musings

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Mountain Time

I have just returned from the loveliest two-week trip: a drive through the Canadian Rockies with my husband, bracketed on either end by precious time with my parents in their mountain home. I feel a little jet-lagged, water-logged, flooded with the joy of a truly pleasurable vacation.

Let’s not bury the lede: I got to meet Nicole, in person. She is, unsurprisingly, gorgeous and warm and generous and kind. She and her husband showed us the most delightful time. We drank really good wine. We ate a dinner of quinoa, roasted veggies, and lentils that I am still thinking about, plus a kale salad with the best Caesar dressing, followed by a luscious lemony cake topped by homegrown raspberries. I got to meet REX, and give him pets and tell him to his face that he is the softest, handsomest boy. I got to chat with Nicole’s son, who is one of the most charming, attentive, interesting young people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, and he allowed me to hug him even though I am apparently of the age where I refer to twenty-somethings as “young people.” I got to ogle Nicole’s garden, and admire her prolific zucchini plants (she gave me three monstrous zucchini to take home; they were delicious). I did not take nearly enough pictures, or spend nearly enough time with Nicole. Our husbands are, obviously, fantastic, and I think next time we will allow them space to do their own thing so Nicole and I can cover all the extremely important topics we didn’t get to during our much-too-short time together.

An extremely distinguished gentleman.

Driving through British Columbia and Alberta with my husband was magical. Spending time together, just the two of us: It feels both simplistic and true to say that I enjoy his company. We travel well together. He’s a thoughtful and careful planner, and I like to think I’m an agreeable and supportive companion.

We listened to a podcast recommended by Engie, DNFed one audiobook and got a good chunk of the way through another. We giggled over Canada’s road signage (it seemed to us that things like “no services 110 km” would be more helpful before we’d passed the last town for 110 km) and wished that all US highways would follow Canada’s lead with the number of passing lanes they include. We stared in awe at the landscape and pulled over many, many times to try to capture the jaw-dropping beauty of the mountains and turquoise lakes with our phones. We ate tons of delicious food (my favorite, next to Nicole’s home cooking, was a meal of birria tacos in Banff) and did lots of sightseeing.

We visited multiple local bookstores, and my husband encouraged me to buy some souvenirs. (I also bought a really excellent book for a friend and had the author sign it.)

We encountered a lot of wildfire smoke. Sometimes it obscured almost everything.

Sometimes it leant an ethereal magic to our views.

Sometimes it disappeared at just the right moment for us to experience the pristine splendor of the landscape.

We didn’t see any wildlife at all, beyond a few birds and mammals that we can see in our own backyard, thank you very much.

Speaking of wildlife, we did admire our cat, via the cat cam. He spent a lot of time sitting glumly on the counter, waiting for someone (me?) to come tell him to get off. He also spent one morning exploring my mother-in-law’s set up for making hot fudge. He went so far as to get in the pot, which is horrifying and hilarious in equal measure. (Don’t worry: we did let her know that her hot fudge vessel had been contaminated before she started cooking.) I love that he looks directly at the cat cam. He knows (I fully believe) that he’s doing something we would not approve of, and he knows that we know what he’s doing, and he wants us to know that he knows we know, and he’s doing it anyway.

We had a wonderful time together, and loved the parts of Canada we saw. I hope someday soon we can explore other provinces… and perhaps visit Allison and Elisabeth in their corners of their stunning country.

Even though it’s a place I visit regularly (although nowhere near often enough), my parents’ mountain home is no less stunning or special.

Spending time with my parents feels both mundane and precious. We do things we’ve been doing for decades – walk the same mile-long forest loop, brave the black cold of the same lake, sit on the deck listening to hundred-year-old aspen gossip in the breeze – while knowing there will be a last time for each of these experiences.

Being among the mountains makes me feel small and insignificant and acutely aware of the vastness of time and the ephemeral nature of our lives.

I’m an introspective kind of gal, as you are well aware, and I spent a lot of this trip thinking about time. The mountains wrap me in a paradoxical kind of time warp, where I feel both the speed of time passing by and a simultaneous timelessness.

