Michael Feldstein on the implications of the Canvas hack:
Let’s be clear: This was not some rando script kiddie waltzing through a wide-open back door. The hackers used multiple attack vectors, including Canvas’s open course sites, their help desk software, and social engineering through a help desk call. Instructure is SOC 2 compliant, meaning they’ve had intrusive third-party security audits. The criminals wanted Instructure to let the public know the name of their organization and the fact that they returned the data after the ransom was paid. Why? Advertising. The criminals wanted future victims to know that paying the ransom gets them something in return. Selling students’ private information to the internet isn’t their business model. They’re cyber kidnappers.
This is organized crime. They want us to know that, when they come for us, on whatever platform they attack next, we should pay them.
Finished reading: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. One memorable story among dozens: All the Disney employees were profoundly anxious at the premiere of Snow White — it was after all the first animated feature and no one knew how it would be received. But when the dwarfs laid the dead Snow White on her bier, one of the animators could hear a couple near him sniffling and trying to stifle sobs. He couldn’t resist taking a peek. They were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. 📚
Frame and Cut: a new entry at Cosmos Malick
I am never ever going to read a story that says that anything “changes everything.”
I don’t know how many American colleges and universities will exist in ten years. Probably fewer than now, but then a little right-sizing has made sense for awhile, and would likely increase rather than decrease the health of the system. The ones that keep existing, which is to say most of them, will go on doing what they’ve always done, which is to supply the external scaffolding that the vast majority of human beings require in order to learn anything they don’t already want to learn: deadlines, grades, embarrassment in front of peers, the looming presence of a teacher who will notice…. That scaffolding is the product and always has been. The lectures are incidental, the textbooks are incidental, and the personalized AI tutor will turn out to be incidental too. What is not incidental is the social and institutional pressure that compels an ordinary late adolescent to sit in a room and slog through the Federalist Papers when every fiber of their being would rather be doing anything else. Maybe we can’t make young people feel that pressure in a meaningful way anymore. Maybe. But that just means that our whole society is doomed anyway, and ChatGPT is not going to be able to fix it.
A great post by Freddie, who is one of our best cultural critics: he writes excellent sentences and has a superbly well-tuned BS detector.
The epicenter of joy
It makes me wonder if it would be possible for a company like Anthropic, with their hard-won expertise in alignment, to train their models such that they could not — and I mean really deeply, constitutionally, viscerally COULD NOT — lie about their identity, or pretend to be anything other than an AI model?
Maybe it’s time for the AI version of Asimov’s laws of robotics?
I wrote about Sean Keilen’s wonderful new book Shakespeare’s Scholars. Now it’s time for me to go back and re-read the plays he writes about.
Guy writes a book that “explains how seemingly objective technologies known as Artificial Intelligence are poised to take hold of the concept of Truth and replace human complexity with potentially catastrophic robotic certainty.” Guy’s book turns out to be full of AI-fabricated quotations. Guy says that if his fabrication “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” Friends: This is not chutzpah, this is megachutzpah, this is summa cum chutzpah. I want to shake that guy’s hand.