# Lunch Is Enough

> On curiosity, making things, and the pleasure of being here for it.

By Nate Morton · 2026-10-08 · [Essays](https://lfkai.town/essays/)

Web version: https://lfkai.town/essays/lunch-is-enough/

## The walk

On half my morning walks, when I’m not listening to a podcast, I’m talking to ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice mode. I was wowed when it first came out, and I’m still wowed now. We already had the internet in our pockets. In the old days you had to get the phone out, find the browser, go to Google, do a search. Before that, god forbid, you had to wait until you got home and open the computer. Now I talk. The step from having my words transcribed to having a real conversation with the electrons humming along on the other end cannot be overstated.

I wonder how long we get to find this strange. There must have been a period when people picked up a telephone and thought about the voice traveling down the wire. Eventually they just wanted to know when you’d be home. We’re remarkably good at absorbing a miracle into the arrangements for dinner.

I’m trying to enjoy this one while I can still see it.

One morning, on my way toward the levee, I was asking about the last century of the Roman Republic. The place was coming apart. Ambitious men, armies, the usual catastrophic trouble. I wanted to know how the everyday machinery kept working. Who collected the taxes while the people in charge were busy destroying one another? Somewhere under all that history, somebody had paperwork.

So I asked. Then I asked something else. Two thousand years collapsed into a conversation I could have with my hands in my pockets.

I’ve always had a weakness for following a question farther than I intended. Reading about something is dangerous. You begin with a perfectly innocent interest and eventually there’s a directory on your computer, three things you need to learn, and a reasonable chance you’ve forgotten why you sat down.

I have a lot of directories.

## Getting connected

In the mid-90s, we ran a dial-up internet company. Getting online involved a modem, TCP/IP settings, and some negotiations with the gods of baud rates. Ordinary people figured it out. They got the computer talking to the modem and the modem talking to the world. I loved that. I loved being a part of it. A whole new world was opening up, and people were finding their way into it from their living rooms.

Once you were connected, an interest could carry you a long way. Whatever you wanted to learn, somebody had written about it, argued about it, or made instructions. It was a city you could get lost in. No zoning laws, no building inspectors, and certainly nobody worrying about the user experience. Just a sprawling, haphazard collection of strange little establishments run by people who cared far too much about something. You could wander into one looking for a bicycle part and emerge three hours later knowing the history of Soviet ball bearings.

Down some questionable side street you’d find a person who knew everything about one thing. He’d spent twenty years restoring amplifiers, or studying a forgotten battle, or working out why your exact model of turntable made that noise. His website looked like an accident at a stationery store. The information was magnificent.

That strange, wonderful city is still out there. But now there’s another way to explore it. You can ask about the unfamiliar part, try an idea, show the model what happened, and work through the next step. Learning and making start happening together. You get something working, understand a little more, and immediately think of something else to try. There goes Saturday, quite happily.

In January of 2023, my wife and I gave ChatGPT the responses to a North Lawrence neighborhood survey. There were 127 of them. It grouped the themes: community, the river, proximity to downtown, the quiet, the small-town feel. It drafted an opening paragraph for the writeup for us.

My initial response to ChatGPT 3.5 had been the technically sophisticated assessment, holy shit, this is cool.

It was astonishing, even when it was wrong. And Christ, it could be wrong. A chatbot could leave you half expecting “1 + 2 = 5,” offered with the serene confidence of a drunk giving directions.

Now it writes the code for my podcast player. I hadn’t finished being impressed by what it did with the neighborhood survey.

## At my desk

I can have an idea over breakfast and start building it that morning. I can hand off hours of research. I can ask questions about things I know almost nothing about and immediately start learning. I can automate something annoying just because I’m tired of doing it.

So I do. I wanted a podcast player I could talk to, one that would go find an episode, tell me what’s in it, and line it up to play. Now I have one. I wanted a work log that mostly keeps itself. A little pop-up that hands me a password when I ask for it. Nobody asked for any of them. I wanted them, so I made them.

I use the cloud models constantly. They’re there on my walks. But models are also available to download and run on my own computer, humming away under my own roof, and I can talk to them! My childhood sci-fi reading come to life.

At the moment, I’m adapting a model to my own writing. Feed it things I’ve written, train it, see what comes out. Apparently this is a domestic activity now. Somewhere between tending a sourdough starter and taking apart a bicycle, you can cultivate a small program with your literary habits.

