For the rest of this term I’ll be teaching two books: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Man Born to Be King by Dorothy L. Sayers — I suspect that all my blogging, or almost all, will be about them. 📚
My son suggested today that someone should make ChatBCP: a chatbot that, no matter what you ask it, replies with a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer.
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.
