Effort Fortifies

Marketing messages (top to bottom) from Qulllbot, OpenAI, the “Effortless Academic”, and two from Google.

The last one popped up in Google Docs and offered to do my homework for me, 40 years too late.

I am an enthusiastic practitioner and user of AI systems, but I also have a lot of misgivings about the technology as it is being deployed in the world. I am especially concerned about what it is doing to our minds and to our relationships. When I unpack those feelings, I find that much of my anxiety centers on that one word, effort, and the way it’s valued. It feels like it’s under attack on two fronts.

On one hand, the efforts of authors and artists are being devalued. While AI applications might make things “effortless” for users, they only do so by leaning on the past efforts of others. In the case of a chatbot, those others are the millions of people whose work was used to “train” the system. Rightly or wrongly, those efforts are rarely cited or compensated. If we don’t get this balance right, we risk eroding the incentives for artists to expend effort, or even to share their efforts at all.

On the other hand, and more centrally to my fears, effort itself is treated as a problem to be solved. Many AI products, in both their marketing and design, assume that users want effort to disappear entirely. But not all effort is bad; some of it strengthens us. If we erase it, we risk weakening the very human capacities that make work and learning meaningful.

“A” for effort

A professor I know likes to tell students that using AI to do your homework is like taking a robot to the gym and having it lift weights for you. The weight will get lifted, but your muscles will atrophy. 

Effort has the byproduct of making you stronger.  To sum it up in an epigram: Effort fortifies. (It’s not a coincidence that there’s a “fort” in both words. They’re linguistic cousins, both descended from the Latin fortis, meaning “strong”. More on that later.)

I’m tempted to try to coin a portmanteau, effortification, to describe the strengthening effects of effort. But I’m hardly the first person to muse on this topic. Educators talk about productive struggle, by which they mean engagement in challenging tasks that is beneficial (even necessary) for deep learning.  Psychologists talk about eustress, the response to stress that is seen as healthy.  My fears about AI touch on skill atrophy, or what some AI safety researchers call enfeeblement, the risk that humanity will lose its capabilities (individually and collectively) as we become too dependent on AI. That’s a fun word to say, but not so fun to think about.

Anyway, there’s an even plainer term that means strengthening through effort: “practice”.

Scullers expending effort for its own sake;  Charles River, Boston, October 9.

In Boston, you’re surrounded by the beauty of effort. Everywhere you look, people are practicing for what comes next. You see it on the running paths, across the college campuses, and on the river, where morning scullers glide past in synchrony. There are easier ways to get from place to place, of course; they choose to spend their energy not on arriving, but on practicing together.

What can we do about the devaluation of effort? The opposite, I guess: Acknowledge and reward genuine human effort wherever it still appears. Value practice. Reflect on where things came from. Reflect on who the human experts are and who discovered the thing your chatbot is telling you, if it’s correct. Learn their stories.

Word origins

That brings me to a brief diversion about the stories behind words.  When I get fixated on a word, like effort, I need to know as much of its history as I can.

If you’re a subscriber to this newsletter, I’ll bet you’re already familiar with the term etymology, the study of word origins. (Don’t ever confuse etymologists with entomologists, people who study insects. It really bugs them.) 

I’ll have a lot more to say about etymology in the coming year, but for now I’d like to call your attention to OneLook’s “History” tab, which I recently spruced up a bit. Look for it when you do a regular OneLook search; it’s also cross-linked from “Origin” buttons that appear in OneLook Thesaurus. 

This tab shows Wiktionary’s take on a word’s etymology, along with an interactive chart of its popularity over the centuries, based on Google Books data. (The chart has a little-known feature that shows you words popular in any decade if you hover over the bars. For instance, as depicted above, “endeavour” was a popular way to express “effort” in books of the 1810s.)

The “History” tab also includes a link to Etymonline for the word, if one is available.  Etymonline is perhaps my second favorite word site. Like OneLook, it’s been run by a guy named Doug for more than twenty years. But while OneLook is primarily an organizer of other people’s effort, Etymonline is the embodiment of effort itself. Douglas Harper has painstakingly traced the origins of more than 50,000 words, initially to assist his work as a historian. Among a dozen other colorful metaphors on that bio page, he describes the site as “an imaginary labyrinth with real minotaurs in it”. Go gently; it’s worth the effort.

This week’s challenge

Ray B. in Worcester, Massachusetts won the challenge from the last newsletter issue, which was to be the first to solve the Puzle game from that day. Ray’s efforts were rewarded with a handsome OneLook mug. Five others got it, if I counted correctly.

New challenge: In the past week, a certain pop megastar released a new album with a song that touches on this week’s newsletter theme in its chorus. If you take the last letter of every line in that chorus and unscramble the letters, you get one of the words in the paragraph above.  For a prize, what’s the artist, song, and unscrambled word?

Word games from around the Web

It’s been four years since Wordle was publicly released — happy birthday, Wordle! — but the world is still awash in low-effort Wordle clones. Wordle won’t mind, therefore, if I celebrate its birthday by highlighting a few things that look nothing at all like Wordle:

Ambigram:  This is more of an ongoing contest than a game, but it’s breathtaking. An ambigram is a typographical design that remains readable (or forms a different word) when it’s flipped or rotated or reflected. I can’t do it justice with that description, and screenshots cannot convey the intricacy of it; please visit the site to enjoy the fruits of a passionate online community.

Tiled Words:  In this well-crafted puzzle, you move and rotate Tetris-like word tiles around to “rebuild a broken crossword”.  The answers all belong to the same topical category — in this case, beans — and the clues play creatively on other senses of those same words.