Five Things: Human Interventions in War, White-Collar Apocalyptic Insecurity, E-Streets, Hypercuriosity, RomCom
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
In honor of the Artemis 2 crew flying around the moon I watched Despicable Me with our youngest daughter. I just love the minions! And I am glad the moon went back to its place in the right size. K4, as I affectionately our youngest daughter, is turning 11 years old today and it continues to amaze my how quickly she has grown up. I love her dearly. She’s just wonderful.
Enjoy these Five Things!
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
The target package for the Shajareh Tayyebeh school presented a military facility. Lucy Suchman, whose 1987 book Plans and Situated Actions remains the sharpest account of how formal procedures obscure the work that actually produces their outcomes, would not have been surprised. Plans always look complete afterward. They achieve completeness by filtering out everything that wasn’t legible to their categories. This package looked like every other package in the queue. But outside the package, the school appeared in Iranian business listings. It was visible on Google Maps. A search engine could have found it. Nobody searched. At 1,000 decisions an hour, nobody was going to. A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.” How indeed.
I learned a lot about military strategy from this piece and the inherent issues with the decision making structure.
For White-Collar Workers, AI Also Stands for “Apocalyptic Insecurity”
As humans fade into background and AI enlists workers in their own demise, it feels like it’s Soylent Green meets The Hunger Games: Middle-class labor is forced to eat itself. For white-collar workers across the country, the upheaval is psychological and existential as much as technological. They are grappling with what we call apocalyptic insecurity: the realization that something massive is underway but there’s no clear timeline or playbook. Everything moves at incomprehensible speed.
It’s made work itself into an uncertainty, with dark impacts on our behavior, careers, and health of mind and body. A massive 71 percent of Americans are now scared that AI will steal livelihoods. Tech leaders issue Magic 8 Ball musings: white-collar jobs gone in months; half of entry-level jobs wiped out in five years; or, depending on who’s talking, jobs will simply “ transform.” But how? When? What, if anything, is the plan?
I know this might sound harsh, but life-long learning is something that is required of all of us and we have to understand that we live in times of uncertainty, if we like it or not. Anyone who has read just the headlines about AI in the last ten years probably has figured out that change is going to come. It shouldn’t be such a surprise that AI will change white-collar jobs tremendously.
Menace on the Streets
Public streets have always been contested, as drivers and cyclists and pedestrians jockey for their allotment of our crowded, finite road space. But until e-machines arrived, we could usually take a few basics for granted. Speed limits were non-negotiable. Sidewalks were for people, bike lanes for bikes and roads for motor vehicles. Everything had its place.
The micromobility revolution, as its proponents call it, has destabilized all that, and tensions have ramped up. There is a specific, anger-provoking anxiety that comes from being startled by something, or someone, that comes unpredictably and illogically out of nowhere, especially if they almost knock you off your feet.
If there were a statistic about almost fatal crashes, delivery riders would take the top spot, followed by 3 people on e-scooters zigzaging through traffic in the wrong direction.
How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive
What if we’ve been looking at this backwards? What if the question isn’t what constrains attention, but what captures it? In many people with ADHD, signals linked to curiosity – such as novelty, uncertainty, prediction error, informational reward – carry higher motivational weight. In plain terms, some cues feel disproportionately worth following. From this perspective, what looks like distractibility can be understood as rapid, stimulus-driven reallocation of attention toward whatever promises the greatest payoff. The delay aversion, the executive struggles, the altered reward-processing – they can all be seen as downstream expressions of a brain that has fundamentally different priorities about what deserves attention, priorities that may have served early human societies in certain environments long before modern medicine defined them as a disorder.
Hypercurious, I like that term. While I flunked my ADHD test, my hypercuriosity has oftentimes taken me interesting places while I didn’t focus on what I originally wanted or had to do.
The Global Romcom
Look elsewhere, however, and a different picture emerges. The much-discussed death of the romcom is a particularly American narrative, one that ignores the genre’s many different trajectories across the globe. In countries outside the U.S., romcoms are doing what the genre has always done: use humor to negotiate the gender politics and thorny social mores of a particular society. What’s more, streamers have been increasingly looking to make these titles available to viewers outside their own countries: While my narrow algorithm mostly still shows me unappealing U.S. and U.K. productions, there is in fact a whole world of more enticing romcoms buried beneath my Netflix homepage. The result is that films from all over the world are increasingly influencing one another — and influencing Hollywood, where they might even have a hand in bringing back the unfashionable idea of happily ever after.
Ok, I admit it, I am a sucker for a good romcom. And even for a bad one. I came to like watching movies where I know exactly what will happen and that everything will be fine at the end. There is too much crap going on in the world.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico