TOK Friends

CarynAI is the first major release from a company called Forever Voices. The company previously has created realistic AI chatbots that allow users to talk with replicated versions of Steve Jobs, Kanye West, Donald Trump and Taylor Swift

CarynAI is a far more sophisticated product, the company says, and part of Forever Voices’ new AI companion initiative, meant to provide users with a girlfriend-like experience that fans can emotionally bond with.

John Meyer, CEO and founder of Forever Voices, said that he created the company last year, after trying to use AI to develop ways to reconnect with his late father, who passed away in 2017. He built an AI voice chatbot that replicated his late father’s voice and personality to talk to and found the experience incredibly healing. “It was a remarkable experience to talk to him again in a super realistic way,” Meyer said. “I’ve been in tech my whole life, I’m a programmer, so it was easy for me to start building something like that especially as things got more advanced with the AI space.”

Meyer’s company has about 10 employees. One job Meyer is hoping to fill soon is chief ethics officer. “There are a lot of ways to do this wrong,”

“I consider myself a futurist at heart and when I look into the future I believe this is the beginning of a very diverse future consisting of AI to human companionship,”

One safeguard is trying to limit the amount of time a user is allowed to chat with CarynAI. To keep users from becoming addicted, CarynAI is programmed to wind down conversations after about an hour, encouraging users to pick back up later. But there is no hard time limit on use, and some users are spending hours speaking to CarynAI per day, according to Marjorie’s manager, Ishan Goel.

Elizabeth Snower, founder of ICONIQ, which creates conversational 3D avatars, predicts that soon there will be “AI influencers on every social platform that are influencing consumer decisions.”

“A lot of people have just been kind of really mad at the existence of this. They think that it’s the end of humanity,” she said.

Marjorie hopes the backlash will fade when other online personalities begin rolling out their own AI companions

“I think in the next five years, most Americans will have an AI companion in their pocket in some way, shape or form, whether it’s an ultra flirty AI that you’re dating, an AI that’s your personal trainer, or simply a tutor companion. Those are all things that we are building internally,

That strikes AI adviser and investor Allie K. Miller as a likely outcome. “I can imagine a future in which everyone — celebrities, TV characters, influencers, your brother — has an online avatar that they invite their audience or friends to engage with. … With the accessibility of these models, I’m not surprised it’s expanding to scaled interpersonal relationships.”

The important thing to remember amid all this, and the thing that has changed the game when it comes to the free speech/content moderation conversation, is that Elon Musk himself loves conspiracy theorie

The media isn’t just unduly critical—a perennial sore spot for Musk—but “all news is to some degree propaganda,” meaning he won’t label actual state-affiliated propaganda outlets on his platform to distinguish their stories from those of the New York Times.

In his mind, they’re engaged in the same activity, so he strikes the faux-populist note that the people can decide for themselves what is true, regardless of objectively very different track records from different sources.

Musk’s “just asking questions” maneuver is a classic Trump tactic that enables him to advertise conspiracy theories while maintaining a sort of deniability.

At what point should we infer that he’s taking the concerns of someone like Loomer seriously not despite but because of her unhinged beliefs?

Musk’s skepticism seems largely to extend to criticism of the far-right, while his credulity for right-wing sources is boundless.

This is part of the argument for content moderation that limits the dispersal of bullshit: People simply don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to seek out the boring truth when stimulated by some online outrage.

Refuting bullshit requires some technological literacy, perhaps some policy knowledge, but most of all it requires time and a willingness to challenge your own prior beliefs, two things that are in precious short supply online.

Brandolini’s Law holds that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

Here we can return to the example of Loomer’s tweet. People did fact-check her, but it hardly matters: Following Musk’s reply, she ended up receiving over 5 million views, an exponentially larger online readership than is normal for her. In the attention economy, this counts as a major win. “Thank you so much for posting about this, @elonmusk!” she gushed in response to his reply. “I truly appreciate it.”

the problem isn’t limited to elevating Loomer. Musk had his own stock of misinformation to add to the pile. After interacting with her account, Musk followed up last Tuesday by tweeting out last week a 2021 Federalist article claiming that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had “bought” the 2020 election, an allegation previously raised by Trump and others, and which Musk had also brought up during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson.

