Artificial intelligence has been top of (nonartificial) mind here at Post Opinions, too. Keen newsletter readers might have already checked out Brian Broome’s piece about suspecting a student of using ChatGPT, or Viorica Marian’s on how large-language models threaten Indigenous tongues.
This past week or so, we’ve had some fresh inputs. First up is today’s warning from contributing columnist Danielle Allen. She writes that generative AI is about to remake our world. She anticipates that, like globalization before it, it “will increase productivity but also supercharge dislocation.”
Add in AI-powered disinformation, and you’ve got a real strain on democracy. Danielle (and lesser-known visionaries such as Elon Musk) have signed an open letter asking for a pause on AI development until we can figure out the necessary “next-generation governance.”
Columnist Megan McArdle, like many, is concerned most immediately with job security. It’s time to start planning how to escape obsolescence, she writes. But her latest column has another idea I hadn’t come across anywhere else.
“Honey,” she told her husband recently, “we need to agree on a safeword.”
She proposes that loved ones settle on a secret signal, one that will say, “It’s really me!” no matter how good AI gets at aping individuals.
(For what it’s worth, a few months ago, existential risk philosopher Émile P. Torres foresaw all this and called for a pause, too. They were less worried about the extinction of democracy, though, than the extinction of … humankind.)
It’s not all gloom and doom, though! In fact, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says explicitly to relax, because just look at all the things AI can’t do. It can’t feel, can’t understand, can’t be conscious — and it won’t, ever.
At its best, it’s “like a person who is barely paying attention,” Gelernter writes, which is how ChatGPT gives us the following sentence about spoons: “Today, spoons are an essential part of our daily lives, and are used in a wide variety of settings, from the kitchen to the dining room.” Not particularly poetic, is it?
In fact, Jaswinder Bolina wrote last week that poetry will be the key to differentiating us from the machines. ChatGPT’s job is to crawl the internet and swallow so much of existing human language that it can sound just like what we hear all the time. The poet’s task, meanwhile, “is to keep language from stagnating or, worse, from boring us to death,” Bolina writes.
Because AI has no soul, it can’t invent the “unusual and unpatterned” language that makes poetry poetry. A spoon will be always “an essential part of our daily lives,” and never — joyfully — “runcible.”
Now that’s a good safeword.
From Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber’s op-ed arguing that college is still certainly worth the cost. It’s a rebuttal to the more than half of Americans who disagree nowadays.
Eisgruber’s piece zeroes in on what has coaxed Americans into this notion — college’s confusing pricing scheme, to start, and the fact that bad financial news related to higher ed gets all the press.
It also offers a way to erase the caricature of college as being monstrously expensive, an image that cheats potential students.
Chaser: That image hurts the rest of us, too. As columnist Catherine Rampell recently wrote, we all need more people going to college.
President Biden is officially running again, and based on his announcement video, columnist Karen Tumulty writes, this time will be much less about Donald Trump. Biden has gone broader, she says, with a message “that extremism is not a problem that has been — nor will be — cured by barring Trump from the Oval Office.”
Columnist Marc Thiessen writes that the less focus on Trump, the better for Republicans. Unlike Karen, Marc sees a particularly weak Biden going into 2024 and thinks that if the GOP can find a way to put up someone, anyone else, the presidency is theirs to lose.
But columnist Greg Sargent has reason to question that confidence. His conversation with the analyst who saw through 2022’s red mirage lays out how Biden could beat Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, too.
Chaser: Disney has just sued DeSantis. Read columnist Eugene Robinson from last week on the governor’s ill-advised “Ahab-like pursuit of the Little Mermaid.”
- There is no Tucker Carlson on tonight, satirist Alexandra Petri writes. Must we guess on our own whom to hate?
- Black Americans’ 20th-century migration out of the South has been well studied, columnist Charles Lane writes. We can learn from the White diaspora, too.
- Biden is quietly encouraging Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s rehabilitation, policy expert David Adesnik argues. He should reverse course.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
You merely give directions
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
