Confessions of a Sh**ty Tech Evangelist

To bill myself as a “tech evangelist,” I’m not a very good one.

A “good” tech evangelist pontificates about all the wondrous things technology can do for us, with a zeal that’s borderline religious. It’s not called an “evangelist” for no reason.

But I’m just not quite there.

I think often of whether technology could solve the various mundane challenges of my life. For example, I can outsource reminders to pick up my dry cleaning and I can use augmented reality to ensure paintings on my walls are level. I don’t even own an actual level.

But I’m not a good tech evangelist.

Aside from a Renoir print of my favorite bridge in Paris, all the paintings on my walls are mine. Some people are pictures-in-frames people. Some people are shot-glass-collector people. I chart my life through my paintings. They tell stories of all kinds of love - from youthful infatuation that certainly seemed real at the time to the love that unexpectedly sets your heart on a new rhythm, the kind you believe in your soul as surely as you believe in the horizon in front of you. They tell stories of loss, growth, and starting anew in time.

But boy, do they hurt.

Not just hurt to look at and remember the trying moments they depict.

They physically hurt to paint.

It’s my own fault. My quest to never use paintbrushes (can’t make it too easy, can I?!) takes my hobby to strange - and dangerous - places. One of the older paintings in my living room has a gritty texture to it, as the paint was mixed with the burned ashes of a love letter I never mailed. Another features barbed wire to illustrate separation in all its forms. Making barbed wire by hand is no easy task, believe me. Don’t try this at home.

Many of them lately have used a technique achieved with palette knives operating in a percussive, hammering motion. As therapeutic as it can be to hit the living daylights out of a canvas, it hurts my shoulder and wrist badly and it’s adversely affecting my preparations for the Army Combat Fitness Test. I’ve wondered if I could somehow program a machine to mimic this motion for me, to save my arm from injury.

But what would that achieve?

Could a machine learn to create the controlled randomness that results from the paint hammering onto the canvas?

Probably.

There’s a degree of learning involved each time I start a painting. I’m learning to get the hang of a new technique. I’m learning to gauge color even with sunglasses on indoors at night, shielding my eyes from all the splattering paint. I’m also getting the hang of processing whatever I’m trying to depict. I’m learning about myself and my own perception of the experiences I’m painting about. I’m learning tough but necessary lessons about whether the horizon in my last painting were really reflective of the love I felt slipping away, or if the connection weren’t real and it was simply an ordinary sunset on a beach like any other.

A machine can learn.

Machine Learning pertains to algorithms that build off inferences and patterns in data to essentially improve themselves without supervision. We see this routinely in practical applications. For example, my Gmail suggested responses have improved so much over the years that they’re uncannily in sync with how I communicate.

A machine could be programmed to automate the knife movements used in my paintings and could get the hang of the technique before the piece was finished. Doing so would save my shoulder and wrist from aching for days.

But what of the aching for days in my heart that led to each painting on my wall in the first place, mitigated only through the process of learning from myself as I paint?

A machine can learn from itself - by itself - and the along the way could save my arm from hurting. But it cannot replace what I must learn from myself - by myself.

We train our algorithms, but do we allow ourselves enough room to mature, evolve, heal, and learn - from our mistakes and the chances we bravely take to make them?

We talk so much of Machine Learning. Have we forgotten the Emotional Learning in ourselves that’s equally important?

Should #EL be the new hot issue, alongside its techie cousin #ML?

The quest to save my injured arm taught me more than I’d ever be able to teach models for machine learning.

Maybe I’m a bad tech evangelist after all.

Or maybe I found exactly what I needed technology to provide me, and it just happened to be in the data store I’d least expect:

My own heart.

Keep learning, team.