If Zuckerberg wanted to use his vast fortune to tip the election, it would have been vastly more efficient to create a super PAC with targeted get-out-the-vote operations and advertising. Notwithstanding legitimate criticisms one can make about Facebook’s effect on democracy, and whatever Zuckerberg’s motivations, you have to squint hard to see this as something other than a positive act addressing a real problem.

It’s worth mentioning that the refutations I’ve just sketched of the conspiratorial claims made by Loomer and Musk come out to around 1,200 words. The tweets they wrote, read by millions, consisted of fewer than a hundred words in total. That’s Brandolini’s Law in action—an illustration of why Musk’s cynical free-speech-over-all approach amounts to a policy in favor of disinformation and against democracy.

Moderation is a subject where Zuckerberg’s actions provide a valuable point of contrast with Musk. Through Facebook’s independent oversight board, which has the power to overturn the company’s own moderation decisions, Zuckerberg has at least made an effort to have credible outside actors inform how Facebook deals with moderation issues

Meanwhile, we are still waiting on the content moderation council that Elon Musk promised last October:

The problem is about to get bigger than unhinged conspiracy theorists occasionally receiving a profile-elevating reply from Musk. Twitter is the venue that Tucker Carlson, whom advertisers fled and Fox News fired after it agreed to pay $787 million to settle a lawsuit over its election lies, has chosen to make his comeback. Carlson and Musk are natural allies: They share an obsessive anti-wokeness, a conspiratorial mindset, and an unaccountable sense of grievance peculiar to rich, famous, and powerful men who have taken it upon themselves to rail against the “elites,” however idiosyncratically construed

f the rumors are true that Trump is planning to return to Twitter after an exclusivity agreement with Truth Social expires in June, Musk’s social platform might be on the verge of becoming a gigantic rec room for the populist right.

These days, Twitter increasingly feels like a neighborhood where the amiable guy-next-door is gone and you suspect his replacement has a meth lab in the basement.

even if Twitter’s increasingly broken information environment doesn’t sway the results, it is profoundly damaging to our democracy that so many people have lost faith in our electoral system. The sort of claims that Musk is toying with in his feed these days do not help. It is one thing for the owner of a major source of information to be indifferent to the content that gets posted to that platform. It is vastly worse for an owner to actively fan the flames of disinformation and doubt.

He stated that democracy is also a language that dwells on meaningful conversations, and when AI hacks language it could also destroy democracy.

The 47-year-old wrote that the biggest challenge of the AI age was not the creation of intelligent tools but striking a collaboration between humans and machines.

To highlight the extent of how AI-driven misinformation can change the course of events, Harari touched upon the cult QAnon, a political movement affiliated with the far-right in the US. QAnon disseminated misinformation via “Q drops” that were seen as sacred by followers.

Harari also shed light on how AI could form intimate relationships with people and influence their decisions. “Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews,” he wrote. To demonstrate this, he cited the example of Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who lost his job after publicly claiming that the AI chatbot LaMDA had become sentient. According to the historian, the controversial claim cost Lemoine his job. He asked if AI can influence people to risk their jobs, what else could it induce them to do?

Harari also said that intimacy was an effective weapon in the political battle of minds and hearts. He said that in the past few years, social media has become a battleground for controlling human attention, and the new generation of AI can convince people to vote for a particular politician or buy a certain product.

In his bid to call attention to the need to regulate AI technology, Harari said that the first regulation should be to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. He said it was important to put a halt on ‘irresponsible deployment’ of AI tools in the public domain, and regulating it before it regulates us.

The author also shed light on the fact that how the current social and political systems are incapable of dealing with the challenges posed by AI. Harari emphasised the need to have an ethical framework to respond to challenges posed by AI.

He argued that while GPT-3 had made remarkable progress, it was far from replacing human interactions

The novel probes how nothing in life is fixed, including the legacies of the dead and the stories we tell about our pas

“The study of history shouldn’t be backward looking,” explains a historian in “Halcyon.” “To matter, it has to take us forward.”

Ackerman was in college on Sept. 11, 2001, but what he remembers more vividly is watching the premiere of the TV miniseries “Band of Brothers” the previous Sunday. “If you wanted to know the zeitgeist in the U.S. at the time, it was this very sentimental view of World War II,” he says. “There was this nostalgia for a time where we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys, and we’re going to liberate oppressed people.”

