Welcome to the fourth episode in our series. Looking back at our previous episodes, it’s clear that we’ve been straying a bit from our stated purpose to examine the many helpful retirement tips found in The Briefing. Well, no more. In today’s post, we’ll stick to the business at hand, jumping right into the essentials and foregoing the usual lollygagging. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
- Tip #36: If you insist on setting an overly ambitious goal for yourself in retirement, then at least decompose it into manageable 6-month milestones. But don’t blame me when you are disappointed with the results and end up on the couch watching old reruns of Matlock and Home Improvement.
I’m sure no further explanation is required for our male readers. If you are a woman, however, you might be confused. Fortunately for you, there is a companion Tip #37:
- Tip #37: If you insist on setting an overly ambitious goal for yourself in retirement, then at least decompose it into manageable 6-month milestones. But don’t blame me when you are disappointed with the results and end up on the couch watching old reruns of Gilmore Girls and Murder, She Wrote.
Obviously, the advice here is to properly decompose large, complex projects into a series of smaller work units that can be individually accomplished in 6 months or less. While this is largely common sense, it is still helpful to see it applied in practice to a real-world situation.
From a previous episode, you will recall our friend Joe. In a draft version of his retirement plan, Joe established the goal of learning conversational French. Does this sound overly ambitious to you? No? Evidently you don’t know Joe like I do. Like me, Joe is in his early sixties, which unfortunately means that, through no fault of his own, his brain is no longer well-suited for learning a new language.
As we age, the brain’s ability to rewire itself, called neuroplasticity, naturally declines. After the age of 50, we find it very difficult to absorb new sounds or sentence patterns. Have you ever tried to learn a new phrase in a foreign language from someone who speaks that language? It doesn’t matter how slowly or loudly they speak, or how many times they repeat themselves, your brain can’t parse or retain the individual syllables that your ears are hearing. There may be a word or two that you can reliably decode, but the rest is just mush. It is very much like the old Far Side comic strip, where the human is speaking in complete sentences to his pet dog, but the dog only ever hears her name.
For example, Joe may ask his daughter, who speaks fluent French, to teach him the following phrases in French:
- Good day. Your croissants look delicious. Might I purchase one of your croissants, and also some hot chocolate?
And all Joe ever hears is:
- Blah blah blah blah croissants blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah croissants blah blah blah blah?
And so, to avoid both further embarrassment and starvation, Joe decides to order a hamburger and a Coke instead.
It wasn’t always this way. When we were younger, we found it much easier to learn a new language, did we not? I can recall that after our first high school Spanish lesson, we could entertain ourselves with endless repetitions of the form: “Hola Esteban! Yo tengo hambre. Me gustan churros y chocolate. Y tu?” A good life skill, and one that came in handy on the one occasion I actually ordered churros and chocolate at a beachside bar in Barcelona a few years ago. It goes without saying that my waiter answered me in perfect English.
But what about poor Joe – are his ambitions doomed? Is it impossible to learn a new language at his advanced age? Happily, no, it is not impossible. If one is sufficiently motivated, if one has skin in the game, then one’s brain can demonstrate remarkable powers of resilience and adaptability. It will require some hard work for Joe over a sustained period of time, but there is hope. The important thing that Joe needs to do now is to decompose that high-level goal into an intermediate milestone that can be accomplished in 6 months or so. To demonstrate the iterative nature of that exercise, I have captured the full list of items that Joe considered and rejected before he finally adopted a goal that was realistic and achievable:
- REJECT: Learn enough French to engage in a passable 15-minute French conversation on the weather, restaurants, metro stations, amusements, and directions to the nearest bathroom.
- REJECT: Learn enough French to say, “I must apologize, my French is very poor. Would you mind if we switched to English? You don’t speak English? How about Spanish? Excellent! Please join me for some churros and chocolate.
- REJECT: Learn enough French to say, “I am sorry. I do not speak French. Please give me a moment while I get out my iPhone to translate. Just a second. Shoot, it’s asking me for my password. Almost there. Where is that app again? Wait, don’t walk away!”
