ON Cracking a code, the values piece, and asking ourselves what is at the end of this trajectory
October 31, 2026
Dear Eva,
Somehow it feels like a lifetime since our last letters…less than two weeks ago. For me it has been another one of those stretches where the number of places I need to put my body (travel, events) and topics and tasks I need to assign to my mind is saturating the time I am awake. I am ready for a firm wringing out! This should come late next week after I finish with one more rapid round of travel and intense work time. I was about to write something that is not true: “I don’t know how people who constantly travel for work do it.” I do know, or I at least have a hunch. I suspect they are gliding along the top layer of life, slaying todos like dragons and focusing on getting from point A to point B and doing what they are there to do. Maybe there is even a way it forces more presence in the here and now out of necessity. I guess for me it just feels like those times, while generative, are not my real life or real self. Tucked in that sentence is something I know I shouldn’t take for granted, the fact that I feel most myself at home. I don’t think that is a given, and I’m grateful that it is true for me right now.
I promised some details about my interactions with Silicon Valley types from my trip to the Bay Area, but I am not even sure where to start. I spent much of the time I was there coping with the discomfort of being in spaces where there was very little overlap in the Venn diagrams of my worldview with those around me. In principle, I think plopping ourselves into those contexts is healthy and helps us grow and understand other perspectives. In practice, it is often just a stressful human experience to be faced with other people’s certainty and conviction that looks nothing like your own. Here is a smattering of some of the things I observed and heard:
Nearly everyone I interacted with who is regularly using AI systems (including those building them) conveyed a sense of rushing. People spoke of the experience of acting as fast as possible to review the work of AI agents, all day long, as quickly as they can. Generally there was a sentiment of extreme effort to keep up with the machines. The exhaustion was palpable. So was the stress. One man expressed his deep fear for his artsy teenager who is resistant to AI. “I don’t want him to be left behind,” he said in a truly heartfelt way that left me sympathetic, even while I felt like his parental anxiety was misplaced. (Be delighted that your artsy kid has found a passion!) My overwhelming response to all of this was what on earth are we racing for?
People seemed to be in awe of both the fact and potential of what these systems could do. I take this as a form of awe about a certain kind of knowledge creation, the kind that comes from finding patterns at scale. It seems to me that these AI technologies are showing us how much more predictable things are in our world, including humans. They are finding and showing us things that were there all along, we just couldn’t see them with our human-level abilities to process information. It seems obvious to me that there can and will be a huge amount of value to being able to use data in these newfound ways to understand humanity and our world. I think there is just a real threat of us overvaluing that ability in ways that allow it to run roughshod over the other, equally important parts of human life, the parts where we are not facts and figures, but messy, contradictory, singular humans.
There seemed to be widespread concern about the future of human creativity and knowledge, some of that fueled by the aforementioned awe of what these systems can do. I am still putting my thoughts about this into words, but I think there is a need to avoid conflating number-crunching knowledge creation (which is fundamentally what these systems do) from anything created by human minds. One is calculation, the other is thought. They are not the same, even if the former can produce outputs that look and feel like the latter. It felt to me like this distinction was not top of mind for many of the people I interacted with. Often it felt like the fear around the future of human-produced works was based more on a prediction that it will be passed by; in other words, that it is replaceable.
It struck me that the entire premise of these systems is compression, and many of the people I met have adopted this mindset that everything that can be compressed, should be. For example, there are projects to compress a lifetime’s worth of effort on craft and taste into numerical form by using reinforcement learning to teach these systems the approach that a seasoned [insert any professional role] would take on given tasks. This ties to the acceleration point above. The only reason to compress is to believe there is value in moving faster. Clearly in some fields this is true, like medical research. But in many (most?) others, I have trouble seeing why faster is better. Yes, I know it is because people see dollar signs when they ponder instantaneously created advertising or anything else that humans currently get paid to do. But what is at the end of this trajectory?
