Reflections 17th August
Thoughts on a train
Travelling is one of those things we don’t talk much about; it has become a largely invisible element of our lives.
I think that’s a shame. At its best, travelling to new places is one of life’s joys; at its worst, travelling to a “work theatre” meeting that could have been done on Zoom is dispiriting at best. According to the Association of Accounting Technicians, in an average career, we spend 557 continuous days, or one and a half years, simply in transit. And around £25 billion a year on rail transport, £4 billion on coach, and around £60 billion on road freight.
We spend close to £50 billion a year buying new cars. EVs were not created to save the environment. They were designed to save the car industry.
It seems we no longer travel out of necessity; we travel because it has become a market with us as consumers.
I Work, Therefore I Travel.
Commuting often promises higher pay but rarely delivers a true return. While longer commutes can bring wage premiums (notably for London roles), the “commuting paradox” highlights that the costs, stress, poor health, and lost time, typically outweigh financial gains. Long commutes are associated with lower life satisfaction, worse health, and even relationship strain. Post-pandemic hybrid work shifted the equation a little, for a while, but many are seeing pressure to return to traditional patterns.
I think there is also a psychological aspect. Commuting is expensive and often unreliable, making it an investment based on trust in our employer. Volatility in many sectors, tech in particular, compounds these levels of uncertainty.
The uncomfortable reality for businesses is that, despite the utterings of corner office Alphas, commuting doesn’t do much for them either. It may make the occupancy of expensive office estate look better, improve compliance and look good to clients and shareholders, but it comes at a cost. Mandating presence suggests leadership don’t trust employees’ ability to manage their productivity, weakens relationships and creates an atmosphere that shifts from voluntary energy to grudging compliance. Gallup’s recent poll that showed over half of those at work are looking elsewhere for a job encapsulates the detachment well.
I think the balance of power lies with habit. Commuting is an established industry. Familiarity and vested interests stifle innovation in how we work. If we want to change work, we need to change the underlying attitudes and dispositions of those who shape it.
In July this year, Harry Stebbings, a British Venture Capitalist, advocated a seven-day workweek as a necessity to compete globally. Much as his comments courted controversy, the truth is that, like Lola, what capital wants, capital gets. Stebbings may be seen to be extreme, but in a play straight out of the Trump playbook, he was setting a place to retreat from to where he wants.
It shows. Those I work with are senior professionals, and a common complaint is that when workplace technologies mean that their activity in the workplace is constantly visible, discretionary time for development just isn’t available.
The water cooler is a myth. Even at senior levels, we’re increasingly back in the Mill.
I always find travelling into London instructive. It is a place unashamedly defined by money: earning it, spending it and putting it on show. It doesn’t seem to matter much where it comes from or where it goes, as long as enough gets caught on its way through. Everything else is window dressing.
London can feel superficial; its core skills in financial storytelling, and proximity to power more important than genuine creativity. Under pressure, it relies on government intervention rather than natural adaptation. It has an extractive rather than regenerative culture, and is reactive rather than strategic. It will go wherever the money leads, and the rest of the country has little choice other than to follow.
The result is a world of work that faces a constraint and a dilemma.
The constraint is that the workplace isn’t going to change for the better when it is shaped by highly mobile shareholders whose eyes are on the short-term.
The dilemma is how we regain sufficient autonomy to find alternatives. How we work, where we work, who we work for and why.
The question that settled in my mind as I gratefully returned home was, how can we make the constraint, in the language of Adam Morgan, a beautiful one?
“A constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change—we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough.”
― Adam Morgan, A Beautiful Constraint:
AI has become a bête noir in the world of work, but if you work for yourself, there are those pointing the way to how we can leverage the constraint to advantage. David Hieatt’s “Fifth Day” programme at “Do Lectures” is looking good, as is Seth Godin’s new venture. Both are centred less on the hype of AI, and more on its limited, but powerful reality for us to find different ways to reshape work as the opportunities present themselves.
