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.
This is the world I grew up in. But just a few years later, my elementary-school classroom was integrated. A few years after that, my high school was thoroughly integrated, and though there were still racial tensions, blacks and whites could openly be friends. Then came the white flight from Birmingham: the city’s public schools are now 99% black. Dark forces that seem invincible aren’t; but no victories are permanent either.
Well duh — have you ever seen a more obvious handball?
