Mountain Lake Park
Over Labor Day weekend, my husband and I walked around Mountain Lake Park, just south of the Presidio. It was a beautiful sunny day, and eventually we sat down by the lake. There, I had a staring contest with a very small creature I thought was a moth. Someone later identified it as a skipper butterfly. I can’t speak for its experience, but from my side, we were making eye contact. I was delighted.
Elsewhere along the path, I picked up a particularly beautiful leaf, then had the belated thought that it looked suspicious. A little research suggested poison oak. A small misstep in my enthusiasm for looking closely at things.
My husband and I had also been talking about AI, as we have been doing a lot lately. He shared An Alien Mind, an essay by OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, about the risks of developing increasingly capable systems we don’t fully understand. Between that and the Hugging Face security incident, there has been a lot to think about, and very little I feel certain about.
The weekend before, we had been at Fat Cat, an annual getaway with friends and one of my most treasured weekends of the year. We spend so much of it laughing. This year, alongside all that familiar happiness, I noticed a new uncertainty in our conversations. Many of us are at an age where we’re thinking about having children, imagining what the next part of our lives might look like. Questions about AI seem to find their way into those very personal questions. What will our work look like? What kind of future are we planning for?
I think some of that followed us to the lake. It’s strange how much of the future can occupy your mind while you’re sitting somewhere so lovely in the present. And then a tiny butterfly appears to look back at you, and for a little while you’re occupied with that.
Near our staring-contest spot, I found cleavers clinging to a low fence: a beautiful, spiky tangle. I took a small piece home to paint. I’m still turning over those conversations. I also want to spend some time looking at how this little plant holds itself together.