That rhetorical question segues nicely into something completely different I have been contemplating of late. I have realized I have an almost maniacal insistence on believing the future is always bright(er). This is less true on a macro level than it is on a micro one. I cannot bear the thought that the good times are behind me, which is why I have always been allergic to nostalgia to a certain extent. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good reminiscing session with loved ones, but if it starts to bleed into longing, I get uncomfortable. None of this is new insight. What is new to me is the realization that at least part of this is rooted in wanting to avoid sadness. It is painful to let myself grieve good times that I cannot reclaim. As a result, I think I have largely tried to avoid it entirely. So my work ahead is to keep the hopefulness that motivates me, while also letting myself feel sad about the things I am inevitably leaving behind. What better time to do that than as my kids leave their childhoods behind? It seems wild and dangerous to let myself be sad, but I am committed to not trying to outrun sadness this time.
Speaking of dangers that are not really dangers, I had the funny experience this week of being presented with a link to a podcast interview of yours truly. My reaction was visceral discomfort, even the message in my inbox felt like a threat. Finally I mustered the courage yesterday to listen, and it is hard to convey just how physically uncomfortable it made me. I find this fascinating! The good news is I did not say anything contemptible, just used a few phrases that normal people (including me) do not say in real life. (Who says “the values piece” to refer to the moral part of a problem?) Anyway, I think this tells me it would be good to exercise the particular muscles of being comfortable expressing myself in the wider world.
There was so much in your letter last week that I wanted to respond to, and here I have almost written my way out of space to get to it! There is always the next letter! It all ties together into the conversation about the things I gleaned from my time in the Bay Area. You ask “am I doing enough” and I ask “do I matter?” and we are all asking what is human life for?
I can’t wait to read what is on your mind! Happy Halloween! May you be spooked in only the most delightful ways.
Best,
Sarah
Thursday November 12 2026
Dear Sarah,
I started a letter to you on November 1 and now it is November 10 12. Please accept my apology for this long delay! After an extended period of my time being very flexible, the past couple weeks had a little bit of everything pressing from every direction, and my mind space was too full. I know your mind space is also full and you still wrote your letter! Some of the following might sound like I am making excuses for why I couldn’t finish my letter on time but I just want to tell you some of the things that have been going on. I’m feeling a little bit weird today but I’m going to do my best! This letter is going to be a mishmash of energies and ideas and I hope you will bear with me through it. I wrote some notes for this letter many days ago but when I looked back at them, they all felt grumpy in a way that didn’t seem true to life, and wouldn’t have been any fun to read. Everything doesn’t have to be fun, of course, but I also don’t have any real reason to send you a Grouchy Letter right now! I am not grouchy today!
Last week I performed in a PLAY that had a few evening rehearsals and then four nights of performances. It was a fun and wacky play and I had lines to memorize in a fairly short period of time and my brain was having a hard time holding onto them. Let me tell you that I perceive myself as someone who is able to memorize lines for a play. Let me also tell you that the last time I memorized lines for a play, I was in 12th grade. For some of the performances of this play I made myself little line reminder cards that I taped to my wrist and utilized on stage to somewhat comic effect. I would like to be in more plays!
I am taking an AUDITING class this semester at LACC. It is dry. I am supposed to be doing a good amount of reading for it that I am not completing. It makes sense to me right now to continue with my accounting classes — the classes represent the continuation of an idea about what I could do to forge a new income-generating career — but I would not say I am deeply interested in auditing. I am taking the class in order to maintain some momentum behind the idea of being in school. In the winter and spring I am planning to take my tax classes and I am actually looking forward to those, after my experience applying for the tax job earlier this fall, but I still have to make it through the next six weeks of auditing. Ok!
