A rose by any other name…
… is still a rose. Amazing what one can do with the right lens.
Quote of the Day
”The alarming fact is that everyone on this earth has an enormous stake in how the United States chooses to be and act in this world.”
- Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson in his book American Imperatives.
Yep. Which is why we need to learn from what is happening there now.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Paul Simon | Train In The Distance
Long Read of the Day
Using generative AI to learn is like Odysseus untying himself from the mast
Lovely, thoughtful essay by David Deming on why students (and their teachers) should beware of using ChatGPT et al as crutches for the mind.
The Sirens are often portrayed as sexual temptresses in art and popular culture. But Homer never describes the Sirens bodies or gives any sense that their physical allure. Here is a translated excerpt from the 12th book of the Odyssey (emphasis mine) – “For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.”
The Sirens offer Odysseus the promise of unlimited knowledge and wisdom without effort. He survives not by resisting his curiosity, but by restricting its scope and constraining his own ability to operate. The Sirens possess all the knowledge that Odysseus seeks, but he realizes he must earn it. There are no shortcuts. This is the perfect metaphor for learning in the age of superintelligence.
“Learning is hard work”, Deming concludes. “And there is now lots of evidence that people will offload it if given the chance, even if it isn’t in their long-run interest. After nearly two decades of teaching, I’ve realized that my classroom is more than just a place where knowledge is transmitted. It’s also a community where we tie ourselves to the mast together to overcome the suffering of learning hard things”.
The problem is that the temptation to rely on AI to just get the essay done and get the grade you need is often overwhelming for students who need to get the credentials for a job that will help them pay off their debts.
Books, etc.
A while back, Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Deep Mind, published an interesting book with the title “The Coming Wave.” In it, he argued that the looming problem facing humanity is how to manage two “uncontainable technologies”: — AI and ‘synthetic biology’. At the moment we are spending a lot of time fretting about the former, and perhaps not thinking enough about the latter.
And now, along comes a new book from a molecular biologist which basically argues that the two can — and will — work together. “With the assistance of AI,” Woolfson writes, “which has the potential to decode life’s generative grammar and the agency of a chemical printing press capable of rendering the genome sequences of species as if they were the texts of books, our ability to manipulate life’s structures could become virtually limitless. Free from the constraints of chance and natural selection, we would no longer need to reference nature’s blueprints. We could instead begin to narrate new designs – equipped with the pen, paper and creativity necessary to rewrite life’s story. In so doing, we would become the authors of species.”
The book’s title neatly gives the game away. Darwin was concerned with the origins of species; Woolfson thinks that we will eventually be in a position to design entirely new species from scratch. You might well ask: why would we want to do that? And you know the answer: we humans are a weird species.
My commonplace booklet
For the first 100 days of the COVID lockdown I kept an audio diary on this substack — transcripts of which I eventually published as a Kindle book, 100 Not Out. Searching through my files the other day, I came on one of the notebooks I used at the time. This is the entry for Day 30 — Monday 20th of April, 2020.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
BIC penlight
Just what you’ve always wanted. Not.
h/t Charles Arthur
This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!