Because the truth is that large organisations are inherently fragile. They are monofocal and speak only the language of capital, and even then, only one small version of it - financial. They cannot imagine a world that doesn’t need them.
But Capital is more than money, just as the sea is more than water:
“The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes.”
Adam Nicolson, The Sea Is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides
If, like me, you follow the commentaries on AI, you are probably noticing that between the frothy, evangelistic excitement on the one hand, and the doomsayers on the other, there is a conversation developing that recognises the reality that AI will not replace people. It may replace jobs where we have turned people into process operators, but the essence of being human still holds sway.
On my journey to London, I listened to Ed Zitron’s excellent “Better Offline” podcast with academics who think ChatGPT is Bullshit. It is one of the best podcasts I have listened to for a while, measured, thoughtful and provocative, and I thoroughly recommend it.
A few of the notes I scribbled on the train from it:
AI does not hallucinate; it bullshits in the Frankfurtian sense.
“where he defines the term (bullshit) as speech or writing intended to persuade without regard for the truth. This is exactly what LLMs do. They produce text that tries to reproduce the average properties of texts in their training data, and the user experiences the encoded text in their RLHF training. None of that has anything to do with the truth. At best you could say they are engineered to try to give the users what they want (eg. what the engineers building these systems think we want), which is, again, a common motive of bullshitters.” (Hacker News)
If you’re learning from copying, you’re not learning, you‘re memorising.
What happens if we allow AI to moderate the truth on which we act?
And whilst I’m on podcasts, I also really enjoyed Rory Stewart’s on the History of Heroism: four episodes, two hours or so, well worth it.
A couple of notes from it:
“Our conception of heroism in a time of AI is not to be more than human, it is to be more human”.
“Who are our heroes today - why do we pay more attention to social media influencers than the great scientists of our time?”
“We don’t need big heroes, we need small heroes - those stretching their concept of themselves.”
“Who are your heroes. What would they think of you?”
It makes me wonder who the heroes of this time will be - the corporate feudalists, those who resist them, or those who make them irrelevant. I suspect the hubris of the techbros may yet face a Copernican moment. AI is not the centre of the Universe. (I am going to take this thought across to - I think there is a full post on this)
AI and Odin’s Ravens.
The world today has become too complex for any one of us to see.
Maybe we can learn from Odin, the Norse God. His Ravens, Huginn, (Mind) and Munnin (Will), flew across the Nine Realms, returning each night to whisper what they had found.
Our Ravens are our AIs. They scan the digital realm, gather fragments, patterns, signals. We can train them, and become familiar with their idiosyncrasies. The gift, though, is double-edged: Mind can encourage illusion, Will can cling to distortion. The power lies not in the Ravens, but in the one who listens.
For all the technical wizardry, I am increasingly convinced there is a craft to the use of AI, and there is more to learn from Odin. He was a Poet, bringing the mead of poetry to gods and men, an Artist, Master of shaping words, magic, and symbols, and a Warrior: God of battle and death, a chooser of the slain. Not the normal job description to be found on LinkedIn, but food for thought for us.
I enjoyed my trip, not because of London, but because of the perspective it gave me. It reminded me that we are in the middle of a revolution, not as observers or victims but as participants.
All we need to do is listen and then use our humanity and wisdom to apply what we hear.
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim MORRISON
Next week, back to the more recent thread of these posts, and from Sand Bars to Rock Pools….
Have a great week
Other things I have enjoyed:
AI as a demon:
“Demons were like genies or philosophy professors — if you didn’t word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.”
— Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
On Tribes. The Price of Belonging
Being together as a radical act - Insight from Chris Corrigan
How Culture Tames Technology - Always. Giles Crouch, Digital Anthropologist, on culture vs AI.
Working Fast and Slow (reminded by ). Greg Satell on the pace of work.
Interesting reflections, Richard. Thanks. Where was the Jim Morrison quote from? 🌿
The Doors Illustrated History. It’s and age thing :-)