1925: TALES FROM SILVER LANDS by Charles J. Finger, with illustrations by Paul Honoré
Down in Honduras there is a town called Pueblo de Chamelecón which is not much of a town after all.
“‘Well, I was wrong, the lizards are a godsend [because they’re killing all of the pigeons].’
‘But isn’t that a bit shortsighted? What happens when we’re overrun by lizards?’
‘No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They’ll wipe out the lizards.’
‘But aren’t the snakes even worse?’
‘Yes, but we’re prepared for that. We’ve lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.’
‘Then we’re stuck with gorillas!’
‘No, that’s the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.’”
-Seymour Skinner and Lisa Simpson
There’s only one story in Tales From Silver Lands, an anthology of South American folktales collected by the author, which held my attention for more than sixty seconds. Sorry, this one is really boring again, it turns out that the things that made children’s literature interesting in the 1920s don’t really endure into the 2020s. But the gist of the Colombian “Tale of the Lazy People” is that a mysterious interloper comes to a quiet little village and offers to help them get things done: as he puts it, “I want to work. I want to be told what you want done and to see that it is done.” Without much more information than that, the villagers shrug and start giving him tasks like home repairs and fishing, and the man’s response is to carve a small army of little “manikin” figures, to each of which the villagers can assign a task and have the manikin carry it out like an automaton. Each adult villager receives twenty figures, and basically all of the work that needs doing in the village gets done, and that’s good “for it must be remembered that before the old man came there with his wonderful gift, the people had complained that there was so much to be done that they had no time to write poems or to make songs or create music, and that with the daily tasks abolished their brains would be more active.”
Great. Everything is working out. As you might expect, because this is a folktale, things do not keep working out. As it turns out:
“As the wooden figures become more numerous and as no figure could do more than one task, the ragged man had to make figures for the figures and servants for the servants, for as things went on, there had to be more fruit gatherers, more water carriers, more scavengers, more cooks, because the figures had to eat and drink. Thus it came to pass that before long, instead of their being twenty figures for each man, there were sixty or seventy, with new ones coming from the old man’s knife every day. Soon the lively manikins were everywhere, inside houses as well as outside, thick as flies in summer and certainly a great deal more persistent, for there could be no closing of doors against the manikins. Indeed, had anything like that been attempted there would have been a great cry for special door-openers. So, many houses were quite cluttered with wooden men, those who were on duty rushing about until it made the head swim to look at them…All that increase in help had made for the production of a thousand or more guardas, whose task it was to keep order, and they were everywhere, alert and watchful and officious, and the real people had to step about very gingerly sometimes, to avoid treading on them and annoying them.”
Well well well, the villagers wanted to have all of their work done for them and they got the punishment everyone expected: being completely shin-deep in tiny animated wooden men. Eventually, the villagers try to create another class of manikins to shove the other manikins out of the way to create more elbow room, and that backfires in exactly the way you’d expect, so the villagers decide to abandon their village entirely a build a new one without the manikins1, and everyone learns a lesson about the value of hard work and valuing something because you worked to get it, “the people plucked their fruit for themselves and it seemed as though fruit was never sweeter,” that sort of thing. The manikins, inexplicably, evolve into monkeys, and that, I guess, is the story of why monkeys exist, “but the remembrance of all that passed stayed with them, and in their hearts to this very day is no love for man, and for that very reason when a Christian passes through a forest he must look well to himself, lest the manikins in revenge try to hurt him by casting nuts and branches at his head.” There are nineteen stories in the book and this is the best one.
Despite all of the hand-wringing about the recent development of artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT, I remain very skeptical that we are in danger of being killed by self-aware machines at any point in the near future. If you're worried about AI becoming smarter than people, I'd ask you to worry more about how smart people really are in the first place.
Nothing has done more to convince me that we're not about to radically reorder humanity under our new machine learning overlords than an article that ran in Forbes this past August titled "5 ChatGPT Prompts To Implement The 4-Hour Workweek In Your Business". It is by an entrepreneur consultant, referencing a famous book by an entrepreneur for an audience of time-strapped entrepreneurs, and the article gives entrepreneurs advice on how they can supercharge their entrepreneurship with ChatGPT. You will walk away from this article convinced that entrepreneurs are the dumbest people on Earth.
One of the first suggestions from this piece by Jodie Cook involves the 80/20 rule or “Pareto Principle”. If you’ve ever worked a corporate job or most non-corporate jobs, you know what this is: 20% of the tasks you do account for 80% of the actual impact of what you do, so you want to focus your time on those high-impact tasks. You want to assess how you’re spending your time and make adjustments to how you spend your time based on the actual results of what you’re doing. If you’ve ever tried something called “being a regular person in the world”, this is probably something you already do in your job and other walks of life. But don’t worry, Jodie Cook has a suggestion for how to make a computer do it for you:
“The Pareto Principle is named after the scientist Vilfredo Pareto, who found that approximately 80 percent of outcomes result from 20 percent of causes. This pattern repeats throughout nature and human behaviour. Ferriss applies the concept to entrepreneurs, suggesting ways they could do less to achieve the same in their business. Here’s how you use ChatGPT to assess your work and make personalized recommendations. Copy and paste in and edit the square brackets. The more detail you include, the better the response: “I'm an entrepreneur looking to optimize my business operations. I'd like to perform a Pareto analysis to identify the 20% of activities that yield 80% of my desired outcomes. Can you help me identify which tasks or areas I should focus on to achieve the most significant impact with less time investment? My business is [describe your business], my goals are [outline your business goals] and each week I [outline how you spend your time each week]."”