Ackerman, who also covers wars and veteran affairs as a journalist, says that America’s backing of Ukraine is essential in the face of what he calls “an authoritarian axis rising up in the world, with China, Russia and Iran.” Were the country to offer similar help to Taiwan in the face of an invasion from China, he notes, having some air bases in nearby Afghanistan would help, but the U.S. gave those up in 2021.

With Islamic fundamentalists now in control of places where he lost friends, he says he is often asked if he regrets his service. “When you are a young man and your country goes to war, you’re presented with a choice: You either fight or you don’t,” he writes in his 2019 memoir “Places and Names.” “I don’t regret my choice, but maybe I regret being asked to choose.”

Serving in the military at a time when wars are no longer generation-defining events has proven alienating for Ackerman. “When you’ve got wars with an all-volunteer military funded through deficit spending, they can go on forever because there are no political costs

The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which Ackerman covers in his recent memoir “The Fifth Act,” compounded this moral injury. “The fact that there has been so little government support for our Afghan allies has left it to vets to literally clean this up,” he says, noting that he still fields requests for help on WhatsApp. He adds that unless lawmakers act, the tens of thousands of Afghans currently living in the U.S. on humanitarian parole will be sent back to Taliban-held Afghanistan later this year: “It’s very painful to see how our allies are treated.”

Looking back on America’s misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, he notes that “the stories we tell about war are really important to the decisions we make around war. It’s one reason why storytelling fills me with a similar sense of purpose.”

“We don’t talk about the world and our place in it in a holistic way, or a strategic way,” Ackerman says. “We were telling a story about ending America’s longest war, when the one we should’ve been telling was about repositioning ourselves in a world that’s becoming much more dangerous,” he adds. “Our stories sometimes get us in trouble, and we’re still dealing with that trouble today.”

more state school students need to be taught “how to communicate, how to argue, how to fight their corner” from a young age.

Adobe ADBE 7.19%increase; green up pointing triangle, maker of the Photoshop, released a new tool in Firefly, its generative-AI image suite, that lets you change and add in parts of a photo with AI imagery. Earlier this month, Google showed off a new Magic Editor, initially for Pixel phones, that allows you to easily manipulate a scene. And people are all over TikTok posting the results of AI headshot services like Try It On.

After testing a mix of AI editing and generating tools, I just have one question for all of you armchair philosophers: What even is a photo anymore?

I have always wondered what I’d look like as a naval officer. Now I don’t have to. I snapped a selfie and uploaded it to Adobe Firefly’s generative-fill tool. One click of the Background button and my cluttered office was wiped out. I typed “American flag” and in it went. Then I selected the Add tool, erased my torso and typed in “naval uniform.” Boom! Adobe even found me worthy of numerous awards and decorations.

Astronaut, fighter pilot, pediatrician. I turned myself into all of them in under a minute each. The AI-generated images did have noticeable issues: The uniforms were strange and had odd lettering, the stethoscope seemed to be cut in half and the backgrounds were warped and blurry. Yet the final images are fun, and the quality will only get better. 

In FaceApp, for iOS and Android, I was able to change my frown to a smile—with the right amount of teeth! I was also able to add glasses and change my hair color. Some said it looked completely real, others who know me well figured something was up. “Your teeth look too perfect.”

The real reality-bending happens in Midjourney, which can turn text prompts into hyper-realistic images and blend existing images in new ways. The image quality of generated images exceeds OpenAI’s Dall-E and Adobe’s Firefly.

it’s more complicated to use, since it runs through the chat app Discord. Sign up for service, access the Midjourney bot through your Discord account (via web or app), then start typing in prompts. My video producer Kenny Wassus started working with a more advanced Midjourney plugin called Insight Face Swap-Bot, which allows you to sub in a face to a scene you’ve already made. He’s become a master—making me a Game of Thrones warrior and a Star Wars rebel, among other things.

We’re headed for a time when we won’t be able to tell how manipulated a photo is, what parts are real or fake.

when influential messages are conveyed through images—be they news or misinformation—people have reason to know a photo’s origin and what’s been done to it.

Firefly adds a “content credential,” digital information baked into the file, that says the image was manipulated with AI. Adobe is pushing to get news, tech and social-media platforms to use this open-source standard so we can all understand where the images we see came from.

So, yeah, our ability to spot true photos might depend on the cooperation of the entire internet. And by “true photo,” I mean one that captures a real moment—where you’re wearing your own boring clothes and your hair is just so-so, but you have the exact right number of teeth in your head.

Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer.

The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men, women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.)

Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,”

“We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”

If you tried to cruise to a C, you missed the point: “I realized the only way for me to get the most out of this class was to experience it all,” she said. (She got Dr. McDaniel’s permission to break her vow of silence in order to talk to patients during her clinical rotation.)

Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair. Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and José Saramago’s “Blindness.” Then they stay up late discussing it.

The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad. In the middle they’re sad. They stay sad. I’m not concerned with their 20-year-old self. I’m worried about them at my age, dealing with breast cancer, their dad dying, their child being an addict, a career that never worked out — so when they’re dealing with the bigger things in life, they know they’re not alone.”

Both courses have long wait lists. Students are hungry for a low-tech, introspective experience —

Research suggests that underprivileged young people have far fewer opportunities to think for unbroken stretches of time, so they may need even more space in college to develop what social scientists call cognitive endurance.

Yet the most visible higher ed trends are moving in the other direction

Rather than ban phones and laptops from class, some professors are brainstorming ways to embrace students’ tech addictions with class Facebook and Instagram accounts, audience response apps — and perhaps even including the friends and relatives whom students text during class as virtual participants in class discussion.

Then there’s that other unwelcome classroom visitor: artificial intelligence.

stop worrying and love the bot by designing assignments that “help students develop their prompting skills” or “use ChatGPT to generate a first draft,” according to a tip sheet produced by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis.

It’s not at all clear that we want a future dominated by A.I.’s amoral, Cheez Whiz version of human thought

It is abundantly clear that texting, tagging and chatbotting are making students miserable right now.

One recent national survey found that 60 percent of American college students reported the symptoms of at least one mental health problem and that 15 percent said they were considering suicide

A recent meta-analysis of 36 studies of college students’ mental health found a significant correlation between longer screen time and higher risk of anxiety and depression

And while social media can sometimes help suffering students connect with peers, research on teenagers and college students suggests that overall, the support of a virtual community cannot compensate for the vortex of gossip, bullying and Instagram posturing that is bound to rot any normal person’s self-esteem.

We need an intervention: maybe not a vow of silence but a bold move to put the screens, the pinging notifications and creepy humanoid A.I. chatbots in their proper place

it does mean selectively returning to the university’s roots in the monastic schools of medieval Europe and rekindling the old-fashioned quest for meaning.

Colleges should offer a radically low-tech first-year program for students who want to apply: a secular monastery within the modern university, with a curated set of courses that ban glowing rectangles of any kind from the classroom

Students could opt to live in dorms that restrict technology, too

I prophesy that universities that do this will be surprised by how much demand there is. I frequently talk to students who resent the distracting laptops all around them during class. They feel the tug of the “imaginary string attaching me to my phone, where I have to constantly check it,”

Many, if not most, students want the elusive experience of uninterrupted thought, the kind where a hash of half-baked notions slowly becomes an idea about the world.

Even if your goal is effective use of the latest chatbot, it behooves you to read books in hard copies and read enough of them to learn what an elegant paragraph sounds like. How else will students recognize when ChatGPT churns out decent prose instead of bureaucratic drivel?

Most important, students need head space to think about their ultimate values.

His course offers a chance to temporarily exchange those unconscious structures for a set of deliberate, countercultural ones.

here are the student learning outcomes universities should focus on: cognitive endurance and existential clarity.

Contemplation and marathon reading are not ends in themselves or mere vacations from real life but are among the best ways to figure out your own answer to the question of what a human being is for

When students finish, they can move right into their area of specialization and wire up their skulls with all the technology they want, armed with the habits and perspective to do so responsibly

it’s worth learning from the radicals. Dr. McDaniel, the religious studies professor at Penn, has a long history with different monastic traditions. He grew up in Philadelphia, educated by Hungarian Catholic monks. After college, he volunteered in Thailand and Laos and lived as a Buddhist monk.

e found that no amount of academic reading could help undergraduates truly understand why “people voluntarily take on celibacy, give up drinking and put themselves under authorities they don’t need to,” he told me. So for 20 years, he has helped students try it out — and question some of their assumptions about what it means to find themselves.

