[Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra] – Twitter post by Ethan Mollick referenced in Helen Lewis’s substack newsletter. “[The Star Trek:The Next Generation episode ‘Darmok’, features the Tamarians who communicate entirely by reference to history and myth (see ref below).] I asked Bing [AI] to do the same for English using American history. It gave remarkably subtle & interesting results…. ‘Parks, her seat unchanged.’... ‘Kennedy and Khrushchev at Cuba.’… ‘Nixon and Woodward at Watergate.’…” See also https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/star-trek-tng-and-the-limits-of-language-shaka-when-the-walls-fell/372107/
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans – article by Henry Farrell in Boston Review, referenced in John Naughton Memex 1.1 blog. “Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping). In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. … What he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work…: ‘The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?”’”
AI Chatbots Don’t Care About Your Social Norms – article by Jacob Browning and Yann Lecun in Noema, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “In human conversation, there are countless ways to say the wrong thing: We can say something inappropriate, dishonest, confusing, irrelevant, offensive or just plain stupid. We can even say the right thing but be faulted for saying it with the wrong tone or emphasis. Our whole lives are spent navigating innumerable conversational landmines in our dealings with other people. Not saying the wrong thing isn’t just an important part of a conversation; it is often more important than the conversation itself. Sometimes, keeping our mouths shut may be the only right course of action. Given how few ways there are to say the right thing, and how many different ways there are to say something wrong, it is shocking that humans don’t make more mistakes than they do. How do we navigate this perilous landscape of not saying the wrong thing, and why aren’t chatbots navigating it as effectively?… The problem [with chatbots] is that they don’t care. They don’t have any intrinsic goals they want to accomplish through conversation and aren’t motivated by what others think or how they are reacting. They don’t feel bad about lying and they gain nothing by being honest. They are shameless in a way even the worst people aren’t — even Donald Trump cares enough about his reputation to at least claim he’s truthful.”
The data delusion – article by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Imagine that all the world’s knowledge is stored, and organized, in a single vertical Steelcase filing cabinet. … The drawers are labelled, from top to bottom, ‘Mysteries,’ ‘Facts,’ ‘Numbers,’ and ‘Data.’ Mysteries are things only God knows, like what happens when you’re dead. That’s why they’re in the top drawer, closest to Heaven. A long time ago, this drawer used to be crammed full of folders with names like ‘Why Stars Exist’ and ‘When Life Begins,’ but a few centuries ago, during the scientific revolution, a lot of those folders were moved into the next drawer down, ‘Facts,’ which contains files about things humans can prove by way of observation, detection, and experiment. ‘Numbers,’ second from the bottom, holds censuses, polls, tallies, national averages—the measurement of anything that can be counted, ever since the rise of statistics, around the end of the eighteenth century. Near the floor, the drawer marked ‘Data’ holds knowledge that humans can’t know directly but must be extracted by a computer, or even by an artificial intelligence. It used to be empty, but it started filling up about a century ago, and now it’s so jammed full it’s hard to open. In ‘How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms’ (Norton), the Columbia professors Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones open two of these four drawers, ‘Numbers’ and ‘Data.’ … The book … is an adaptation of a course they began teaching in 2017, a history of data science. It begins in the late eighteenth century with the entry of the word ‘statistics’ into the English language.”
ChatGPT is making up fake Guardian articles. Here’s how we’re responding – article by Chris Moran, Head of Editorial Innvotion in The Guardian. “Last month one of our journalists received an interesting email. A researcher had come across mention of a Guardian article, written by the journalist on a specific subject from a few years before. But the piece was proving elusive on our website and in search.... The reporter couldn’t remember writing the specific piece, but the headline certainly sounded like something they would have written.... They asked colleagues to go back through our systems to track it down. [However, ] they could find no trace of its existence. Why? Because it had never been written. Luckily the researcher had told us that they had carried out their research using ChatGPT. In response to being asked about articles on this subject, the AI had simply made some up. Its fluency, and the vast training data it is built on, meant that the existence of the invented piece even seemed believable to the person who absolutely hadn’t written it.... Two days ago our archives team was contacted by a student asking about another missing article from a named journalist. There was again no trace of the article in our systems. The source? ChatGPT.... The question for responsible news organisations is simple, and urgent: what can [generative AI] technology do right now, and how can it benefit responsible reporting at a time when the wider information ecosystem is already under pressure from misinformation, polarisation and bad actors. This is the question we are currently grappling with at the Guardian. And it’s why we haven’t yet announced a new format or product built on generative AI. Instead, we’ve created a working group and small engineering team to focus on learning about the technology, considering the public policy and IP questions around it, listening to academics and practitioners, talking to other organisations, consulting and training our staff, and exploring safely and responsibly how the technology performs when applied to journalistic use.”