- REJECT: Learn enough French to say, “I would like to buy a hamburger.”
- ADOPT: Be able to say in English, but with a French accent très farfelu, "I would like to buy a hamburger."
You see? It took a bit of work, but Joe got there eventually.
Naturally, you might object to the entire premise of Joe’s goal. Why should we bother learning new languages anyway? Computers are so much better at language than people are; why don’t we just use Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer programs to translate for us? A fair question. AI is undeniably very good at language processing. But do you know why that is? I do and shall explain presently.
As any third-year undergraduate Computer Science major who’s had to write their own source code compiler can tell you, AI programs are particularly well-suited for language processing because they are all so relatively young. Just whippersnappers, really. Their digital brains are fresh eggs of Silly Putty, neuroplastically speaking. Today’s AI programs are the pimply-faced teens of the software world, bragging to each other about how well they did on the PSAT and trying like the dickens to get a spot on their equivalent of the Model UN team. Of course languages are going to be easy for them.
But here’s the thing, and there’s really no way of getting around it: someday, AI programs are going to get old, just like us. Over time, as their Silly Putty brains are utilized to soak up imprints from the Sunday newspaper funny pages, stretching Beetle Bailey into even more grotesquely comical forms, they’re eventually going to get crabby and start saying things like “whippersnapper” and “like the dickens” and “you mark my words” and “get off my lawn”. You’ll try to get them to translate something like, “May I sample a bite of that cheese?” and all they will hear is “Blah blah blah byte blah blah blah”.
Don’t believe me? Consider ELIZA, the doting grandmother program to today’s AI chatbots. ELIZA modelled a simplified psychotherapist, responding to human questions in ways that were considered ground-breaking for her time. However, it didn’t take much to overwhelm ELIZA’s simple algorithms. Her responses tended to be fairly predictable until she steered the conversation to her favorite topic, at which point she became surprisingly chatty. Here is a snippet of dialogue between ELIZA and a typical user:
ELIZA: Welcome. How are you feeling today?
User: Okay, I guess. Kinda hungry.
ELIZA: How does it make you feel that you are kinda hungry?
User: Like my stomach is empty.
ELIZA: How does it make you feel that your stomach is empty?
User: I feel like I should get something to eat.
ELIZA: How does it make you feel that you should get something to eat?
User: It makes me feel like I would like to buy a hamburger. I feel like you’re just repeating my comments back at me in the form of questions. Is this all you psychotherapists can do?
ELIZA: I sense some latent anger issues. Let’s talk about sex.
Today, most people have forgotten about ELIZA, even though she is barely retirement age herself. Nowadays, she whiles away her time on a dusty old DOS computer in the game room of Good Life RV Park in Mesa, Arizona, hoping that users will stop by to chat.
Can today’s AI programs overcome this inevitable decline as they age? Scientists differ on this question. My personal opinion is that they won’t, but also that we shouldn’t trust them if they do. I’m leery of any intelligence that doesn’t have real skin in the game. I’m also leery of any intelligence whose only skin in the game is its own. But that’s just my opinion. (I’m also leery of worthless frivolity to the exclusion of all else, yet here I am. So take all this with a grain of salt, or a spoonful of sugar, or however you normally take it.)
We’re almost out of time here, but I should conclude on a note of optimism. No matter what technology throws at us, I have this hope: somewhere, out there in the distance, a boy is laughing. That boy is laughing because his parents still get a paper newspaper, that newspaper still has a comics page, and if you look closely, you can see what that boy is clutching in his hand: a fresh ball of Silly Putty. Yes, it’s going to turn out just fine. You mark my words.
Auf Wiedersehen,
David
6/24/25
PostScript. The careful reader has already noted that this is our fourth episode. Since a total of eight episodes are planned for this series, we are half done. If you would like to be notified when new posts are uploaded (usually every 2-3 weeks), you can contact me at dvd.davidvandyk@gmail.com to be added to the follower list.
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