“On college campuses, these students think they’re all being individuals, going out and being wild,” he said. “But they’re in a playpen. I tell them, ‘You know you’ll be protected by campus police and lawyers. You have this entire apparatus set up for you. You think you’re being an individual, but look at your four friends: They all look exactly like you and sound like you. We exist in these very strict structures we like to pretend don’t exist.’”

Colleges could do all this in classes integrated with general education requirements: ideally, a sequence of great books seminars focused on classic texts from across different civilizations.

“For the last 1,500 years, Benedictines have had to deal with technology,” Placid Solari, the abbot there, told me. “For us, the question is: How do you use the tool so it supports and enhances your purpose or mission and you don’t get owned by it?”

for novices at his monastery, “part of the formation is discipline to learn how to control technology use.” After this initial time of limited phone and TV “to wean them away from overdependence on technology and its stimulation,” they get more access and mostly make their own choices.

Evan Lutz graduated this May from Belmont Abbey with a major in theology. He stressed the special Catholic context of Belmont’s resident monks; if you experiment with monastic practices without investigating the whole worldview, it can become a shallow kind of mindfulness tourism.

The monks at Belmont Abbey do more than model contemplation and focus. Their presence compels even non-Christians on campus to think seriously about vocation and the meaning of life. “Either what the monks are doing is valuable and based on something true, or it’s completely ridiculous,” Mr. Lutz said. “In both cases, there’s something striking there, and it asks people a question.”

Pondering ultimate questions and cultivating cognitive endurance should not be luxury goods.

David Peña-Guzmán, who teaches philosophy at San Francisco State University, read about Dr. McDaniel’s Existential Despair course and decided he wanted to create a similar one. He called it the Reading Experiment. A small group of humanities majors gathered once every two weeks for five and a half hours in a seminar room equipped with couches and a big round table. They read authors ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon

“At the beginning of every class I’d ask students to turn off their phones and put them in ‘the Basket of Despair,’ which was a plastic bag,” he told me. “I had an extended chat with them about accessibility. The point is not to take away the phone for its own sake but to take away our primary sources of distraction. Students could keep the phone if they needed it. But all of them chose to part with their phones.”

Dr. Peña-Guzmán’s students are mostly working-class, first-generation college students. He encouraged them to be honest about their anxieties by sharing his own: “I said, ‘I’m a very slow reader, and it’s likely some or most of you will get further in the text than me because I’m E.S.L. and read quite slowly in English.’

For his students, the struggle to read long texts is “tied up with the assumption that reading can happen while multitasking and constantly interacting with technologies that are making demands on their attention, even at the level of a second,”

“These draw you out of the flow of reading. You get back to the reading, but you have to restart the sentence or even the paragraph. Often, because of these technological interventions into the reading experience, students almost experience reading backward — as constant regress, without any sense of progress. The more time they spend, the less progress they make.”

Dr. Peña-Guzmán dismissed the idea that a course like his is suitable only for students who don’t have to worry about holding down jobs or paying off student debt. “I’m worried by this assumption that certain experiences that are important for the development of personality, for a certain kind of humanistic and spiritual growth, should be reserved for the elite, especially when we know those experiences are also sources of cultural capital,

Courses like the Reading Experiment are practical, too, he added. “I can’t imagine a field that wouldn’t require some version of the skill of focused attention.”

The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with i

Ms. Rodriguez said that before she took Living Deliberately and Existential Despair, she didn’t distinguish technology from education. “I didn’t think education ever went without technology. I think that’s really weird now. You don’t need to adapt every piece of technology to be able to learn better or more,” she said. “It can form this dependency.”

The point of college is to help students become independent humans who can choose the gods they serve and the rules they follow rather than allow someone else to choose for them

The first step is dethroning the small silicon idol in their pocket — and making space for the uncomfortable silence and questions that follow

Olli-Pekka Heinonen, director-general of the IB, told The Times that teenagers taking the new diploma would be “uniquely empowered” on leaving school.

Traditional assessment often led to pupils forgetting what they had learnt once exams were over, he said. “The aim of this type of assessment is to strengthen deep learning and understanding, something you learn that stays with you and is part of you. We’re experimenting with non-exam assessment and finding the best ways to evaluate.

“Biodiversity, food, migration and energy are meaningful and attractive to young people. They’re appealing and relevant.“We’re looking at these areas through the lens of systems leadership — ie, how it’s possible to make change happen.”

