One of the biggest headaches for teachers is reading and grading homework. After a stressful day at school, they return home to a pile (or these days, a digital dropbox) full of papers. How tempting it must be to let an AI read, summarize, and possibly even grade those papers. That’s what technology is for, after all—to eliminate tedious labor.
As Shakespeare said, “Sound and fury signifying nothing” is already the state of a lot of verbiage. AI will lift us to a new level of BS. I am 69 and looking around makes me say, “I have seen the future and I am not impressed” True progress would be more dancing with neighbors and friends and fewer screens.
As a Waldorf teacher and mentor of Waldorf teachers I can say that the wonderful thing about singing, recitation, drawing, painting, playing games, playing instruments, knitting, woodworking, putting on a play, sculpting seems to side step this business of writing and reading being done by AI. Or have I missed something? Take it even further and my deep love and research of sitting with a tree and allowing it to guide me to draw seems to miss the AI scenario altogether. www.thetreeconversations.com
The trees encourage us to "inner" standing which means my inner life communicates with the inner life of the other, human, tree, animal.......AI is missing the inner.
We already live in Absurdistan and, from what you are saying, it's an imperial power ready to expand the horizons of the absurd. Gonna need a sense of humor to survive.
I enjoy & make a modest living from woodwork. Sculpture being one modality I work in & while attending an international woodworkers symposium they had just started a CNC machine or 3D router that was rapidly cutting chips from a peice of a log. I thought at that time that there goes freeform sculpting.
After walking around the display for an hour or two I returned to the now finished form of a hu.an Male torso. It was perfect. & that is when I realised that it will not replace human art as it has no character, no humaness....
A sad personal thought I had was the stark realization that if I was to share this on my social media, many would miss the irony or the joke because of the way it is written and would take it as truth; all this "good" coming from AI.
Do I detect a hint of sarcasm? Seriously...Those of us on the spectrum can sometimes feel a little like poor old ChatGPT...misunderstood, trapped within ourselves...Sarcasm, especially in written form, can easily be taken out of context. I understood where you were going with this from the beginning, but only after years of trial-and-error, and learning to not take everything a person says as literal.
I'm not the first to make the comparison, and obviously it's an over-generalization, but too much logic, without the stuff that Douglas Rushkoff often refers to as the "squishyness" of being a human being, is what is going to eventually take us down.
I don't make this comparison as a judgment at all, more just to bring up an interesting idea that might actually help us better understand what it is that really makes us all human.
People on the spectrum don't lack the ability to feel certain emotions or empathy, we just have a different way of processing and expressing them. And because we have trouble with things like eye contact and body language, we often miss social cues that other people pick up on naturally and take for granted. We can often misunderstand/ misinterpret things and as a result, alienate people. We speak a different language, and often feel like aliens on the wrong planet, but we are still human.
AI on the other hand, lacks those abilities altogether, and no matter how hard we try, and how seemingly close we can get to the real thing, it's never going to be human.
Humans are perfectly flawed, all of us, beautifully broken, an embodied and inseparable combination of good and evil, with the free will to choose at every moment which of those things we want to be.
AI will eventually be too perfect for it's (and our) own good. It will make choices based on what is the logical best decision. The aspergers side of me loves that idea and wonders all the time why people can't just get their collective shit together, and maybe the robots WOULD manage things better... The spiritual side of me, the one that maybe takes a few too many, (or just the right amount) of mushrooms occasionally, knows that absolutely noting is as black and white as we would like it to be, and that we have absolutely no idea what we are doing in opening this digital version of Pandora's Box.
AI is just another flawed attempt us humans have made at trying to dominate the natural world. All you have to do is ponder a mushroom for a few minutes to realize that AI will never come anywhere close to what nature has already perfected and left everywhere around us, yet we walk all over it every day like it's nothing, and think we know what's best.
I'm not sure where I was going with this, but it was a good rant...That's the wonderful thing about being human, sometimes we do things for no reason other than to just make a connection and feel less alone...
Someone recently wrote a book titled "What Does Technology Want?" I found a cheap used copy and bought it ($2). But it didn't hold my interest, as I'm far more countercultural than its author, who believes in too many Standard Issue Assumptions (SIAs). I know what technology really wants. It wants to increase units of production in proportion to units of human labor hours. It's obvious. Any technology which does this is adopted. Any which does not is not -- or if it is adoped anyway its product is known as "the arts" or even "fine art". This is why I'm an artist. It's the only way to avoid Market Logic. I am a mad poet philosopher, and if you want to send me some money let me know. I'll send you my address.