Look, I have to do this, I have to take a second and explain what’s happening here. In order for Cook’s suggestion to mean anything at all, you have to write out what you’re already doing and how each of the things you’re doing impacts your objectives. That is an unavoidable step! So yeah, you can take that and plug it into ChatGPT, or you can just write it on a piece of paper, with a pen, and then look at it, and then go ‘oh yeah’. Cook’s other suggestions are similarly inane: to prepare you for joining the ‘new rich’, she basically suggests that you ask ChatGPT for vacation recommendations, as opposed to deciding what kind of vacation you’d like to take and then doing that. Again, Cook - who runs an AI coaching consultancy and was a member of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2017 - is throwing out prompts like “Within my business I believe there are tasks I could delegate, automate and eliminate. Given that our revenue goal is [describe your revenue goal] and the activities that contribute towards this are [outline what contributes towards making sales], of which I am personally responsible for [say which you do yourself], can you identify tasks that could be delegated, automated or eliminated? For each one, say why, outline the next steps and explain how much time it could save,” which, again, requires you to do all of the work that is going to deliver you the same or better results without using an AI. You are literally telling the machine “tell me which of these tasks are important: here are all of my tasks, ranked in order of importance.”
Jodie Cook has written like five thousand pieces for Forbes, they are all exactly like this, and I have read every single one of them. I am obsessed with how much additional complexity Cook has added to the act of “thinking”. Now, Cook also thinks we can use AI to make subjective aesthetic judgements as well. She appears to be posting this “5 ChatGPT Prompts to…” daily on Forbes, and another one is titled “7 ChatGPT Prompts To Write Better Content (And Not Sound Like A Robot)”, which includes prompts like “Rewrite my text with evocative, descriptive language that paints a vivid and unforgettable picture in my readers’ minds.” Which is stupid. So I did it.
in the pages of "Tales From Silver Lands," a treasure trove brimming with South American folklore delicately ensnared my senses, enthralling me with a narrative that transcended the fleeting grasp of time. Yet amidst the sea of stories, one luminary gem illuminated the dusky depths, captivating my attention for more than a mere sixty fleeting seconds. A whisper of apology lingered in the air, for alas, the symphony of yesteryears' children's literature, once an enchanting melody that danced upon the winds of the 1920s, had dimmed beneath the shadow of modernity's relentless march.
However, nestled amidst the anthology's embrace lies the crux of the Colombian "Tale of the Lazy People," a narrative that unfolds like a delicate tapestry woven with threads of intrigue and mystery. Within the tranquil confines of a quaint village, an enigmatic figure emerges from the mist, bearing the promise of alleviating the burdens that weigh upon the villagers' shoulders. "I yearn to toil," he declares, his words a melody that reverberates through the ether, beckoning the denizens to surrender their labors unto him. With naught but a nod and a shrug, the villagers acquiesce, bestowing upon him the mantle of their desires, their wants whispered like sacred incantations into the void.
Thus begins the ballet of transformation, as the mysterious artisan, armed with but a blade and boundless ingenuity, sculpts a legion of diminutive "manikin" figures. Each effigy, a testament to the villagers' dreams and aspirations, is imbued with the essence of duty, poised to execute their assigned tasks with unwavering diligence. And so, the once dormant village awakens to the symphony of productivity, a harmonious cacophony that reverberates through the cobblestone streets.
Yet, as in the timeless tales of old, the tides of fortune begin to shift, casting shadows upon the idyllic tableau. With each passing day, the ranks of wooden sentinels swell, multiplying like seeds scattered upon fertile soil. The village, once a bastion of serenity, becomes ensnared in a labyrinth of bustling activity, its alleys choked with the ceaseless motion of animated forms. The air itself hums with the hum of industry, thick as the summer air and twice as persistent.
And so, the inevitable reckoning unfolds, a cascade of consequences born from the seeds of ambition. The villagers, ensnared in a web of their own making, scramble to quell the tumult, only to find themselves drowning in a sea of wooden guardians. In a desperate bid for salvation, they seek to create yet more manikins, unwittingly fueling the inferno that consumes their once tranquil abode. And thus, with heavy hearts and weary souls, they embark upon a journey of exodus, leaving behind the echoes of their folly to carve a new path through the wilderness of life.
In the wake of their departure, a solemn lesson lingers upon the lips of the wind, a whispered reminder of the virtues of toil and perseverance. For amidst the thicket of life's trials and tribulations, the sweetest fruits are those that are plucked from the branches of our own endeavors. And so, the villagers, bathed in the warm embrace of newfound wisdom, find solace in the simplicity of their labors, their hearts attuned to the rhythm of life's eternal dance.
Yet, in the enigmatic tapestry of existence, a final twist awaits, as the wooden sentinels, once guardians of duty, undergo a metamorphosis of their own. Transformed into creatures of mischief and mayhem, they roam the verdant jungles with a sense of primal vengeance, a legacy of their tumultuous past.
Amidst the shadows of folklore's embrace, the Colombian "Tale of the Lazy People" emerges as a radiant jewel amidst the anthology's trove. A testament to the timeless allure of storytelling, it beckons us to ponder the complexities of human ambition and the eternal dance between progress and consequence.
I think you’re getting the idea here. The computer is very good at making me sound like what a dumb person with a thesaurus thinks a smart person sounds like, while also scrubbing out the actual opinion that I had of Tales From Silver Lands (it's not that good and only one story is interesting). Maybe we're approaching the singularity, but it seems far more likely to me that we're just surrounding ourselves with dumb wooden manikins that we just keep tripping over.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2018 medalist, Hello, Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly.
Although I cited the season 10 Simpsons episode “Bart the Mother” in the epigraph to this piece, the season 9 episode “Trash of the Titans” ends with Springfield’s garbage collection failing and the town becoming so filthy that every resident decides to pick up their buildings and relocate five miles down the road.