The school hosts pupils from 80 different countries and charges fees of £37,000 a year. It is set in St Donat’s Castle, in 122 acres and its grounds include woodland, farmland, a valley and its own seafront.

Naheed Bardai, principal of UWC Atlantic, said he felt dissatisfied with the state of education in the world today as pupils should be prepared to become leaders of organisations and government in the 2040s and 2050s.

He said the new qualification would help them understand the root causes of problems but also become compassionate world leaders that can create “transformative solutions”.

“Our core policies are peace, sustainability and experiential learning but there’s very little education for young people at the intersection of problems, particularly where the human meets the natural world,”

We need people who can take constructive action as inequality is growing at a tremendous rate.”

Bardai said the school had been given a free hand in curriculum writing and was looking at more radical forms of assessment. This may include interviews, peer assessment and portfolios.

traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us

Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage.

Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the kind of patience and perseverance that marks stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun it. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.

If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness

Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”

Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.

American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose.

I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”

Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.

Kuang was critical of those who believe that “the only people getting book deals right now are BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of colour] writers”, including Joyce Carol Oates, who tweeted last year that editors do not want to look at debuts by white male writers. Oates “really just needs to get off Twitter”, Kuang joked, but also said “if you just walk into a bookstore you know that’s not true.”

“We also know from industry reports year after year that the number of BIPOC authors being published hasn’t really budged since the 70s”, she added. “In fact, you can historically trace the years in which the number of Black authors being published in the US spiked to the years in which Toni Morrison was an acquiring editor, which is very depressing.

“I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,” he wrote in “Making Up People

His work in the philosophy of science was groundbreaking: He departed from the preoccupation with questions that had long concerned philosophers. Arguing that science was just as much about intervention as it was about representation, be helped bring experimentation to center stage.

Regarding one such question — whether unseen phenomena like quarks and electrons were real or merely the theoretical constructs of physicists — he argued for reality in the case of phenomena that figured in experiments, citing as an example an experiment at Stanford that involved spraying electrons and positrons into a ball of niobium to detect electric charges. “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote, “if you can spray them, they’re real.”

His book “The Emergence of Probability” (1975), which is said to have inspired hundreds of books by other scholars, examined how concepts of statistical probability have evolved over time, shaping the way we understand not just arcane fields like quantum physics but also everyday life.

“I was trying to understand what happened a few hundred years ago that made it possible for our world to be dominated by probabilities,” he said in a 2012 interview with the journal Public Culture. “We now live in a universe of chance, and everything we do — health, sports, sex, molecules, the climate — takes place within a discourse of probabilities.”

Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that pervades all his work is that “science is a human enterprise,” Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote when Professor Hacking won the Holberg Prize. “It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is ‘true,’ or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.”

Hacking often argued that as the human sciences have evolved, they have created categories of people, and that people have subsequently defined themselves as falling into those categories. Thus does human reality become socially constructed.

In 2000, he became the first Anglophone to win a permanent position at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in the philosophy and history of scientific concepts until he retired in 2006.

“I call this the ‘looping effect,’” he added. “Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before.”

In “Why Race Still Matters,” a 2005 article in the journal Daedalus, he explored how anthropologists developed racial categories by extrapolating from superficial physical characteristics, with lasting effects — including racial oppression. “Classification and judgment are seldom separable,” he wrote. “Racial classification is evaluation.”

Similarly, he once wrote, in the field of mental health the word “normal” “uses a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.”

In his influential writings about autism, Professor Hacking charted the evolution of the diagnosis and its profound effects on those diagnosed, which in turn broadened the definition to include a greater number of people.

Encouraging children with autism to think of themselves that way “can separate the child from ‘normalcy’ in a way that is not appropriate,” he told Public Culture. “By all means encourage the oddities. By no means criticize the oddities.”

His emphasis on historical context also illuminated what he called transient mental illnesses, which appear to be so confined 0cto their time 0c 0cthat they can vanish when times change.

“hysterical fugue” was a short-lived epidemic of compulsive wandering that emerged in Europe in the 1880s, largely among middle-class men who had become transfixed by stories of exotic locales and the lure of trave

His intellectual tendencies were unmistakable from an early age. “When he was 3 or 4 years old, he would sit and read the dictionary,” Jane Hacking said. “His parents were completely baffled.”

He wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”

Most A.I. researchers agree that models trained using R.L.H.F. are better behaved than models without it. But some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath.

In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses, and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model.

