The 10,000 Hour Problem

The loss of earned knowledge

I believe in the 10,000 Hour Theory, whether the original research has been debunked or not. The 10,000 hour number was popularized by author Malcolm Gladwell whose book Outliers was based on research by psychologist Anders Ericsson, who studied violin students at Berlin's Academy of Music. He found that the elite performers spent more practice time developing their craft, while those who performed at an average level did less. Ericsson himself later said the 10,000 number was just an average and that some people gained the same level of proficiency with less time, while others took longer.

But still, practice makes perfect. This really should be self-evident.

As a writer, I went through my own 10,000 Hour journey. I had to spend decades writing mediocre short stories and starting but not finishing many novels before I finally completed and published The Red Jade Door, my first Beatnik Spy novel. Once I finished that one, more followed in fairly quick succession. I got better with each book, learning new things as I went, and the process also began moving quicker.

Learning how to write a novel isn't one thing. Neither is playing violin or playing quarterback or building beautiful furniture. You have to learn dozens of elements of the whole, each one a significant hurdle of its own. Some of them are essential and if you can't master them, you can't master the larger whole. Some, if you can excel at them, will elevate your art.

It may be that you get really good at one part of the whole and that becomes your signature. A quarterback can study defenses so hard that they out-think the opposing coach. A musician develops a tone that is so perfect and beautiful that they can play anything and it sounds amazing. A crime writer may be renowned for their ability to construct incredibly clever and intricate mysteries. Another may be heralded for their unique and memorable characters.

Any artist must go through this journey. Even savants and geniuses must still attempt and master the pieces, even if they arrive at excellence faster than the mean.

But what if you could skip all that and go right to emulating mastery without earning it?

That is what Artificial Intelligence offers the creative arts. (Not the performing arts, you still have to play your scales to get up in front of an audience) It offers the production of novels, screenplays, illustrations, and musical recordings outside the path of 10,000 Hours. The machine, via mass plagiarism and clever regurgitation, does all the work so that users don't have to.

Creating 'content' with A.I. means that users didn't master any of those interim steps and therefore, don't really understand all those components of the art. As an experienced writer, sometimes it's hard for me to watch movies or TV shows where elements of storytelling are weak or missing. I recognize overused tropes. An actor can see flaws in anther's performance that the average person would miss. The same holds for musicians.

I suppose as A.I. advances, it will develop an understanding of art in all its complexity and elements just as a human might through the 10,000 hours process. Perhaps it will even rival humans in creativity and craft – God save us. But the humans who refuse to take the harder path and rely on machines to do their work will never achieve that same level of understanding and I think that makes them poorer for it. They will remain clueless drivers of machine output, unable to fully understand the 'product' they are creating.

That's a personal tragedy for those involved in A.I. implementation, but there is a greater loss for society a whole. The gradual replacement of developed knowledge and skills in the hands of humans by technology eventually removes those skills from society. Think of this analogy: imagine that all our food is grown in massive fields tended by robots. Fast forward a few decades and something disables them. No one knows how to grow food and all the farmers and their farms are gone. Mass starvation commences. This type of scenario will be replicated across every area of human endevour.

This could also destroy audiences for higher art. If no one is spending 10,000 hours to understand and read literary fiction, then who will literary writers write for? The same is true for artists and musicians in the 'higher' forms of art and music. Who will jazz musicians play for? Will there even be jazz musicians?

Going forward, as A.I. expands its reach, I am just expecting that everything I can do as a writer will be replaced by machines and their lazy users. I think it's even possible that written fiction may die altogether, killed by a generation raised with IPads from birth who aren't capable of exerting the attention span to digest a short story, much less a novel.

If that's the case, then the art and craft of fiction, in the best case, becomes an artisan product crafted for a diminishing audience of old farts and the handful of young people whose parents didn't destroy their brains with digital addiction. We human writers will try and preserve the knowledge and art of the form, just as artisan carpenters preserve pre-industrial woodworking or gardeners cultivate heirloom vegetables.

Because of this shift, I am going to re-orient my own writing slightly. I recognize the pointlessness of trying to compete with slickly produced A.I. written genre fiction spawned with stories and characters designed to appeal to the widest popular audience. If I'm going to become a boutique craftsman, I might as well write with a more personal voice. I'm sticking to crime fiction, but starting with my dark crime thriller, The Never Was, I will focus more on craft and my idiosyncratic worldview. This will carry over to next year's The Conspiracy of the Pines, the first book in a semi-autobiographical hard-boiled detective series. I will still write for an audience, but from a more personal perspective.

When I think of this I always imagine the end of Truffaut's adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, where a hidden community have all memorized books and are walking about, speaking them aloud. Maybe that is my future, reading my books aloud to a small group of outcasts, huddled around. That's comforting, but also sad.