Latest 3 Posts
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How AI Broke Aristotle
It's hard to describe abstract ideas like the fragility of society's understanding of personhood. But in an attempt to do so, I'd like to invite you on a thought experiment with me.
Imagine you had a time machine and could go back in time to another era of human history. In this case, you need to go all the way back to… 2017. That's far enough to reach a time before the first large language models (LLMs) were introduced.
Having traveled back to that far-distant time, now imagine yourself walking around your neighborhood. As you walk, you happen upon a snippet of writing. It could be on a slip of paper on the ground, it could be a random tweet on your phone, it could be any medium at all. Even without knowing any context or background of the writing you found, if that writing contains a coherent thought expressed in language then you know something incredibly significant: it was written by a person.
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How Meta Is Pitching Their New AI Glasses
Meta announced a new model of "AI glasses" this week. While this is interesting on a technological level, what really struck me was the angle they chose as their selling point.
“Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are designed to help you look up and stay present.”
That was the second sentence of the announcement, preceded only by the lede sentence that stated the fact of the product's debut. Meta's sales pitch, then, is the promise of access to smartphone-like capabilities without it feeling (or looking) like you're using a device.
In other words, Meta is introducing a device that provides comprehensive mediation of the user's interactions with the world, while promising that those interactions will feel less mediated. This is precisely the kind of re-definition that can make a new medium profoundly disruptive.
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Craving Garden of Eden Intimacy
This is a guest post by my friend and co-worker Jason Maas.
After creating the entire universe and planet Earth, God created a special home to share with his image bearers. “The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed.” (Genesis 2:8) In the garden of Eden God walked and talked with the first humans that He had created in his image. Can you imagine what that was like for Adam and Eve? God, who is all-knowing, always available, and lovingly kind to the core, was right there, directly communicating with all of the human inhabitants of the universe.
When Adam and Eve disobeyed God and sinned one of the worst consequences was a break in this special access and relationship with God. “So the Lord God sent him away from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out and stationed the cherubim and the flaming, whirling sword east of the garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:23-24)
What a tragic loss! In this life, on this Earth, the rest of us will never know what it was like to have the kind of access to God that Adam and Eve had in the garden of Eden. Until now, says the cunning serpent-like world of chatbot generative AI.
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8 more posts can be found in the archive.