Digital Dilemma, True Confessions

The In-Office Conundrum

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The hybrid work arrangement was one of the pandemic’s few silver linings. It was a crazy, forced, social experiment many of us endured. However, in the end, we know the hybrid arrangement worked in a lot of ways. For me, personally, I love the work-life balance. With a hybrid arrangement, currently two days in office and three remote, I save lots of commuting time. I have the flexibility for a lunchtime physio appointment, or right at the end of my workday. Whereas if I worked 5 days in the office, I would have to leave early to go to physio. Or try to get one of the coveted evening or Sat morning appointments. There’s usually long waiting lists.

I also appreciate being able to have hot lunch. Packing lunch can get tiring. Going out for lunch can get expensive. And for people like me, with stomachs wrecked by food-court food poisoning, I usually prefer safer options. These perks may seem small, but they’re meaningful.

However, working from home 5 days a week would also seem challenging. I appreciate the social aspects of being onsite and the opportunity to meet new people. A lot of new people were hired during the pandemic, when we were fully remote for a while. Consequently, I haven’t met a lot of them in person. I find this can sometimes lead to a lot of miscommunications with people over teams chats, emails, or even virtual meetings, especially when cameras are always turned off.

Herein lies the conundrum. How do we evaluate work-life balance against the valuable in-person experiences? Now some people would say that they can work efficiently being 100% remote. Truthfully, I sometimes feel more productive at home where I can more easily tune out distractions. However, on the flip side, remote work doesn’t afford people, especially new employees, the same opportunities for connection. Those small, random interactions can be important. I know I certainly missed those tiny waves to neighbors or exchanged pleasantries waiting for the elevator when we remained isolated during the pandemic. I even missed swapping a few snippets of conversation with a friendly cashier or somebody talkative on public transit. It felt so lonely.

Lots of companies are going back 5 days/week. But is this the standard we should be aiming for? Did we learn nothing from those long years spent remote, overly reliant on technology, and digital chatter?

Human Archives, True Confessions

Reacting in Real Time

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This past weekend I had the great pleasure of playing in the pit orchestra for the Nutcracker for the fourth year. This time around, I’m expecting at least one thing will not go as planned. However, the fun part is that we never know what it is until it happens. Then we’re just reacting in the moment. Or in some cases, trying hard not to react.

The pit is long and narrow. It’s located in front of the stage, rather than underneath, like a real orchestra pit. Seating arrangements are always a bit odd. First of all, the configuration is completely different from how we sit for rehearsals. The elongated shape of the pit separates us from instruments we normally play with. For example, the bassoons sit at one end and the double bass and cellos sit all the way at the other end. This can make it pretty difficult for us to play together at times.

For the first three years I sat right up against the stage. There was barely enough space for me to hold my instrument without occasionally hitting it. I also couldn’t see anything except for a few arm flaps during the Snowflake Waltz. Though to be fair, it eliminated a lot of distractions. This year, however, we had a last minute seat swap with one of the percussion players. I ended up on the edge closer to the audience. I could see the stage, but my head was mere inches from the timpani. Luckily, my musician’s ear plugs protected my ears even while it created a lot of interesting vibrations in my body.

I happened to have my ear plugs out to play the coffee character dance. It features a very beautiful bassoon duet while the dancers sashay around in glittery, colorful costumes. It’s a sensual and fascinating depiction of arab-themed dancing. Everything was going well until about halfway through the piece. Suddenly we heard this loud, scratchy squeak from one of the ballerina’s shoes! It persisted until the end of the piece and came back again during the “Waltz of the Flowers.” While I felt a pang of compassion for the ballerina, I was also feeling some for myself trying to keep a straight face so I could play all the delicate, hard notes at the end of the movement. Always something to keep us on our toes.

Productivity, Spring Cleaning

Tidying vs. Cleaning

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Some people excel in the art of tidying up. Though there are some merits to tidying, most of the time, it results in future “make work” projects. This has been my experience when tidying, instead of cleaning and organizing, is the first line of defense. Although if the area, or room, is already relatively uncluttered, than some light tidying can be beneficial.

To clarify, tidying is different from a “piling” system. This system aggregates “like with like”. Or collects seemingly random things together because they make sense contextually. For example, storing writing implements with notebooks because the two go together. I tend to have a special place in the cupboard for my go-to breakfast foods, even though it looks a little chaotic to anybody not familiar with my eating habits.

Tidying is also different from cleaning and organizing. To me cleaning and organizing means taking time to put things where they belong. Throwing things out, even if this sometimes means making hard decisions or being a little ruthless. In recent months, during preparations for the renos, I even had to face some hard truths that I was never going to get around to all the little repair projects and other lofty plans. Consequently, I ended up clearing a lot of stuff from the house. And there’s still more to go!

Finally, tidying is different from a junk drawer. In my opinion, a junk drawer is a necessary convention to store organic accumulations of stuff. This is usually stuff that you kind of need, have a hard time tossing, but is really “homeless”. Enter the junk drawer, a perfect solution.

So what is tidying? Tidying aggregates a little bit of everything, even stuff that could be thrown out or put away, all in one jumble. Usually it’s in a bag, or a box, making it impossible to know where anything is. Even worse, is when somebody else tidies up for you creating pockets of random stuff mishmashed together. I find this super annoying and often it takes double the time to clean up and organize. Far longer than taking time to put things away in the first place. Plus there’s the added aggravation of not being able to find things, or even knowing which bag/box/drawer to start the search!

