The count grows. 2024…2025. Our midnight countdown celebration occurred once again with friends in a stove-heated party garage in Vermont, including our kids, finally able to stay up for the official EST demarcation. Same place, same people, same time for most of the past decade, although we have all changed considerably during that time. A tradition of similar but different experiences, layered like evolving archeological strata in our cyclical memories. We skied, at Middlebury and Pico, and the kids are finally keeping up and charging ahead. I must be getting old.
Christmas with my family in Maine is one of my most cherished routines, occurring bi-annually to accommodate spousal families on off-years, and settling in the Portland area only recently as both my siblings have migrated there. Although the location has shifted and the family has more than doubled in size over the past decade, the joy of assembling with my original five-person nuclear family, plus three partners and nine generation alpha cousins, is greater than ever. Gift exchanges were bountiful and Christmas dinner was hosted in Big Tree’s new event space with more extended family, featuring a delicious Mexican theme and karaoke carols. Everyone is very aware of how fun it is to be in this company and how fortunate we are to have such a beautiful and loving group constituting our family; it is always a pleasure to assemble with these people and I cherish every opportunity.
We have not watched much TV recently, but we did make time for the final season of “Somebody, Somewhere”; the diversity of characters with complex and emotional depth makes it a very compelling and bittersweet experience. We also watched the first season of “Slow Horses”, a fun British spy thriller that falls in a more exciting and intense area of the entertainment spectrum.
I took Miles to a Bruins-Islanders game at UBS Arena and a Patriots-Colts game at Gillette Stadium. I also watched a documentary celebrating the Red Sox 2004 legendary comeback from 3-0 down to beat The Yankees in the ALCS, then win their first World Series in 86 years. I also convinced my family to watch Fever Pitch, a rom-com that follows The Sox that same year. It is hard to fathom that twenty years have passed since the Curse was reversed, but remembering the intensity and excitement of that season still makes me tingle! I also got to pick a movie on my birthday and we watched “2001: A Space Odyssey”! I recently read the book and was happy to rewatch it 30 years later with that context. It is a truly remarkable film and considering that it was made in 1968, one year before the moon landing and 50 years before Artificial Intelligence, is incredible.
I just read two fantastic books on Information and Intelligence: Daniel Dennett’s “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds”, which describes evolutionary intelligence and postulates that “memes”, or viral ideas, are the basis for our thought processes and communal culture; learning and adapting are made possible by sharing concepts or meta-concepts, and language consists of rudimentary memes that can be combined to create the endlessly unique and innovative ideas that have built the scaffolding of our intelligence. Biological evolution, from bottom-up Darwinian trial and error, has given humans the superpower of top-down intelligent design, establishing the Information Age and Artificial Intelligence. “Nexus”, by “Sapiens” author Yuval Noah Harari, describes the history of Information distribution networks in the context of this nascent Artificial Intelligence revolution, warning that information does not necessarily lead to truth and when it is controlled by a malicious centralized entity, such as an autocratic government, or even one that is simply programmed to prioritize engagement, such as a Facebook algorithm, the results can be catastrophic. Humans have been able to transform their environment by sharing ideas and technology, but our sociability also makes us vulnerable to emotional manipulation; fear and anger grab people’s attention and the flow of information now is increasingly distributed by software and algorithms designed to keep customers scrolling, rather than to promoting truth. The tools we are developing are very powerful and will have an unprecedented impact on humanity; some hopefully constructive and some potentially devastating, with no clear way to proceed safely; if we are not careful, we may soon find ourselves on a one-way mission with HAL 9000 at the helm.