My parents are aging, I cannot deny that. In fact, several of our conversations this trip centered around estate planning, on things my husband and I need to know when their mountain home becomes ours. My daughter is now a teenager, nearly my height, about to begin eighth grade. My husband and I are solidly, undeniably middle-aged.

And yet: everything is the same as it’s always been.  

Even though the individual aspen that make up the skyline around my parents’ house have been around for a mere century, their underground root systems are thousands of years old. The peaks I admire as my dad guides our thirty-year-old boat around the lake were thrust into being fifty million years ago. Glaciers and water and tectonic shifts have sculpted the mountains and valleys into their current form over the intervening millennia. It is astonishing to me that I can admire the artistry of forces so enormous I can hardly conceptualize them, that I am alive for this eyeblink of a moment, that I can choose to spend my time with the people I love most while surrounded by such extraordinary beauty.

I am bobbing, breathless, in the same lake I’ve been swimming in since I was a little girl, the same lake my father visited as a boy, and his father before him. My daughter, shrieking, leaping into the bracing deep beside me, simultaneously thirteen and five and two and ages I have yet to experience. Around us, a crenellation of stately serene peaks that have stood sentry over each of us in turn, in a valley that was once itself a massive inland sea.

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This Went in an Unexpected Direction

Yesterday I spoke to an AI agent on the phone. At least, I think it was an AI. It did not announce itself as such; it called itself “Dane.” But maybe it wasn’t an AI? It was so humanoid that I wasn’t sure, so I spoke to it as though it could be a human, albeit one who was extremely adept at mixing conversational speech with call center script. Aside from a general AI vibe I got from Dane, it did some specific things that made me think it wasn’t human. I thought about listing them here, but I don’t want to. And now I’m realizing, perhaps for the first time, that everything I post here is already being digested and catalogued by non-humans.

Which of course I already knew. Surely there have been web crawlers as long as there have been search engines, identifying keywords and indexing my blog alongside every other thing posted to the internet.

If you have a blog: have you ever learned that someone unexpected reads your posts? Once, years ago, I learned that a colleague or maybe a classmate of my husband had stumbled across my blog. Obviously, that has always been possible; my posts are public. I write because I want to be read. I do try to remember that my words are public, and I do self-edit my posts in some ways. It’s not as though this person did anything nefarious, or even (as far as I know) commented on my posts or kept reading for any length of time. (If you’re still reading, hi!) It still felt odd, though, as if someone were reading over my shoulder. (Why it doesn’t feel that way all the time, I don’t know. You’re reading it, aren’t you? And that not only doesn’t bother me, it makes me happy!) Looking “being read” right in the face makes me squirmy. The same feeling applies when I think about an AI scouring the web for ideas about how to be more human, and landing on this post, and tucking my thoughts away for future instruction.

I started out thinking this would be a Five for Friday post, but apparently I want to talk about AI some more. It’s a topic I think about many times a day. It’s a subject I don’t know a whole lot about. It’s something that terrifies and fascinates me.

Let’s start here: The environmental implications of AI are massive and horrifying. Full stop.

A while back, I had a friend who seemed obsessed with LLMs. She used them all the time, and our conversations often included her saying things like, “I asked ChatGPT and it said…” or “I just put all my thoughts about X into Claude and it suggested…” She seemed to derive real insight from her interactions with AI. Sometimes, when we exchanged everyday gripes or concerns, she suggested that I turn to one of the LLMs for answers or clarity.

I occasionally use Chat GPT, and I do so with tremendous trepidation. I do not like what it learns about me when I ask it for things. I do not like the humanoid quality of its responses. I do not like that it makes assumptions and intuitive leaps. I do not like the image, in my head, of all the resources it’s depleting just to give me a list of books that meet a series of very specific requirements.

At a work event for my husband’s practice, some of his colleagues were discussing AI and its various applications in the medical field. Providers ask AI to summarize patient visits, which can optimize their time doing paperwork and allow them to interact with patient instead of focusing on their computers. Surgeons operate robotic tools remotely. AI can help spot pre-cancerous polyps in endoscopy videos.   

