Here we come to the fundamental epistemological shift in whose midst we find ourselves. It is a shift away from the idea of knowledge as justified true belief, discovered by hard work and careful investigation, verified by its correspondence to evidence, and towards an idea of knowledge as the product of the pleroma [fullness] of data, mediated by artificial intelligence. In other words, AI is a greater intelligence than us, and what it generates is the truth. The implications of this shift are profound, of course. It would mean a world where 107 lost books of Livy generated by AI are the lost books of Livy. It would mean a world where AI cannot ‘hallucinate’, because AI is itself the arbiter of truth; if AI seems to have erred, it must be [we] who are wrong, we who are misremembering the past or what we learnt in the pre-AI era. It would also mean a world without private thoughts, for if someone wants to know what a person thinks about something, they can ask a chatbot. What AI thinks you think is what you think.
Meet Project Suncatcher, Google’s plan to put AI data centers in space. Cool! — and, um, while you’re there, could you maybe pick up some of that orbiting garbage our upper atmosphere is now full of?
I wrote about the feature-limited, severely constrained note-taking app that’s just right for me.
Baylor’s Memorial to Enslaved Persons has been opened — this is the view from just outside my office. It’s very well done. Larger version of the photo here.
Love this WordPress plugin, which combats link rot by redirecting broken links to the Wayback Machine’s archive of the relevant page. Insta-installed. Open web FTW again.
A fine post on Turner’s largest painting — one I am almost sure I have seen, on some previous visit to the Queen’s House, but have never really looked at. Shame on me.
To me our neighborhood is not just the middle-class moms with their expensive pushchairs or my writer friend across the park, but instead a place of many layers, where people are going through all kinds of struggle, many of whom I now know personally. The [local parish’s food pantry] makes me ask myself: How do you want to be connected in the world, and how do you want to be in communion with people?
Anglicanism is meaningful to me in that way. I’m not in any way an effective, good, or faithful Anglican. I am at the larder far less frequently than I should be. But I’m interested in the idea that this particular space in Willesden provides something which, at least in contemporary capitalism, seems very hard to find elsewhere. (I cannot speak for Anglican churches elsewhere.) It’s meaningful to me, in the radically local sense Philip Larkin got at in “Church Going,” as a specific place where for hundreds — or maybe thousands — of years, people have gathered for this purpose: to be quiet, to be in communion, to be with one another. These human souls can be abject, they can be lost, they can be rich or poor, hold a great variety of political views or none at all. The door is open.
As an Anglican who, unlike Zadie Smith, has “metaphysical concerns,” heck, even a set of beliefs, I say: This is a good start.
Last spring, it became clear to me that over half the students in my large general education lecture course had used artificial intelligence tools, contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams. (Ironically, the course was titled Contemporary Moral Problems: The Value of Human Life.) I had asked them about some very recent work in philosophy, parts of which happened to share titles with entirely different ideas in medieval theology. You can guess which topics the students ended up “writing” about.
Well, of course they did! What I just can’t get over is the number of professors who think that making an “explicit policy” against AI use will have any effect at all on students’ behavior. The overwhelming majority of college students will have chatbots do their work for them unless we teachers make it impossible for them to do so. Certum est.