AI transition, womens' plays
Reflections on humanity through the lens of AI. Thoughts on a new play, Lyonesse, in London (woman writer, complex female chracters). What are greedy jobs? Problems with transistion plans. Links.
Creator (film, AI), reflections on humanity
Lyonesse (play, spoilers), reflections on womens’ jobs
Greedy jobs, female equity
Transition plans, UK framework, Tom Gosling critique
Links: seafood sourcing, immersive video gaming, how to get pardon in Minnesota, sightline climate intelligence; solar power in space, a FT review.
Alphie (Advanced AI Child): Are you going to heaven?
Joshua: No. You've got to be a good person to go to heaven.
Alphie: So we're the same. We can't go to heaven because you're not good, and I'm not a person.
From the film “The Creator”. The director, Gareth Edwards:
“If we create AI, and it starts having genuine autonomy and says things we don't like, are we allowed to turn it off, you know? And what if it doesn't want to be turned off?”
Edwards started writing the film in 2018, where I think AI was mostly seen as positive.
“I really was using robots and AI as a metaphor for people who are different, you know, the other and the idea of, like, how we always reject people who are different and fear them, and vice versa, they do the same to us. And when I first sort of pitched this to the studio, the main note I always got back was, but why would we ban AI? Like, it's such a positive thing, you know. And it's sort of hilarious to be now where we are.” (2023)
“Tell me about despair, yours. And I will tell you mine.” Chris, in Penolope Skinner’s new play Lyonesse (London).
Skinner: “The story I was interested in telling is the story of the life that has been lost, the light that has been put out, by incidents of #MeToo,” she says. “We’re still focused on the perpetrators, but what I want to explore is that unseen life that has been lost and damaged.” The Guardian journalist writes “#MeToo may have made a lot of powerful men think twice about their actions, it hasn’t been quite so transformational for women; that perhaps things haven’t changed as much as we might have hoped.”
Are stories more important than climate transition plans? Visually, The Creator builds on much sci-fi and space opera before it, Star Wars, Blade Runner and the like. If you’re sensitive to or steeped in that visual language the cinematography is meaningful. Even more so, if you have the experience of the language of Asia, in particular East and South East Asia; and in particular again if you’ve travelled through or been to villages and farming communities that exist on little.
I’ve blogged before about some of my travels including staying with the Wana tribe in Indonesia. I’ve spent time in places where money means little and running water comes before running electricity. 500m to 1 billion people live on less than 2 dollars a day and many of them lack a safe toilet.
Against this backdrop, The Creator pits an AI-aligned Asia against a US nexus that has abandoned AI (blaming AI for a nuclear accident, which the AI allies say was human error - I note the director is British which may allow for an anti-America lens easier than with an American director, perhaps). AI police, AI companions and advanced technology has not defeated poverty and has integrated into a way of life in new Asia. This tilts mystical with the notions of Buddhism and the cycle of life and death, which AI are apart from (at least the AI monks think so) - perhaps to their sadness.
Some elements are plausible to me. AI-minded folk I speak to think an AI droid as part of the family could be a likely scenario, and it seems likely we will treat them like family (as we do many pets already). One side character is in love and then in grief for his AI companion. The images of AI floating along the ritual burnings and cremations in the ghats evoke human death rituals.
While the first order debates are about what it means to be human and have consciousness; and if we can live in harmony with such an intelligent species the second order backdrop is war. What humans do to other humans, to other creatures, to other intelligences in the name of idealogy. Edwards, in his interviews, alludes to AI as a metaphor for this (see above), but we don’t need them as a metaphor if it’s happening now. We don’t need AI monks to have a whole spectrum of humanity that think like that although perhaps the distance science fiction gives us allows us to interrogate this notion deeper.
There is an AI transition happening now. One reading of the film at large is that humans may not have developed ethically, morally or socially to encompass this. Technology deepens and emphasises the good and bad within humanity. Every powerful technology seems to be used for harms (and greater harms) alongside any good.
Another reading is around how little we understand consciousness or what it might mean to live (and live well). What creatures with any form of consciousness want to be turned off? The animals seem to tilt to the side of AI. The film is not “perfect” - what film is - but at this moment and for a long while, it asks questions of humans and of our humanity, now and into the future.
