Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Stephen Sachs asked ChatGPT for its ideas about what a giraffe might want to say in an address to the American Chemical Society. Here’s what it came back with.
I was inspired to pose the following question:
I am a unicorn, a male unicorn to be specific, and I have to give a speech to the League of Women Voters. Please give me some ideas about what to say.
Here is what ChatGPT came back with.
…some historical precedents.
There is currently much discussion of the impending effects of artificial intelligence and robotics on employment, the economy, and our society as a whole. (here, for example) I think it’s useful to look at some historical precedents, always keeping in mind the caution that ‘past results do not guarantee future outcomes.’
Peter Gaskell’s book Artisans and Machinery is about the effects of the industrial revolution, as seen by a contemporary observer. I reviewed and excerpted it here, along with some much later commentary by the British writer and scientist CP Snow.
My post Attack of the Job-Killing Robots (three-part series) is a 30,000-foot view of the history of automation over the centuries and of some resulting automation panics.
Your thoughts?
How to spot high-agency people. Interesting list.
The genealogy of nuclear fear. (Nuclear here referring to nuclear power, not nuclear war.)
A survey cited at LinkedIn: Gen Z (aged 16-25) wants to work in media and entertainment when they grow up. “This generation values things like work-life balance, flexibility and creativity over more traditional values like job security” also, half of this demographic is interested in pursuing entrepreneurship in some way. Here’s a link to the actual survey.
How much ‘work-life balance’ does a successful actor or director really have, though? And entrepreneurship, other than the most casual, tends to be quite intense in its time demands.
CBS News reports that roughly one in three young shoppers in the U.S. has admitted to giving themselves five-finger discounts at self-checkout counters, according to a recent survey. A response at X:
America does not have the moral cultural norms for there not to be a massive amount of theft. We’re too self-centered, individualistic, and we celebrate envy as a desert claim in the name of “equity.”
There is certainly a big cultural problem here, but I question the idea that Individualism and Community are opposites…traditionally, there has been quite a lot of both in America, as I believe Tocqueville observed. My thought is that both individualism and community are in danger of being replaced, and in many case have been replaced, by anomie.
Claire Lehmann suggests some books for helping children learn about history and philosophy. Other suggestions in the replies.
NYT finally reports what many others have been writing and speaking about for some time: the school closures for Covid are correlated with a sharp decrease in student learning. How do we square this data, though, with what we know about the preexisting generally poor low and declining quality of US public education?
The AI world is all astir with the news that San Altman has been removed as CEO of OpenAI…and now, the board is negotiating with him for his possible return! There are many explanations floating around as to what is really going on. The organization/governance chart for this enterprise, which someone posted at X, is rather…unique.
Speaking of AI, somebody at X thought that Biden should have issued an executive order to require the rehiring of Sam Altman and his associate who also left. (Tweet now deleted.) There was no mention of what possible legal authority Biden might have for issuing such an order, but increasingly people seem not to worry much about such things. The other thing that struck me was that such an order would be analogous to an order by President Eisenhower to require the Traitorous Eight to return to Shockley Semiconductor in 1957. Or, even earlier, to require Bardeen and Brattain to remain at Bell Labs and keep working with Shockley on grounds that the transistor was such a critically important technology for national security and economic well-being.
A lot of people have trouble grasping the idea that if something important is being done by a particular institution, that doesn’t mean it could not be done equally well…or much better…by other institutions, including ones that may not yet exist. We see this phenomenon, for instance, in discussions of education and the future of the Social Security system.
Thought it would be interesting to compare a ChatGPT-written essay with the one I posted here a few days ago. So I gave the system (version 4) the following request:
Please write about Goethe’s ‘Faust’, focusing particularly on the theme of Ambition as portrayed in that work, with examples.
ChatGPT’s response is here, along with my follow-up question and the system’s response.
So, the obvious question: whether or not this song is the appropriate musical accompaniment for this post?
Andy Kessler of the WSJ describes some conversations he has had with the founder/CEO of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere.”
Three years ago, Sal Khan and I spoke about developing a tool like the Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel “The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.” It’s an education tablet, in the author’s words, in which “the pictures moved, and you could ask them questions and get answers.” Adaptive, intuitive, personalized, self-paced—nothing like today’s education. But it’s science-fiction.
Last week I spoke with Mr. Khan, who told me, “Now I think a Primer is within reach within five years. In some ways, we’ve even surpassed some of the elements of the Primer, using characters like George Washington to teach lessons.” What changed? Simple—generative artificial intelligence. Khan Academy has been working with OpenAI’s ChatGPT since before its release last December.
In the novel, the main character Nell asks about ravens, and “the picture zoomed in on the black dot, and it turned out to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. ‘R A V E N,’ the book said. ‘Raven. Now, say it with me.’ ‘Raven.’ ”
Later, she asks, “What’s an adventure?” and “both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with swords, and girls riding white unicorns through the forest, and girls swinging from vines, swimming in the blue ocean, piloting rocket ships through space. . . . After awhile all of the girls began to look like older versions of herself.”
I admire what Khan Academy is trying to do for education..which, in America at least, needs all the help it can get…and I’m sure that AI has a lot of potential in this field. But a couple of things are bothering me here.
First, that Raven sequence. Is it really a good idea to teach reading with all those dramatic visual effects? Won’t kids later be disappointed when attempting to read anything that doesn’t include such effects? Indeed, I believe such concerns were raised, years ago, about Sesame Street.
Perhaps more importantly, consider that line After awhile all of the girls began to look like older versions of herself. Really? Do we want to bring up people who are so focused on themselves that they can’t identify with even fictional characters who don’t look like themselves? Might be of different ethnicity, difference gender, different age. I thought the development such broader perspective was supposed to be one of the purposes of education in general and of literature in particular.
Adam talks about God, the Forbidden tree, sleep, the difference between beast and man, his plans for the morrow, the stars and the angels. He discusses dreams and clouds, the sun, the moon, and the planets, the winds and the birds. He relates his own creation and celebrates the beauty and majesty of Eve…Adam, though locally confined to a small park on a small planet, has interests that embrace ‘all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth.’ Satan has been in the heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan.. And that “one thing” is, of course, Satan himself…his position and the wrongs he believes have been done to him. “Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament…”