Lakeview
Lough Gartan seen from the grounds of Glenveagh Castle, Co. Donegal
Quote of the Day
”There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty’s confidence.”
- E.M. Forster, writing in Where Angels Fear to Tread about an indifferent performance of Lucia di Lammermoor.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Ry Cooder & David Lindley | Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór
Unexpected gem: Cooder and Lindley playing a lovely little Irish tune composed by Turlough Ó’Carolan, (1670 – 1738), a famous blind Irish harper, composer and singer.
If you’re interested, here is a lovely traditional rendition of the piece by Camerata Kilkenny and the Uileann piper David Power.
Long Read of the Day
The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think
Fabulous essay by Shannon Vallor in Noema magazine on the glib and sinister barbarism of a tech industry that talks of its creations as being “superhuman”. This kind of rhetoric, she argues, “implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.”
She’s right, which is why this essay is worth your time. Here’s how she kicks it off:
Today’s generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini are routinely described as heralding the imminent arrival of “superhuman” artificial intelligence. Far from a harmless bit of marketing spin, the headlines and quotes trumpeting our triumph or doom in an era of superhuman AI are the refrain of a fast-growing, dangerous and powerful ideology. Whether used to get us to embrace AI with unquestioning enthusiasm or to paint a picture of AI as a terrifying specter before which we must tremble, the underlying ideology of “superhuman” AI fosters the growing devaluation of human agency and autonomy and collapses the distinction between our conscious minds and the mechanical tools we’ve built to mirror them.
Today’s powerful AI systems lack even the most basic features of human minds; they do not share with humans what we call consciousness or sentience, the related capacity to feel things like pain, joy, fear and love. Nor do they have the slightest sense of their place and role in this world, much less the ability to experience it. They can answer the questions we choose to ask, paint us pretty pictures, generate deepfake videos and more. But an AI tool is dark inside…
The tech crowd who use this rhetoric have a crude, ludicrously skewed, inhumane view of what it means to be human. Vallor is their most articulate critic. She’s just published a splendid book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking which is on next week’s reading list.
My commonplace booklet
The dangers of ‘phishing’ scams have been radically increased by the advent of Generative AI, so this advice from Seth Godin is timely:
Please be on the alert for:
Spam that includes your name, address, phone number and other personal details.
Phone calls that are from human-sounding bots that pretend to be from friends or trusted brands.
Job offers.
Video mashups that include AI-generated people that seem to be made just for you.
Security alerts that are actually precisely the opposite.
Links that sure look trustworthy, but go somewhere you don’t expect.
It makes me sad that people with skills spend their time building ever-more ornate scams. It also bums me out that the emails from this blog often end up in the spam folder, but spam somehow manages to make it to my inbox.
Linkblog
- Our Research Centre has an interesting online event next Wednesday on the micro-sociology of polarisation in two American towns. Click here to sign up for it.
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