When I was growing up in Seattle, I didn’t have that many friends aside from a few other boys who were like me. It took hard work and a lot of help from my mom to develop my social skills so I could relate to different kinds of people. I still draw on those lessons today at the age of 70.
~ Bill Gates via Gates Notes
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To build their thinking machines, the largest A.I. firms have undertaken one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in American history. Not even during the peak years of building the railway, interstate highways or fiber optic networks did Americans spend, proportionally, what these companies will spend this year. The price tag of this boom now exceeds that of the Apollo space program and the Korean War. If it cannot secure new land to build on, this entire project will sputter out.
~ Tanner Greer via The New York Times
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We are more than a trillion dollars deep into our national wager on machine intelligence. The climb in the stock market has buoyed the fortunes of Americans with a real stake in it — but has done very little for everyone else. Half of the country’s adults do not even use artificial intelligence chatbots. Only a quarter of American adults use these services daily, and often for small things: answering idle questions, hunting down recipes, softening otherwise irate emails to their co-workers. For much of our country, Artificial Intelligence is nothing more than that thing the kids use to cheat on their homework.
~ Tanner Greer via The New York Times
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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
As a community, we need to keep in mind that although research is central to MIT’s mission, it’s more than an end in itself; on our campus, research is also an apprenticeship, a means of training the next generation of researchers to continue our work and drive our fields of inquiry forward. Using research as an opportunity for learning-by-doing may produce seeming “inefficiencies,” but that’s a feature, not a bug.
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When a storm is coming, there will always be signs. The wind might suddenly drop. The tide goes out farther than usual. Streamers of clouds sail across the sky.
~ Margaret MacMillan via The New York Times
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Last year, I traveled to Montana State University for a week as a writer-in-residence. There, I met with students and faculty to talk about journalism and creative nonfiction. The highlight of the trip was a Q&A session with the university’s writing-center tutors. I left with an ultramarine MSU Writing Center T-shirt and an overwhelming admiration for the students and staff who were doing their best, with limited resources and watery office coffee, to make a case for going to the center rather than using the bots.
~ Tyler Austin Harper via The Atlantic
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It turns out that swaddling college students does not actually improve their mental health. It creates entitlement. It creates a lack of productive tension.
~ Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute via The New York Times
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Four years into the ChatGPT era, colleges may be further from solving AI cheating than they were when it launched. Chatbots are becoming capable of completing ever more complex assignments, making their output harder for professors to sniff out.
~ Will Oremus via The Atlantic
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Sometimes, for reasons we don’t understand and can’t control, shit goes south; rather than thrashing against those inevitabilities, maybe it’s better to accept the minor defeats.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker
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This whole tower of wealth and expectation is built on land that is controlled by ordinary Americans — and ordinary Americans possess an absolute hatred for the data centers. This hate will endure until the builders of the data centers can use their products to tangibly benefit the lives of ordinary people who oppose them.
~ Tanner Greer via The New York Times
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