My relationship to writing has been changing lately. It still functions for me on the private stage like it always has, or at least like it has for the past five to eight years or so. I am writing daily to figure out what I am thinking, to put my thoughts down so I can see them, sort them, and understand them more clearly. I am writing to put language to things that spark my attention or that I don’t want to forget. I have not been writing so much “creatively” lately (which still always signifies to me the idea of writing in order to share publicly, which we know is not the only way to be creative) — though some new wheels are turning in my mind. After performing in last week’s play, and after taking part in an experimental theater class structured around the idea of creating unreproducible performances — introducing chance and unpredictability into the theater-making process — I find myself interested in exploring writing for the stage. This hadn’t presented itself to me as an idea previously because I see a lot of people performing solo works and that is not something I am inclined to do. But the idea of making-writing-shaping something that other people would perform, and making it kind of weird and non-narrative like the kinds of writing I’ve been working on otherwise, is appealing. It feels like cracking a code. I think there is a lot of room in this city to try out making theater pieces. I will keep you posted if and as (I hope) this idea gets any traction with me. I think I’ve been feeling my way around to it for a while — I’ve been taking clown and theater and movement classes, and I haven’t been sure what to do with them or why exactly I am taking them, but I keep feeling drawn to them. Now it feels like I have established some kind of grounding in concepts that I can work with in ways I hadn’t thought of when I came into the practice.
When I read your letter I found myself reflecting on your words about the podcast interview with the mathematician Steven Strogatz. Fascinating. It is interesting to think about a.i. stepping into every field and showing what it can and cannot do. If you love solving problems it would be annoying, disturbing, crushing to have a.i. popping up and solving problems you had or could have spent years working on. It feels comparable to the idea of a.i. making art — creative people who write or paint or do various kinds of design or any number of things know that the point of creative work is to have gone through a process; the point is not simply to have a product. Certainly there are people in the mix for whom the point is actually to have a product, and to sell it, or to own it; for these people a.i. would seem to be answering a call: I want to look at (yet) more things; I want to make something that is interesting to my eyeballs without taking the time to learn the craft that would allow me to do it; I want “art” in my life without paying artists; I want to make money while putting in a minimum of time, etcetera. If you are a mathematician your work is solving hard math problems, and it is your form of creativity; it is unfortunate for the mathematicians that a.i. is inherently well-suited to solving such problems, whereas it is less well-suited to making creative work, which we often appreciate because it shows evidence of the human hand, mind, heart. You suggested that “some types of puzzles may become easier to solve, but will there not always be truth to seek together?” and to that I say… but what if all your favorite puzzles and the contexts for doing them went away and didn’t need you anymore?? I suppose the mathematicians will find other things to do together, but it’s not surprising that people would feel grief in the precise moment of having dreams and habits taken away from them, and before new puzzles have arrived to take their place.
I recently reviewed a piece of writing that I believe was composed using a.i. in some capacity. At first I was incensed by this; my knee-jerk reaction was that anyone writing anything should be using their own brains to write the piece; I only want to read writing that has been created by another person’s brain and through the blood, sweat, and tears of bringing it to the page. Then a few days passed and I realized that the context for this particular piece of writing was different; it was not a context where the writing itself was the focal point, but it was a context where the presence of a piece of writing gave a certain kind of cachet to the thing being written about. I don’t know if this makes sense without me getting super specific with my example, but I had an interesting moment where I thought maybe it is all right for some pieces of writing to be made using a.i. I am not myself interested in using a.i. to write, nor am I interested in reading a.i.-supported works, but it is certainly true that I am already not the target audience for every piece of writing. One thought I’ve had is whether any work created using a.i. should have to cite its use in some way. We’re currently tasked with wondering which works have utilized a.i. I think it matters if someone has used a.i. in a setting where they are to some extent claiming that they are presenting their own ideas. If, for example, someone has “written” a literary work using a.i., I want to know that so I can steer clear of the work or make a distinct choice about whether I’d like to be reading it for some purpose, e.g. is a writer who I respect transparently experimenting with using a.i. as a creative collaborator, or etc. I can think of at least one or two writers I admire who I would not be surprised to learn that they had produced some kind of a.i.-collaborative works with the intention of exploring the landscape of a dialogue with a machine. Whether I will read those works if and when they come out is another question.
Sarah, it looks like I’ve written you a letter. Forgive my extreme lateness and my lack of communication about my lateness. I am really, really, REALLY looking forward to reading your words that have been languishing in my inbox. Here I go! Looking forward to writing to + talking with you soon!
Much love,
Eva
P.S. I just opened the email with your letter in it and it says Happy Halloween! DAMN I AM SO LATE FORGIVE ME ONCE MORE