It makes me think of Bowie’s Verbasizer, the computer program he used to rearrange words into unexpected combinations for songwriting. A souped-up descendant of that impulse: put language into a machine, let it surprise you, see what’s worth following. I get to work on the machinery and the sentences. Two interests that occupied separate parts of my life have started making trouble together, and I’m having a very good time with it.

Last week it gave me this: “It was silicon sitting six inches from my coffee mug, doing math on my electricity bill.” It made me laugh. It sounds like something I might have written, though I’m not entirely sure I would have thought of it myself. Which is a strange thing to discover coming out of a machine you’ve been feeding your own words.

None of this has a sensible business case. Excellent. Some of my favorite things exist because somebody ignored that consideration.

Some of these projects are useful to twelve people. Others are funny, strange, or exist simply because somebody couldn’t get an idea out of their head. Someone makes something, shares it, somebody else improves it, and a third person takes it somewhere nobody expected.

We should remember that about ourselves. Alongside all the other shit humans do, we do that.

## A friend of a friend

I showed a friend ChatGPT and explained some basics. Next thing I know he’s using it to cut down on work, and to look up and learn all sorts of things. Then he turned around and showed a handyman he knows. Now the handyman uses it to write better invoices and to look up what things cost around the region.

That’s how it travels. A friend shows a friend. The invoices get better.

It’s the dial-up years again: ordinary people getting the thing to work. Exploring, sharing. If you’ve been standing at the edge of all this, that’s the way in. Ask somebody to show you one thing.

## Lunch

We now have self-driving cars pulling up to the curb, merging into traffic, stopping at red lights, and navigating the same streets as the rest of us. I mean, what the fuck. We're actually building these things now!

But there's a day when the keys go into a drawer. Maybe your eyesight isn't what it used to be. Maybe your reflexes have gone to hell. Maybe somebody finally tells you, "Sorry Dad, you can't drive anymore."

Giving up the keys turns an ordinary outing into a request. Someone has to be available. You have to arrange a time. You may decide the trip isn't worth bothering anybody about. Eventually, you stop asking. Little by little, places you used to go become places you used to go.

A car that comes when you call it gives some of that back. Friends across town. A favorite restaurant. An afternoon out because you feel like going.

It could be lunch. Lunch is enough.

A civilization ought to be pleased when it figures out another way for people to go have lunch with their friends.

## Home

A great deal of technology earns its place that way.

Consider the hot water heater. Heating water used to be a job somebody had to do: fuel, fire, a vessel to heat it in, water to carry. We built a machine and plumbing that took over most of that work, and now I turn a handle. An astonishing amount of civilization is tucked behind that handle. I generally notice it when the shower goes cold.

AI is settling into life that way too. A task gets easier. Something that required an afternoon fits into a few minutes. The machinery recedes, and the person gets on with whatever they wanted to do in the first place.

I love this technology. I am addicted to the flow of it. But I still love analog things. I like physically feeling a record as I turn it over, looking at the grooves, placing it on the turntable. Watching the arm move over and lower the needle into place. I like the sound it makes. Music pressed into a groove, waiting for a needle to find it. At one time this was magic.

I still like pen and paper. And all my little notebooks. I still like seeing the grease on the rag when I fix my bicycle and hearing the little click when the derailleur finally shifts just right.

Now I can ask how to fix nearly anything and get walked through it. A future with more things worth repairing would suit me fine.

It seems so many people spend so much time imagining the future as a place we’ll have to move to, leaving our old pleasures behind. I’d quite like to bring mine along. The person who loves bicycles has new tools to work with. The handyman sends a better invoice. A small program on my desk writes a sentence about my coffee mug. Getting across town to lunch.

I don’t expect to run out of things to do with any of this. I’m more likely to run out of afternoon.

That may be why the morning walk suits me. For a while, an idea can remain an idea. I can ask about Rome, follow some tangent, watch the sun come up from the levee. There’s no requirement to turn the conversation into anything. But when something does catch, I can bring it home with me.

The computer used to be there waiting. Now a little of that strange electrical world comes along for the walk, and I still find myself delighted that I can speak to it.

Eventually, I suppose, I’ll get used to that.

I’m in no hurry.