The New Yorker is already writing to an algorithm

Is the human imagination safe?

I often wake up before dawn, ahead of my wife and kids, so that I can enjoy a little solitary time. I creep downstairs to the silent kitchen, drink a glass of water, and put in my AirPods. Then I choose some music, set up the coffee maker, and sit and listen while the coffee brews.

It’s in this liminal state that my engagement with the algorithm begins. Groggily, I’ll scroll through content on Reddit, or watch home-gym videos on YouTube, or check Apple News. From the kitchen island, my laptop beckons me to work, and I want to accept its invitation—but, if I’m not careful, I might instead watch an episode of The Rookie, an ABC police procedural about a middle-aged father who reinvents himself by joining the L.A.P.D. (I discovered the show on TikTok, probably because I'm demographically similar to its protagonist.) In the worst case scenario, my kids wake up while I’m still scrolling, and I’ve squandered the hour I gave up sleep to secure.

If this sort of morning sounds familiar, it’s because, two decades into the smartphone era, life’s rhythms and the algorithm’s have merged.

I have a simple proposal for Joshua Rothman (from the start of whose latest New Yorker article this extract is taken). Leave your phone upstairs. Notice how passive this all is. “Life’s rhythms” didn’t “merge” with “the algorithm.” (Is there only one? Hail The Algorithm!) That is a metaphor. In reality, people chose how to spend their time. I also like to get up early. My phone stays upstairs. In the kitchen is a copy of The Sound and the Fury and recently Gulliver’s Travels. I will be continuing my read-through of Adam Smith in that time soon.

The rest of the article is about AI, and if you have been keeping up with AI in places other than the New Yorker you won’t learn much, apart from the fact that the director of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once thinks that the way AI tells stories is a threat to civilization (he has a Jenga analogy). In my print edition, the text cuts off before the end of the article. But it was heading for the usual corny resolution.

The way Rothman chose to tell his story removes the idea that he can just change things, quite easily, if he wants to. He is already following a New Yorker algorithm. He is already writing in a skimmable, predictable manner. The sub-head gives you the whole thing: “We’re used to algorithms guiding our choices. When machines can effortlessly generate the content we consume, though, what’s left for the human imagination?”

A lot of writing conforms to the demands of its genre. To change that, it takes new human choices. The irony of the piece is that Rothman started ChatGPT and it was both a better use of time than watching police procedural shows or scrolling Reddit for an hour before dawn, and actually lead to him closing the laptop out of boredom.

Win-win, right? The human imagination is safer than it was when he scrolled all morning?