I felt so much better on Thursday and so I put in a full day of patent work – still not working out (physically) yet, I think I’m going to ease into that later in the week. I’m increasingly having more and more conversations with patent attorneys about how they use AI for their work and how it helps them out a lot, saving time, analyzing charts of data, summarizing patents. It’s not that I don’t try, I try a bit here and there (kind of hoping that it’ll help me out the way other people tell me it will – like maybe it’ll cut my search time in 50%) and kind of remain unimpressed. Maybe I’m not using it the right way, maybe I’m ornery and old. It’s just..not very clever. That’s what I want – even at my regular job which is repetitive and one might say, boring – it is in finding the magic in the mundane that is human. I know AI is still a baby, so maybe it will grow into a capable adult. Or else it will just bypass that capable adult stage and slide right into all the ways in which we are terrible to each other. Anyways, the funniest part of my conversation yesterday with an attorney was not about patents, rather it was about the attorney’s children’s school which sent an email out pleading with parents to not send AI generated emails to the schools asking for stuff. I mean, does it feel good when you get an email that is AI generated – even if it says all the right things, doesn’t it feel not quite right?
In the fall, I’m going to go to NYC to see a Mozart opera with my friend Dave. Dave is a big opera fan. I’m mostly a fan of Dave and NYC and I’ll finally get to meet his sister and niece which I’m very excited about and I’m only somewhat tolerant of opera. (People are so interesting, really! I love doing things that other people love – Dave can talk for hours about opera and sometimes I let him do that to me, and I then I forget about 85% of what he says (not on purpose, it’s just because I don’t really understand/care about opera). And then I ask him again and then he tells me again, happy (I think) for the opportunity to talk about opera at length again. (I met another person who is as passionate about the movie Home Alone as Dave is about opera. The Home Alone conversation veered into how many times have you met macaulay culkin? To when did you get your home alone tattoo of mc slapping his hands on his face? Listen – AI has got nothing on people.))
Anyways, this opera chit chat brings me to my most charming find of the week on the internets. This opera clip of a song from the Magic Flute by Mozart. This couple is so cute and they are in love in real life and engaged to be married and you can feel it in the music and their joy at singing it together. To love and be loved – that is how it goes.