Requests for my freelance work have declined in recent years. Occasionally, I decide that I want to earn more money and I look for jobs. Usually, my searches are for remote positions because I dislike wearing real clothes any more than absolutely necessary. My entire career has been in writing adjacent fields: editing, copywriting, content creation. Editing and writing are what I love to do; they are my primary skills. The job search engines turned up posting after posting after posting for various methods of training AI to edit and write.

(I use Google and Gmail every day. I click on words in my Kindle and in online content to see their definitions. I employ spellcheck in Word.)  

Two men at my neighbor’s barbecue chatted about their use of AI at work. One uses it to generate marketing copy. The other uses it to write emails to customers. They agreed that AI is so much cheaper and easier and more efficient than hiring an expert to do those tasks. They noted that the output isn’t quite as good. They each shrugged.

I disabled the predictive text function on my phone. I disabled Gemini in my Gmail accounts. I refuse to look at the AI Overview in my Google search results. I feel principled and righteous. I feel irritated because I have to do so much scrolling to find a reputable source for my inquiries and I misspell so many words when I text and I overlook emails from my mom because my inbox is so clotted with advertisements.

One of my writing friends recently told me that she was quitting ChatGPT cold turkey. She had been using it to help her brainstorm ideas, refine sentences, identify plot holes… but she’d been horrified by the number of articles she’d been reading about AI use in the publishing industry. She also felt her brain wasn’t working as quickly or as deftly as it had before she’d started using AI.

(Apple Maps tells me how to get to the airport and friends’ houses and medical offices. Siri tells me what to expect from the day’s weather. Presumably nearly every airplane I’ve ever been on utilizes autopilot.)

I worry about: My lack of marketable skills. The various ways AI might impact my child’s future: her career prospects, her critical thinking skills, her mental health. The longterm effects of the systematic mutilation of our environment. Doctors relying on AI to the point of missing symptoms or eroding their own skills. Deepfakes and AI scams and chatbot-fueled psychosis.

A professor friend of mine laments the increase of AI-generated work among her students. She uses AI to pinpoint whether an assignment has been completed using AI.

Sometimes I think that it’s shortsighted and stubborn to resist a technology that could offer real improvements in efficiency and scope of knowledge. Sometimes I feel like a side character in a dystopian story, being propelled inexorably toward the collapse of humanity.  

(Netflix recommends shows I might like. Google Lens helps me identify plants, and Merlin Bird ID recognizes the birds I’m listening to. Shazam tells me which song is playing on my Apple playlist of “summer songs.” My phone’s Clean Up tool removes blemishes from my photos. A robot vacuums my floors and another robot cleans my pool.)

Elevator operators, lamplighters, crossing sweepers, linotype operators, travel agents, video store clerks. I’m not the first person whose career prospects have dwindled or disappeared due to technological innovation. I won’t be the last.

There’s nothing new I can add to the conversation. There’s SO MUCH about AI I don’t know and haven’t considered. But it’s something I think about all the time and it’s something that has insinuated itself into all of our lives.

I don’t know if I can be against AI when I use it so frequently in everyday life. But I certainly don’t feel good about AI. Outsourcing our critical thinking to AI can lead to faulty conclusions (“cognitive surrender”) and stunt our capacity for analytical reasoning (“cognitive offloading”). Generative AI models and the data centers used to power them have clear, measurable environmental consequences (one estimate I read says the same query on ChatGPT uses five times the energy than a web search). There are the slippery moral, ethical, and philosophical issues of AI consciousness (or not). But AI can also increase efficiency, automate daily routines, facilitate learning, summarize and analyze vast amounts of data, and and and and.

I don’t want to contribute to the depletion of our water sources, the impairment of our ability to think, the decline of civilization. I don’t want to be left behind.

(My phone labels unknown numbers as potential spam. Canva’s AI tool alters graphics to my specifications. Google AI Mode generates a list of articles about AI.)

Some AI use may be “better” than others. But where’s the line?

I would be so very interested to hear about your thoughts regarding and experiences with AI. Do you use it at work? In your personal life? What worries you or excites you the most? This is a judgment-free zone; I feel like we are all grappling with how and when and why and at what cost.