‘I spent years studying death, but it didn’t prepare me for grief’: archaeologist Sarah Tarlow on losing her husband – article by Sarah Tarlow in The Guardian, extracted from her book The Archaeology of Loss. “My whole adult life, I have made a study of death. I am a professor of archaeology, specialising in mortuary and commemorative practices. I have written dozens of papers and several books about death – and how the relationship between the living and the dead changed between the late medieval period and the 20th century.... Today, even those who are knowledgable and experienced in death often deny that it is coming. ... Many of my generation do not [know what to expect].... As archaeologists, our knowledge of the past is always incomplete, patched together out of material that is never enough, not quite the right thing and usually the wrong shape. My personal memories are not so different. Already I have forgotten things. I am surprised sometimes by a photograph or a comment, and I think, 'Oh, yes. That’s right. We did do that.' Trying to remember is like boxing smoke.... It has taken me time to remember that there was not just the anger and frustration of those last months, but that there was also love. I must remember how exciting it felt at the start, and the solid ordinariness of it through the years of young children, through the Christmases and the summer holidays and the cups of tea in bed. There were moments of passion, of tenderness, of anger and regret, but mostly there were just days, months, years tumbling past, in a long, commonplace ordinary.”
If Labour is to succeed it needs not just new policies, but a whole new philosophy – article by Daniel Chandler in The Guardian. “After four general election defeats and nearly 15 years in opposition, the Labour party seems likely to form the next government.... And yet Starmer has struggled to set out a vision that could bring [his] currently rather disparate policy ideas into a coherent whole. It’s easy to put this down to his personality, more technocrat than visionary, but it also reflects the dearth of systematic thinking about the philosophical foundations for progressive politics in recent decades.... Whereas Margaret Thatcher drew on thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, where could Starmer look for inspiration? For many on the left, the answers lie with Marx and the socialist tradition. There is much of value here, and over the past decade it has been self-described socialists who have been the primary source of creativity within progressive politics. ... But the ideas Labour needs are hiding in plain sight, in the work of the great liberal philosopher John Rawls. ... At the heart of Rawls’s theory is a strikingly simple idea – that society should be fair. He argued that if we want to know what a fair society would look like, we should imagine how we would choose to organise it if we didn’t know what our position would be – rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight. ... First, if we really didn’t know who we would be, we would want to protect our 'basic liberties', including personal freedoms such as freedom of speech, religion and sexuality, but also the political freedoms we need to play a genuinely equal part in collective decision-making. Second, in addition to ensuring 'fair equality of opportunity', we would want to organise our economy so that the least well off are better off than under any alternative system (Rawls called this the 'difference principle'). From this perspective, higher pay for some can be justified as an incentive to work, study or innovate, but only if this ultimately ends up benefiting those who have less – not just by a little, but as much as possible.”
How to future-proof your novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “I'm your future self. I've come back to warn you that the book you're writing will be a failure.” “Wait! I'm from the far future. The book was rediscovered and is now revered as a classic.” “I'm from further into the future. The book is now considered so offensive that I've been sent back to stop you writing it.” “I'm from unimaginably far into the future and we don't allow censorship. Now, everybody go home and leave this man to finish writing his awful book.”
Among Others: Friendships and Encounters by Michael Frayn: heartfelt pen portraits – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. “There is a generation of writers who were schooled by the war and the more egalitarian freedoms of its aftermath, and who borrowed intellectual and moral authority from both. A great capacity for friendship helped, and the porosity of an establishment that for the first time allowed state-educated – mostly grammar school – boys and girls a more equal voice with the fee-paying class. Michael Frayn, now 89, was – and is – a shining star in that firmament. This book, a collection of short essays on some of the other fixed points in his constellation, becomes a thoughtful and often moving portrait of a disappearing world in which a generous kind of bookish rigour and worldly wit created fleeting incandescence at the heart of British cultural life…. The brightness of some of these young things is sharpened in Frayn’s memory by the close knowledge of alternative narrative arcs. There are among the success stories inevitably several tragic notes.… As the book progresses, that sense of the precariousness of fate, of roads not taken, takes over.”
The big idea: can writing make you healthier? – article by David Robson in The Guardian. “Professor James Pennebaker and his graduate student Sandra Beall were the first to demonstrate [the beneficial effects of expressive writing] in the 1980s. They asked a series of students to write a short essay for 15 minutes on four consecutive days. Some of the participants were encouraged to write about ‘the most traumatic or upsetting experience’ of their lives, exploring their ‘deepest thoughts and feelings’ about the episode. Others were asked to write about trivialities, such as descriptions of their dorm rooms or the shoes they were wearing…. Over the following six months, [students in the first group] paid around half as many visits to the student health centre as the participants in the control group…. Why is writing so cathartic? … One possibility is that externalising our thoughts gives us more head space to think about other things. We now know that simply writing a to-do list can release people’s cognitive resources for other activities, as it reduces the amount of information they are juggling in their minds. This eases stress and, done before bedtime, it can even improve sleep. Expressive writing could perform a similar function in clearing our mental workspace of the sources of negative rumination, freeing up working memory to devote to the things that matter…. Equally importantly, writing our worries down can create a sense of ‘psychological distance’, which allows us to take a more philosophical attitude to our problems. If we have been contemplating hurt caused by others, for instance, we might find it easier to see their viewpoint, or we recognise a valuable lesson we’ve learned, which could help us to function better in the future.”
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