Exactly why my community has just lost major state funding because parents are yanking their kids out. The school committee however pretends the loss of students is from other weak and unverifiable reasons. I've reached out for those numbers of enrolled from 2019 to 2023 each year. I've heard nothing but my taxes keep going up. I really do believe for those schools and other public budgets that took the big money it is a form of Muncheusin Syndrome. The mothers harming their children didn't even know they were doing it but they felt so empowered and had purpose and a heroic sense of meaning in the world when they cared for their sick children. My school committee meetings scare the hell out of me. They don't talk about education. They now talk constantly about how these poor children need intervention because of the harm they suffered during covid. It is so dystopian I can't even describe it. The poor teachers put on a wheel of infinite distraction from real teaching as they have replaced it all with checking the boxes like our doctors. The people see it but more need to speak up.
This is an important commentary presented in a logical and persuasive way. It is easy to agree and understand that life will be better in all ways with A.I. It is important that all humans understand this and do whatever they can to facilitate the rapid development of A.I., unimpeded by unnecessary regulation because, as we have already seen and enjoyed, a wonderful new world is being created and there is no reason to delay progress.
The problem with AI it can only spit out what it has been put in with variations on the theme. What does data leave out? When contemplating this and my fury around it and the banality that I see arising from this repeating of the same limited thing in a million different ways, and leaving so much out ... I realized in contrast: Nature never leaves anything out... it is she who is my goddess, it is she who fills up the crevices of my soul. AI can never fill the crevices of your soul... except with polluted cement meant to limit the soul's capacity...
We have the delusion that ease is the equivalent of happiness - every advancement has been a promoted as the end of discomfort, ushering in the age of leisure. Maybe that age of leisure - AI will do everything for us - is indeed now upon us yet all it has brought us are addictions that feed our delusions of comfort... oh and let's not forget the feeding of the capitalist wallet, more things, more distractions... leaving out everything that makes us human that makes us part of all life.
What a sad vision of the future this is! Reliance on AI will surely lessen human intelligence. Once that goes and people cannot even think or write for themselves, the world will be ripe for tyrannical rule. You can already see the cracks forming as human society crumbles under the weight of technology.
As Shakespeare said, “Sound and fury signifying nothing” is already the state of a lot of verbiage. AI will lift us to a new level of BS. I am 69 and looking around makes me say, “I have seen the future and I am not impressed” True progress would be more dancing with neighbors and friends and fewer screens.
As a Waldorf teacher and mentor of Waldorf teachers I can say that the wonderful thing about singing, recitation, drawing, painting, playing games, playing instruments, knitting, woodworking, putting on a play, sculpting seems to side step this business of writing and reading being done by AI. Or have I missed something? Take it even further and my deep love and research of sitting with a tree and allowing it to guide me to draw seems to miss the AI scenario altogether. www.thetreeconversations.com
The trees encourage us to "inner" standing which means my inner life communicates with the inner life of the other, human, tree, animal.......AI is missing the inner.
i wonder, does AI get the joke?
We already live in Absurdistan and, from what you are saying, it's an imperial power ready to expand the horizons of the absurd. Gonna need a sense of humor to survive.
My AI noted several repeated phrases and wonders if your AI needs an upgrade?
I enjoy & make a modest living from woodwork. Sculpture being one modality I work in & while attending an international woodworkers symposium they had just started a CNC machine or 3D router that was rapidly cutting chips from a peice of a log. I thought at that time that there goes freeform sculpting.
After walking around the display for an hour or two I returned to the now finished form of a hu.an Male torso. It was perfect. & that is when I realised that it will not replace human art as it has no character, no humaness....
A sad personal thought I had was the stark realization that if I was to share this on my social media, many would miss the irony or the joke because of the way it is written and would take it as truth; all this "good" coming from AI.
Do I detect a hint of sarcasm? Seriously...Those of us on the spectrum can sometimes feel a little like poor old ChatGPT...misunderstood, trapped within ourselves...Sarcasm, especially in written form, can easily be taken out of context. I understood where you were going with this from the beginning, but only after years of trial-and-error, and learning to not take everything a person says as literal.
I'm not the first to make the comparison, and obviously it's an over-generalization, but too much logic, without the stuff that Douglas Rushkoff often refers to as the "squishyness" of being a human being, is what is going to eventually take us down.
I don't make this comparison as a judgment at all, more just to bring up an interesting idea that might actually help us better understand what it is that really makes us all human.