I managed to see the first preview of my friend, Penelope Skinner’s new play in the London West End - Lyonesse. This, I think is one of the first (if not the first) in a major commercial London theatre to be writer by a woman writer - and with women led characters. (The likes of women writers like Caryl Churchill or Lucy Prebble have been in the National, Royal Court and the like, which are non-commercial, publicly-funded venues). Notable because of the complex woman characters telling womens’ stories that Skinner conjures up and that the actors bring to life vividly.
Why is it we are seemingly still so slow and late to these stories in what people argue is an increasingly feminised world, it still seems to me the weight of stories are not by women, but about women.
There are four womens’ stories. At least three of them are complex and defy an easy characterisation. The male character is the most two dimensional and unsympathetic (reversing the bulk of many theatre stories). The metaphors are rich and theatrical. Birds (dead, living, taxidermied; caged), a building that serves as a character itself with storms and seas as background; and a nudge to land erosion and climate change.
The major story and character arcs belong to Elaine and Kate. On the surface, Kate has a golden life: A film producing career, with supportive maternity cover (although her promotions seemed to be stifled); a movie director husband who is on brink of A-list, recent baby, Issy (always off-stage); a 3 million pound town house in north London.
Under the surface, her childbirth was traumatic and it goes repeatedly unacknowledged, so traumatic she doesn’t want another baby (even though that was the initial agreement); and at the margin - the husband, Greg, mostly gets the support (although he doesnt see it that way).
As an aside - this is the “Greedy Job” problem that recent Nobel winner Claudia Goldin has identified (though not names) as a major challenge for labour equity.
From FT’s Tim Harford: https://www.ft.com/content/7f9c726e-5682-4330-bae9-31b07144f12e
Goldin’s research suggests that much of the gap between men and women is more properly described as a gap between mothers and non-mothers. The reason? There are certain jobs — “greedy jobs” — that often pay very well indeed but require long and unpredictable hours. (Goldin did not coin the term. It was first used by the sociologists Lewis Coser and Rose Laub Coser, a married couple. He used the idea to describe institutions which “seek exclusive and undivided loyalty”; she used it to describe the demands of motherhood.)
So what is a greedy job? If you may need to work late, take work phone calls at the weekend, or travel to Singapore for a meeting, all without much notice and with the absolute assumption that nothing else will get in the way of you doing so, then you have a greedy job. If you are also the primary caregiver for children then, as Rose Laub Coser understood, that’s a greedy job, too, arguably greedier than it has ever been. And it is in the nature of greedy jobs that you can only have one of them at a time. A common arrangement between highly educated, highly employable heterosexual couples, then, is that one of them (often the woman) takes the unpaid greedy job of parenting, perhaps alongside a more flexible paid job, while the other (often the man) takes the well-paid greedy job of being a corporate lawyer or investment banker or C-suite executive.
There’s nothing inevitable about this. The couple could hire a live-in nanny: another greedy job. Or they could both work in flexible jobs where the expectation is that family comes first. But both of those options come at a steep price, since the most lavishly paid jobs are usually greedy. As Goldin puts it in her book Career and Family (2021), “As college graduates find life partnerships and begin planning families, in the starkest terms they are faced with a choice between a marriage of equals and a marriage with more money.” The couple could flip gender norms, with the woman working unpredictable hours and hopping on the flights to Singapore, while the man is the one doing the school pick-up and dropping everything when there’s an emergency. Apart from a few weeks around the moment of birth itself, that’s perfectly possible. But it remains unusual, so both of them will spend time explaining themselves.
Back to Kate, there is a crisis brewing and meeting Elaine and her Lyonesse house is the catalyst.
Elaine was - by all accounts - a brilliant actor - a force of nature. But, after a tremendous opening night on the stage mid-way through her career. She flees and becomes a recluse. She feels because of abuse from a (famous director) lover, who kills her birds - although the story is framed as if there is some doubt in the character’s minds over motives and happenstance.
