A brave new world: La sociedad por venir

[Cadavre Exquis]

The Good Enough Trap
How Technology Can Get Us Stuck In Place

Ian Leslie · 2024.05.04

In Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character John Anderton communes with virtual versions of his wife and child.

It’s not just Manchester United. After a couple of years when it seemed like working-from-home was the new normal, there is a press to go back to the office. Even Zoom expects its employees to be in at least twice a week. I don’t think this is just because CEOs are petty tyrants bent on surveilling their workers in a corporate panopticon. I think it’s because companies are waking up to the danger of getting stuck in a “good enough” equilibrium - one which is workable but ultimately unsatisfactory.

Most knowledge work can now get done over screens, but screens don’t generate the intangible benefits of physical place-sharing - workplace friendships formed by increments around the kettle; the implicit skills and cultural habits passed on by osmosis to new joiners; chats by the elevator that result in quicker decisions. Such effects are hard to measure and make little difference to output in the short or even medium term. But over time, they matter more than almost anything else.

After we lost access to the office, software provided us with a substitute that functioned just well enough for us to get fooled, for a while, into believing we hadn’t lost anything at all.

Software designers refer to “the good enough principle”. It means, simply put, that sometimes you should prioritise functionality over perfection. As a relentless imperfectionist, I’m inclined to embrace this idea. I gave this newsletter its name to encourage myself to post rough versions of my pieces rather than not to write them at all. When it comes to parenting, I’m a Winnicottian: I believe you shouldn’t try to be the perfect mum or dad because there’s no such thing. At work and in life, it’s often true that the optimal strategy is not to strive for the optimal result, but to aim for what works and hope for the best.

The good enough can be a staging post to the perfect. The iPhone’s camera was a “good enough” substitute for a compact camera. It did the job, but it wasn’t as good as a Kodak or a Fuji. Until it was. Technological innovation often works like this, but the improvement curve isn’t always as steep as with the smartphone camera. Sometimes we allow ourselves to get stuck with a product which is good enough to displace the competition, without fulfilling the same range of needs. The psychological and social ramifications can be profound.

Let’s say you’re a student and you use ChatGPT to write your essays for you. Give it the right prompts and it will produce pieces that are good enough to get the grade you need. That seems like a win: it saves you time and effort, presuming your tutors don’t notice or don’t care. Maybe you get through the whole of university this way. But be wary of this equilibrium. Over the longer term, you will be stunting the growth of your own mind. The struggle of turning inchoate thought into readable sentences and paragraphs is a powerful exercise for the brain. It’s how you get better at thinking. It is thinking.

Teenagers use the phone as a good-enough substitute for face-to-face socialising, which can be expensive and involve some stressful coordination - where to meet, what time, who to invite. Teens can get the raw information they need (what Daniel did with Saskia) and use emojis as a good-enough substitute for facial expression and vocal inflection. It’s magic. Except that, as at work, the benefits of gathering in person are lost. This seems to have been a bad thing for teen mental health:

A Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Nikhil Krishnan recently posted a thread about he spent his twenties obsessed with solving the problem of loneliness. He hosted social events where people could meet friendly strangers. He even founded a company around it. But it never took off, and eventually he concluded his mission was futile, because the competition had become unbeatable.

Many people feel uncomfortable about meeting strangers, no matter how conducive the conditions. Even when a lonely person wants to go out and meet people, the option of staying home is seductive - and home is so much more stimulating than it was.

In the old days, the alternative to socialising was watching a DVD you’d already seen while sticking a ready-meal in the microwave. Now you can always find something new on Netflix or play Street Fighter or both, while getting UberEats to bring dinner. As Krishnan puts it: “The fact that you can stay home and basically self-medicate with content in a way that feels not-quite-bored is the biggest barrier [to solving loneliness].”

Perhaps this is just revealed preference, and we should accept that even people who say they want to meet others really prefer being alone. Or maybe people are getting stuck in a good-enough equilibrium. Each decision to stay in makes sense on its own terms, but over time, the prospect of going out seems even more scary, and a self-isolating loop is created.

The psychologist Paul Bloom recently wrote about the services that AI-enabled companies will soon be offering the bereaved. If you’ve lost a parent, lover or child, you’ll be able to summon a simulation of them, based on all the data they left behind: emails, WhatsApp and SMS messages, voice messages, video, and more. The simulations will respond to what you’re saying in the voice of the person you loved. They’ll have even access to information about the world and so be able to discuss current events with you. I can imagine this being almost irresistible for grieving people.

You might argue that anything which eases the pain of bereavement is positive, and that’s certainly what marketers of these services will say. But a comment on Bloom’s post argues that these avatars will likely to do more harm than good. The commenter (“Professor Plum”) is a 55-year-old widower with a teenage daughter. He points out that grief isn’t just about missing what you had, but losing what was to come; an AI can’t recreate the future you anticipated together. Even more importantly, he says, a simulation of your loved one would get you “stuck in place”:

Having gone through the grief process, I think there is enormous value to going through that and coming out on the other side.  I think of my daughter who still has things to work out with the death of her mother, and I can say with great confidence, that if she had access to a Mom-bot, she'd be even further behind in her coping.

Maybe one day AIs will be so good at simulating people that we’ll barely notice the difference, at which point we’ll be truly be in the post-human future. In the meantime, what they’ll offer is a lossy JPEG of the person we loved - one that’s just good enough to keep us chained to it.

Saludos.