Stephen Marche in The New Yorker: Sudowrite uses, as its base, GPT-3, the latest version of a deep-learning neural network that can auto-generate text. The organization that created GPT-3, OpenAI, was founded as a nonprofit with a mission âto advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,…
Tag: Theodore Roszak
“Row upon row, aisle upon aisle of nutritional zero, gaily boxed and packed”
Not that anybody should be surprised by this, but it turns out that what we commonly regard as “healthy foods” may be nothing of the sort, not because the specific foods in question (fruits and vegetables) are wrongly characterized in and of themselves, but because farming techniques — the ones we’ve honed and developed over…
Liminality, Synchronicity, and the Walls of Everyday Reality
(Liminalities, Cycle 1, Part 1) A seminal moment in the formation of Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity came as he was treating a highly educated woman who, by his description, was locked in a rigid Cartesian rationalism that hindered her therapy. The basis of all depth psychotherapy is the airing of unconscious psychic content and…
Recommended Reading 15
This week’s recommended articles and essays (and videos) include: the political battle behind climate science research; the rising push for a future where urban infrastructure is relocated underground; a look at Wal-Mart’s destructive effect on America’s middle class; the alteration of reading, writing, and publishing by the snooping technology that accompanies e-books; a brilliant, long…
Waking up from the nightmare of economics
If you, like me, are consistently struck these days by a kind of unpleasant, inverted sense of numinous awe at the spectacle of economists still occupying major positions of mainstream power and respect in our culture instead of walking around in hairshirts and beating their breasts with heads bowed in unbearable shame, then Columbia University…
Scientism, the “social sciences,” and the assault on the human self
Maybe it’s the rise of “positive psychology,” “happiness studies,” “happiness economics,” and other attempts to quantify human happiness and gain a “scientific understanding” of it that has gotten under my skin. Maybe it’s the veritable tsunami of poll results and policy recommendations flooding through the collective consciousness during the current American presidential campaign season, all…
Technology, ecology, and the real sin of Dr. Frankenstein
I first read Lewis Thomas’s wonderful Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Sympthony as an undergraduate communication major (philosophy minor) at the University of Missouri. In more than one of the essays contained therein, Thomas expresses the belief that many or most of humanity’s basic problems, including environmental and ecological ones, can only…
Science fiction, cultural myths, and the doubtful future of space flight
It appears we’re in the midst of a mini-explosion of reflection about the status of the science fictional dreams that, according to some observers and thinkers, fueled our 20th-century race into space. Basically, the space program in its original conception or incarnation — which in addition to its obvious nature as a geopolitically motivated Cold…
News flash: New study shows formal learning requires effort!!!!
If my tone in this post sounds sarcastic, don’t worry, you’re not imagining things. My tone really is sarcastic. Some things, I’ve learned, positively beg for a rich heaping of irony. The latest issue of Education Week contains the following article, published online June 16 and published in print June on 17: Effort, Engagement, and…