Elaine has waited until her former lover has died before coming forward with her story. In part because of fear that she wont be believed. Elaine has made friends with Chris, who also came to Cornwall, in grief as her wife had died and for the lost oppportunities she was meant to have seized with her dead wife.
And so, Elaine is never quite believed or her story can’t be told the way she wants. Kate convinces her to develop the story as a kindred spirit but the golden cage that Kate has built for herself - or that the system - the patriarchy perhaps - is too…. Golden, easy, expected [we have to make up our own minds here] - that despite the despair Kate feels at these moments - at the times in Cornwall - is it enough to escape her cage?
The character arcs have a modern tragedy sense to them. Women fighting the weight of society expectations - and for all the efforts in modern society - the weight of society wins….
I guess - until society changes. Society has changed over slavery, womens’ rights, child rights, disability rights. It is changing over the climate, over equity, over AI….
These are the stories we tell ourselves. These stories that we believe in together - these are what will shape our discourse.
In the UK, we now have transition plans for corporates and a framework for assessing them. The frameworks - so far as climate transitioning planning goes - make sense to me although I suspect that the major beneficiaries are accountants and consultants in this exercise (and I expect I will be one of only a few investors, or non-accountants/consultants to read the report in full).
Tom Gosling in a recent blog post re: plans argues:
“One argument is to give investors the information they need to allocate capital. Yet if that's the reason, why didn't we need transition plans for the internet, artificial intelligence, growth of global trade etc each of which were hugely significant and widely pervasive issues? The reason is that we trusted market mechanisms to figure out the right way to go through pursuit of long-term value.
The desire for transition plans is therefore clearly driven by the fact that we sense this market mechanism isn't working properly in the case of climate. So transition plans are clearly intended, at least implicitly, to provoke action that market forces are not currently stimulating.
But why should we expect transition plans to succeed in doing that? Are we hoping that when people produce the plan they realise they needed it all along and become converts to the economic opportunities of climate action?
I guess an optimistic view is that by highlighting areas where the transition is currently impossible, the plans will create momentum for policy change. But I think we kinda know where those areas are already, so I'm not convinced that transition plans will reveal new policy solutions that will have widespread political acceptability.
I know a number of the people involved in this initiative and they are smart, good people with the best of intentions. So it's quite possible I'm just wrong on this. But it seems to me that there's a simple truth
If economic signals are aligned with net zero then we don't need transition plans. If economic signals are not aligned with net zero, then transition plans won't do much to help.”
Underlying one of his first points is a sense of nudging / obligation a private sector actor to take on a responsibility or strategy which would better be done at the policy or government level, but which due to political calculus are not being enacted at the policy level.
I think at the margin these plans are better than not, but they are not a substitute for innovation, rising standards and stable, forward-looking policy. It probably also is true that our current system struggles with externalities, tragedies of the commons and 50 to 100 year-and-beyond time horizons. To what extent will transistion plans highlight and nudge the correct policy responses as a second order signal?
This leads to one of my points about stories. The stories we decide to tell ourselves about what it means to be human - as culture - sits upstream from corporate strategy or transition plans - they to an extent intertwine with markets and sit upstream of them too.
So is a transition plan more important than stories? It seems to me now that in many ways the answer is yes. A company doesn’t need a plan to be part of transition (although it may help). Society does need stories we can believe in.
Links and other notes:
Also if you’ve got this far read this in the Paris Review on the video Game Red Dead 2, which on the on hand is a look at one of the most extraordinary games in the last 30 years; but another on AI and what it means to be human really.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/10/16/were-more-ghosts-than-people/
Longread in New Yorker on seafood sourcing - especially from large China fleets. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/16/the-crimes-behind-the-seafood-you-eat
What it takes to get a pardon in Minnesota: “The supplicants clustered outside the enormous closed doors. They paced the hallway, fidgeted on benches, knitted their hands and waited, waited, for their 10-minute chance at mercy.”
Sightline Climate intelligence platform H/T Sophie Purdom and team: https://www.sightlineclimate.com/
Space based solar in FT: https://x.com/benyeohben/status/1714693824621035927?s=20
Fuchsia Dunlop pod: https://x.com/benyeohben/status/1712866822444163398?s=20