You Don't Need "Personalization"

Paid subscribers to Second Breakfast learned on Monday that I'm toying with writing another book. And surprise surprise, it'll explore artificial intelligence, teaching, and learning – the long history of "intelligent tutoring systems," sure, but more of a series of provocations about philosophy, science, and popular culture – the kind of stuff that filled my keynotes – than another book on a century's worth of dumb predictions about technological revolutions. Anyway. Second Breakfast isn't an ed-tech newsletter, and I'll be mostly restricting my thoughts on AI to those Monday missives. But there really are some connections between "health technology" – least of which those sorts of ideological underpinnings that prompt the tech industry to value personalization, optimization, productivity.

Echoes of ed-tech: "The Case Against Personalized Workout Plans" – Alex Hutchinson writes in Outside about data that refutes the popular notion that different people have different training responses to certain stimuli and that their training plans should be adjusted accordingly. "24 Hour Fitness Puts Modern Twist on Presidential Physical Fitness Test," says AthleteTech News. That "twist" is the insulting slogan "Are you fitter than a 5th grader?" As if we weren't shamed enough as kids for not being able to climb a rope. Let's make sure nobody feels safe at the gym.

Drink science: "When did sodas, teas, and tonics become medicine?" asks Vox. Via The New York Times: "Deep Links Between Alcohol and Cancer Are Described in New Report."

Elsewhere in addiction: overdose deaths in the US have plummeted dramatically for the first time in decades, NPR reports. Shoutout to naloxone.

Grief tech: "My dead father is 'writing' me notes again," says Benj Edwards in Ars Technica. No Benj. He's not. Even if we add some air quotes, we should stop with calling what AI does "writing." ChatGPT is just the probabilistic arrangement of words — that’s not what humans do when writing. Elsewhere in horrible ideas of things to do with the dead, the proliferation of “funeral streaming” scams on Facebook.

The longevity hustle: "A Common Diabetes Drug Could Be a Fountain of Youth for Our Brains," says Gizmodo. Via The Conversation: "‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman." This story is super interesting – turns out there might not be "blue zones" where people live longer. There are, however, places where there's a lot of pension fraud, and funny, that's where people seem to live a long long time.

Sports tech: The latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has several stories about Nike, including a profile of CEO John Donahue, "The Man Who Made Nike Uncool." There are also several stories about sports betting (and/as tech). Via The Guardian: "NCAA approves Gallaudet’s use of 5G-connected helmet for deaf quarterbacks."

Thanks for subscribing to Second Breakfast. This newsletter explores the ways in which the digital technology industry seeks to engineer our bodies, not just our "brains," in the service of optimization and productivity.