Shoggoths are fictional creatures, introduced by the science fiction author H.P. Lovecraft in his 1936 novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Lovecraft’s telling, Shoggoths were massive, blob-like monsters made out of iridescent black goo, covered in tentacles and eyes.

@TetraspaceWest said, wasn’t necessarily implying that it was evil or sentient, just that its true nature might be unknowable.

And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in A.I. today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.

“I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.”

when Bing’s chatbot became unhinged and tried to break up my marriage, an A.I. researcher I know congratulated me on “glimpsing the Shoggoth.” A fellow A.I. journalist joked that when it came to fine-tuning Bing, Microsoft had forgotten to put on its smiley-face mask.

@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”

In any case, the Shoggoth is a potent metaphor that encapsulates one of the most bizarre facts about the A.I. world, which is that many of the people working on this technology are somewhat mystified by their own creations. They don’t fully understand the inner workings of A.I. language models, how they acquire new capabilities or why they behave unpredictably at times. They aren’t totally sure if A.I. is going to be net-good or net-bad for the world.

That some A.I. insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comparing Facebook to Cthulhu.)

If it’s an A.I. safety researcher talking about the Shoggoth, maybe that person is passionate about preventing A.I. systems from displaying their true, Shoggoth-like nature.

A great many people are dismissive of suggestions that any of these systems are “really” thinking, because they’re “just” doing something banal (like making statistical predictions about the next word in a sentence). What they fail to appreciate is that there is every reason to suspect that human cognition is “just” doing those exact same things. It matters not that birds flap their wings but airliners don’t. Both fly. And these machines think. And, just as airliners fly faster and higher and farther than birds while carrying far more weight, these machines are already outthinking the majority of humans at the majority of tasks. Further, that machines aren’t perfect thinkers is about as relevant as the fact that air travel isn’t instantaneous. Now consider: we’re well past the Wright flyer level of thinking machine, past the early biplanes, somewhere about the first commercial airline level. Not quite the DC-10, I think. Can you imagine what the AI equivalent of a 777 will be like? Fasten your seatbelts.

@thomas h. You make my point perfectly. You’re observing that the way a plane flies — by using a turbine to generate thrust from combusting kerosene, for example — is nothing like the way that a bird flies, which is by using the energy from eating plant seeds to contract the muscles in its wings to make them flap. You are absolutely correct in that observation, but it’s also almost utterly irrelevant. And it ignores that, to a first approximation, there’s no difference in the physics you would use to describe a hawk riding a thermal and an airliner gliding (essentially) unpowered in its final descent to the runway. Further, you do yourself a grave disservice in being dismissive of the abilities of thinking machines, in exactly the same way that early skeptics have been dismissive of every new technology in all of human history. Writing would make people dumb; automobiles lacked the intelligence of horses; no computer could possibly beat a chess grandmaster because it can’t comprehend strategy; and on and on and on. Humans aren’t nearly as special as we fool ourselves into believing. If you want to have any hope of acting responsibly in the age of intelligent machines, you’ll have to accept that, like it or not, and whether or not it fits with your preconceived notions of what thinking is and how it is or should be done … machines can and do think, many of them better than you in a great many ways. b&

@BLA. You are incorrect. Everything has nature. Its nature is manifested in making humans react. Sure, no humans, no nature, but here we are. The writer and various sources are not attributing nature to AI so much as admitting that they don’t know what this nature might be, and there are reasons to be scared of it. More concerning to me is the idea that this field is resorting to geek culture reference points to explain and comprehend itself. It’s not so much the algorithm has no soul, but that the souls of the humans making it possible are stupendously and tragically underdeveloped.

When even tech companies are saying AI is moving too fast, and the articles land on page 1 of the NYT (there's an old reference), I think the greedy will not think twice about exploiting this technology, with no ethical considerations, at all.

@nome sane? The problem is it isn't data as we understand it. We know what the datasets are -- they were used to train the AI's. But once trained, the AI is thinking for itself, with results that have surprised everybody.

The unique feature of a shoggoth is it can become whatever is needed for a particular job. There's no actual shape so it's not a bad metaphor, if an imperfect image. Shoghoths also turned upon and destroyed their creators, so the cautionary metaphor is in there, too. A shame more Asimov wasn't baked into AI. But then the conflict about how to handle AI in relation to people was key to those stories, too.