The Urgency of Poetry in Business
Why writing poems is our best hope
Last week, I shipped out 30 copies of a new book of poems. It’s called After The House: Poetry of a New Business. The poems aren’t mine. They were written by businesspeople from around the world who responded to my call for contributions. Their material compensation for their efforts is not large. Soon, they will each receive a free copy of the book.
Why would anyone in business spend valuable time writing poetry? Why would I spend my time editing together a collection of poems about business? What’s the ROI?
We want to save the world from a looming cultural apocalypse.
Automatic Writing
About the same time that I was preparing the books for shipment, news came out of the development of an artificial intelligence system capable of imitating the writing style of any person, creating new text that appears to be just like the original author’s.
The creators of this AI are so concerned that it poses a grave threat to human civilization that they are refusing to allow the system to be used outside of their laboratory.
I am equally concerned by the human reaction to the development of this new kind of AI. Journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson exemplified the response I am worried about when she wrote, “AI can write just like me.”
Parkinson was given special access to the new AI system, to which she provided extensive samples of her own writing. She then watched as the machine created replicas of the kinds of news articles she would write, even fabricating false sources of information that, described in imitation of Parkinson’s style, seemed quite plausible.
Parkinson was shocked. The foundations of her professional self-worth crumbled. “It turns out I am not the unique genius we all assumed me to be; an actual machine can replicate my tone to a T,” she wrote. The implicit question for her seems to be: If artificial intelligence can produce work just like that of human writers, more quickly and cheaply than any human ever could, how can humans hope to compete? How can any human writer hope to be paid fairly for their work?
The Coming Apocalypse
“Brace for the robot apocalypse,” Parkinson warns, and she’s right to warn of an apocalypse. She couldn’t be more wrong about the nature of the apocalypse, however.
It’s not the robots we need to fear, but our human reaction to them. The coming apocalypse is not technological, but cultural.
When Parkinson writes that “AI can write just like me,” she’s missing a vital understanding of the value her own work. The new artificial intelligence system cannot write just like her. It can create documents of words that imitate her articles.
“Writing” is a verb, not a noun. The distinction gets to the heart of what it will take for our humanity to survive the apocalypse.
Parkinson bemoans the shattering of her genius, but her genius was never in the tone of her written works. It was in the process through which she produced them, slowly and thoughtfully, struggling to express the profound doubts in her mind.
Parkinson writes by living. As she writes, she brings her individual experience as a human being, reflects upon it, paying attention to her own subtle reactions to sense patterns in meaning. As she writes, she engages with other humans to learn about what they know, but more importantly, how they feel about what they know. She sits at a keyboard and composes sentences to describe what are at first vague reactions. She gets it wrong, deletes entire passages, and rewrites them, gaining deeper understanding in the process.
This process is not at all similar to the way an artificial intelligence system creates its products, but Parkinson seems to have forgotten that writing is valuable because of the sacrifice and subjectivity we put into it. If writing is work, it isn’t work like the lifting of stone blocks into place to create a wall. It’s soul work. The value in writing isn’t merely in the ability to create a document that meets professional standards of information and style, a product that people will pay money for.
When we read material worth reading, what we’re consuming is much more than just the data on the page, or the cleverness of its wording. We are purchasing access to the subjective struggles of another human being to come to grips with reality and share that experience with others.
I acknowledge that digital corporations will soon be capable of cynically applying their skill by creating algorithms capable of producing poems that are just as technically impressive as the poets produced by writing programs at the most prestigious universities. If such material will be capable of supplanting the true writing of human beings, then the problem won’t be with the machines that perform the rote tasks of pretending to be writers.
The problem will be with us, as readers, as writers, and as the business owners who facilitate connections between them. The apocalypse will come when humans degrade themselves to the point at which they believe that their only value is in the ability to act as inefficient computers, receiving and processing data, and using it to create tangible output, objects that create the appearance of reflection, the simulation of care.
When this happens, we cease to be cultural beings. We will become nothing more than the first generation of automata.
The Poetic Resistance
For those of us who value the experience of humanity, it is clear that we must respond, but how?
The poet Fateme Banishoeib advises, “We must start to value the journey of a human, the human personal struggle for achieving something great.” Too often in business, we value achievement without recognition of the journey of struggle that enables it.
If we are going to stop the cultural apocalypse of human automation, then we need to reject its frame. We need to reject the premise that value is to be found only in the efficient creation of products.
The best business thrives by sustaining connections between people who are leading lives of meaningful productivity enabled by the kind of profound insights that only come through slow contemplation and subjective struggle. This is the business of poetry.
Poetry withers when it focuses on its products rather than its process. It is true that there are many poets who believe that their value is in creating great poems, with witty phrasings and tricky technical structure. These poets will be the first to fall victim to the coming wave of AI poetry simulators. Elegant phrasings and intricate structure are the stuff of supercomputers.
Those who wish to survive the cultural apocalypse will need to practice a new kind of poetry, one in which the creation of poems is a consequence of the process, but not the purpose of it. This new poetry will embody the best that humanity has to give, not of intelligence, but of the ability to be struck dumb by the beauty of an idea or experience, and to form relationships in the attempt of sharing it.
Humans will never survive in a business world that trades only in the hard coin of of data, of facts. The humans of business who endure will be those who learn to deal in metaphors, in double-meanings, of things that have never been but which are nonetheless true.
The poets of business have assembled this new book not in order to exhibit poems of high objective quality, but to engage in a conspicuous act of poetic defiance against the algorithmic order. After the House is a declaration of our intention to remain human, celebrating rather than minimizing the ambiguity in the words we share.