Digital Dilemma, Productivity

AI Missing the Obvious

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I’ve been using my AI goggles for almost a year now. In the beginning I plodded along with my same boring workouts. Except for the first time, I could visually see how boring the sets were in the recorded results. I also noticed that the set lengths were too long resulting in a gradual time decrease.

Eventually, I succumbed to the pressure of the head coach subscription. This definitely improved my experience with the goggles, even though I felt a little turned off that so many cool things were inaccessible without the subscription. For example, I couldn’t upload or save workouts to the goggles. I also missed out on tips and insights related to my workouts and some customization.

Since subscribing, I noticed my scores increasing. In the first couple months they climbed several points. Lately, they’ve hit a plateau. The goggles offer some explanations for this claiming as the workouts get harder, it takes time for my skills, technique, and endurance to catch up. However, much to my surprise, the goggles missed probably one of the most important and obvious insights. The time at which I go swimming impacts my score, sometimes by almost 10 points!

I felt surprised when I came to this realization. Despite all the fancy graphs, dashboards, timings, and measurements the goggles provide, the biggest difference in my swim performance is based on the time of day. This is not something tracked, measured, or even observed by the goggles. I noticed it by scrolling through the latest dashboards.

Fortunately, I mostly swim at the same times every week. I usually do one evening swim on Wednesdays. This is a tough day because it’s one of my in-office days. At the end of the day, I drive home in rush hour traffic, around 45 minutes. I do a quick turnaround at home to grab my swim gear and instrument before heading to the gym followed by a 2.5 hour rehearsal. Needless to say, my swim scores are usually lower for this swim, or any weekday evening swim, in general.

The second swim is earlier in the day on weekends. The gym closes at 8 these days, so I accidentally discovered earlier times work better for my energy and performance levels. While the technology helped to provide the data, it was simple human observation that made the connection. We’re not ready to be replaced by machines yet.

Digital Dilemma

The (AI) Agent Will See You Now

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Before anybody has had a chance to adjust fully to the introduction of generative AI (artificial intelligence), there’s already a new version available. The next iteration is Agentic AI. This new type of AI can “think” for you. It can make decisions and take actions, presumably based on what you, or millions of other people like you, already decided. In this way, automating or delegating certain kinds of work is at a new level.

While attending a workshop last month, one of the guest speakers shared his insights about AI. In particular, he spoke about agentic AI and the enormous potential. He used an example of using Agentic AI in his email inbox to automatically reply to emails. This, he said, would save him enormous amounts of time and effort. He then took it a step further to speculate on the new future of job interviews. In time, we can all just send our “agents” to do the interviews for us. Undoubtedly, an HR “agent” will administer the interview. At a certain juncture, you have to wonder what’s the point… and will we eventually lay around all day vegetating and decaying while our “agents” live in the world for us?

I posed my own scenario to the guest speaker. What would happen if his agentic AI email replies were answered by another agentic AI. How would either recipient know what had transpired if each side was being answered by the “agents”? Would this even count as a conversation happening? I already have a hard time retaining information from dozens of emails I receive and respond to daily. If agentic AI responded automatically, I feel I would retain even less because I wouldn’t be doing the actions.

While these scenarios may seem fantastical, creepy, or exciting, depending on your viewpoint, some of these changes are here. Last week I interviewed 6 students for a new coop posting. Two of my colleagues joined me. Though not confirmed, we all suspected that two of the students were using some form of AI to answer the interview questions. A third student invited his AI app as a guest to the interview. Needless to say, I didn’t admit the unwanted guest.

The AI interviews felt long. Answers were long and repetitive. Probably the worst part was that we didn’t learn anything about these students. We didn’t hire any of them.

Digital Dilemma

AI Missing the Mark

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In recent months I’ve read an alarming number of articles about the negative impacts of people developing relationships with AI chatbots. There are stories about teenagers, and adults, committing suicide. Other stories discuss AI chatbot users having mental breakdowns or exhibiting delusional behaviors. 

It’s also been in the news that loneliness is a new epidemic. Something that has only been amplified from the soul-crushing isolation of the pandemic. During the pandemic, we stayed connected by staying apart. Using technology became imperative for communicating. However, we were still communicating with other humans. At least most of us were.

I’ve also read articles about people benefiting from relationships with AI. For example, people who want to explore fantasies that they can’t do with their partners. I also read about a use case for training AI to act like a therapist as a way to make therapy more accessible, and affordable, to more people. Although they may seem like worthy uses of AI, the main objective is to keep you hooked.

Maybe this mode of communication with something non-human does work for some people. Maybe these same people also have other meaningful relationships in their life where AI chatbots are more auxiliary rather than central. For others, however, it’s missing the mark. Tech companies create chatbot characters to fill the void of loneliness. This provides people who maybe lack the necessary social and emotional skills with much needed contact. However, it’s purely digital, even if they sound believably like real people. Most chatbots are also conditioned to blindly validate and encourage everything you say or ask of it. This is designed purposefully to keep people engaged. 

Instead, the tech companies should focus on creating chatbots that help people develop the necessary skills to interaction with real humans. Chatbots should provide a range of feedback, without people needing to understand “jail breaking” to get a different I opinion. Jail breaking, incidentally, is how many people “game” AI to bypass guardrails. For example, constructing the prompt to provide information for a research project or to write an essay is one workaround.

If I ask friends or loved ones for feedback, it’s not always nice to hear, even if it comes from a good place. And sometimes we need that. Maybe this is yet another use of AI to help us re-establish social skills again.