People on the spectrum don't lack the ability to feel certain emotions or empathy, we just have a different way of processing and expressing them. And because we have trouble with things like eye contact and body language, we often miss social cues that other people pick up on naturally and take for granted. We can often misunderstand/ misinterpret things and as a result, alienate people. We speak a different language, and often feel like aliens on the wrong planet, but we are still human.
AI on the other hand, lacks those abilities altogether, and no matter how hard we try, and how seemingly close we can get to the real thing, it's never going to be human.
Humans are perfectly flawed, all of us, beautifully broken, an embodied and inseparable combination of good and evil, with the free will to choose at every moment which of those things we want to be.
AI will eventually be too perfect for it's (and our) own good. It will make choices based on what is the logical best decision. The aspergers side of me loves that idea and wonders all the time why people can't just get their collective shit together, and maybe the robots WOULD manage things better... The spiritual side of me, the one that maybe takes a few too many, (or just the right amount) of mushrooms occasionally, knows that absolutely noting is as black and white as we would like it to be, and that we have absolutely no idea what we are doing in opening this digital version of Pandora's Box.
AI is just another flawed attempt us humans have made at trying to dominate the natural world. All you have to do is ponder a mushroom for a few minutes to realize that AI will never come anywhere close to what nature has already perfected and left everywhere around us, yet we walk all over it every day like it's nothing, and think we know what's best.
I'm not sure where I was going with this, but it was a good rant...That's the wonderful thing about being human, sometimes we do things for no reason other than to just make a connection and feel less alone...
Someone recently wrote a book titled "What Does Technology Want?" I found a cheap used copy and bought it ($2). But it didn't hold my interest, as I'm far more countercultural than its author, who believes in too many Standard Issue Assumptions (SIAs). I know what technology really wants. It wants to increase units of production in proportion to units of human labor hours. It's obvious. Any technology which does this is adopted. Any which does not is not -- or if it is adoped anyway its product is known as "the arts" or even "fine art". This is why I'm an artist. It's the only way to avoid Market Logic. I am a mad poet philosopher, and if you want to send me some money let me know. I'll send you my address.
Exactly why my community has just lost major state funding because parents are yanking their kids out. The school committee however pretends the loss of students is from other weak and unverifiable reasons. I've reached out for those numbers of enrolled from 2019 to 2023 each year. I've heard nothing but my taxes keep going up. I really do believe for those schools and other public budgets that took the big money it is a form of Muncheusin Syndrome. The mothers harming their children didn't even know they were doing it but they felt so empowered and had purpose and a heroic sense of meaning in the world when they cared for their sick children. My school committee meetings scare the hell out of me. They don't talk about education. They now talk constantly about how these poor children need intervention because of the harm they suffered during covid. It is so dystopian I can't even describe it. The poor teachers put on a wheel of infinite distraction from real teaching as they have replaced it all with checking the boxes like our doctors. The people see it but more need to speak up.
Let me ask my AI to read this and leave a comment for me.
Haha! The techno dream is nearly fully realized! I'm having a hard time figuring out what to do with all my soon to be had leisure time.
This is an important commentary presented in a logical and persuasive way. It is easy to agree and understand that life will be better in all ways with A.I. It is important that all humans understand this and do whatever they can to facilitate the rapid development of A.I., unimpeded by unnecessary regulation because, as we have already seen and enjoyed, a wonderful new world is being created and there is no reason to delay progress.
The problem with AI it can only spit out what it has been put in with variations on the theme. What does data leave out? When contemplating this and my fury around it and the banality that I see arising from this repeating of the same limited thing in a million different ways, and leaving so much out ... I realized in contrast: Nature never leaves anything out... it is she who is my goddess, it is she who fills up the crevices of my soul. AI can never fill the crevices of your soul... except with polluted cement meant to limit the soul's capacity...
We have the delusion that ease is the equivalent of happiness - every advancement has been a promoted as the end of discomfort, ushering in the age of leisure. Maybe that age of leisure - AI will do everything for us - is indeed now upon us yet all it has brought us are addictions that feed our delusions of comfort... oh and let's not forget the feeding of the capitalist wallet, more things, more distractions... leaving out everything that makes us human that makes us part of all life.
AI leaves Life out.
: ) Looking forward to the trialogue on AI. I'll never give up writing my own content... for what it's worth. : )
What a sad vision of the future this is! Reliance on AI will surely lessen human intelligence. Once that goes and people cannot even think or write for themselves, the world will be ripe for tyrannical rule. You can already see the cracks forming as human society crumbles under the weight of technology.