my booking my flights back home the day after Memorial Day to avoid the crowds.

    That only worked a little. I got to where I was going, only a little later than I expected. But it was a stressful trip nonetheless.

    Why? Flying from London to New York took up all the time I had planned, and I plan a lot. Whenever I can, I try to arrive at the airport two to three hours ahead of time and if I am going anywhere that requires a change in planes (and that’s relatively often, given I no longer live in New York), I try to leave an equal amount of time at least in between flights. Sure, that means that I wait around the airport longer and I also spend more time in total traveling.

    But it’s better than missing a flight. I did that, years ago, due to weather, and it took a plane, train and two automobiles — plus a hotel room and a 30-hour odyssey — to get back from Chicago to New York after a flight from Dallas.

    So I try to avoid that when I can.

    Traveling since the end of the pandemic has had its own challenges. I flew the week after the mask mandate was removed — although I kept one on the whole time — but the volumes were so heavy that it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. There were a lot of people traveling in that late spring and summer of 2022, probably like me having waited until then to do so.

    There were delays with the inbound jet at Heathrow, delays taxiing at JFK, delays at the baggage screening, delays at customs, delays at security. I had four hours’ in between flights, and I barely made my flight out of JFK back to my home city.

    So this year, I stay home. I have another trip to do by the end of this year, related to a writing project I’m doing. I had planned to go earlier this spring, then postponed it near to the last minute. I’m only going to archives and libraries, so it doesn’t matter when I go. Traveling in the summer, and paying high rates for lodging and airfare, won’t make a spec of difference since I will barely see daylight.

    And I’m OK with waiting.

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  • Allergic to everything green

    Protip: Don’t ever stop taking allergy medication until the season is through.

    I learned this lesson the hard way, just recently. I had run out of my Zyrtec — my entire household takes it from March through June — and I hadn’t gotten to the store by the time evening came around.

    No worries, I thought. Zyrtec takes a while to build up so maybe missing a day won’t be so bad. There will still be some left anti-allergy-ness left in me, right?

    I woke up sneezing, coughing and with a sore throat.

    Not for the first time, my lack of medical knowledge and common sense failed me.

    I rushed out and got a refill, which took another few days before I was out of the watery eye/sneezing/coughing zone. But it got me thinking about how dependent I’ve become on my allergy meds.

    From the moment I remember drawing a breath — decades and decades ago — I’ve had allergies. Spring was my least favorite season because it would signify how miserably sick I was going to be for several weeks running. My eyes would water and burn. My nose would keep running, and I’d have to carry a small box of Kleenex with me. Sometimes my throat would hurt. And I’d cough, for weeks on end.

    Back then, when I was a kid, there wasn’t much of a chance to treat it, either. I would take Benadryl, which would make me sleepy, or another anti-histamine. Doctors would not have any idea what to do, other than to soldier through it and wait for June.

    “You’re basically allergic to everything green,” one doctor told me. Having childhood asthma didn’t help, either.

    I went to an allergist, but there wasn’t much to do. It wasn’t until the ’90s when Zyrtec (cetizirine) came out that I began to get relief, although it took a few years before I got a prescription. And then it wasn’t until 2007 when it began to be available without a prescription.

    Now, I take it from March through June and then again in hay fever season, August and September. I know it takes time to build up in your system, so I get out ahead of any potential pollen and allergen by taking it long before the buds begin. This year, I was in Florida in late February so I started even earlier than I would.

    So far in my second course of allergy medicine, I’m doing OK. I woke up this morning with a fit of sneezing and coughing, but that went away. I expect that it will only be another month or so and then I’ll be able to stop the meds until ragweed season, which I started getting allergic to about a decade ago.

    Can’t wait.

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  • ‘The greatest pilot anyone had ever seen’

    Sixty years ago today, immortalized in one of my favorite flicks, “The Right Stuff,” and one of my fav movie endings ever, with the actual film of Faith 7’s launch and the late, great Levon Helm’s voiceover:

    “On that glorious day in May 15, 1963, Gordon Cooper went higher, farther, and faster than any other American. He was the last American ever to go into space alone. And, for a brief moment, Gordo Cooper became the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen.”

    And if you haven’t ever seen it, “The Right Stuff” has Sam Shepard, Ed Harris, Fred Ward, Dennis Quaid, Harry Shearer, Jeff Goldblum, Levon Helm and Eric Sevareid in an epic and true adventure, beautifully acted, written and filmed. Walking around the Mercury launchpads when I visited Cape Canaveral was truly a heady experience.

    When I saw this movie with my stepfather at the Mission Valley theatres in San DIego in the fall of ‘83, after devouring Tom Wolfe’s book that summer, the Mercury program was only 20 years before and all of the 7 but Grissom were still alive. Now they are all gone, and even a number of the actors – Shepard, Helm, Sevareid, and last year, Fred Ward.

    I highly recommend “The Right Stuff,” which was directed by Philip Kaufman. and this clip uses a lot of the Faith 7 footage to great effect. And Bill Conti’s score, along with the credits rolling as Faith 7 streaks upward through the sky, it’s one of the most rousing endings to a movie I’ve ever seen.

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  • Missing Eurovision

    Eurovision. I’m sorry I missed it this year.

    The last two years I have watched the live telecast from here in the United States, both times live updating with my European friends via WhatsApp where the contest went late in to the night but was over around dinner time here on the East Coast.

    I even got my kids to watch and root for their favorites. We had fun.

    But this year I knew Eurovision was going on and so wanted to see it, but life got in the way. I spent this whole afternoon not in front of the TV or glued to Twitter – I am not doing that anymore – but instead shuttling kids from place to place or spending time with the family. I didn’t even have a spare moment to give to Eurovision, which saddens me.

    It’s pretty fun.

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  • The West Wing bipartisanship

    “The West Wing” lost me after its second year, when my personal and work life became much more complicated and busy. But I got a chance to see the last year and it was fascinating to see how it was being transitioned. I would have liked to see the first term of President Santos.

    And this is a great scene, with Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda showing what bipartisanship really looks like. Too bad it’s fiction.

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About Me

Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.

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