We get an extra day to see if we can get it all done.
Author: Eric (Page 2 of 5)
This is the time of year when we hear folks going through their lists to recap the past year, and to make new lists of predictions. With this past a year of hyperbole, we are heading into a new year full of dire warnings. The planet is on fire, our politics are on fire, our culture is on fire…
And yet.
It is a new year, and while the politics of the day will be front page for many months to come (You thought the 2024 contest was already taking up too much airtime and pixels? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.) it is also worth remembering that we are not living in history…yet.
The signs, all bright neon colors, flashing at hypnotizing rates every way we turn, tell us we are in a scary time for our nation. And, well, yes we are. But the signal-to-noise ratio in our public discourse is lower1 than I can recall in my lifetime, and the alarm bells are rinnging for all the wrong reasons. Deflection is the name of the game, and we – all of us – need to keep our collective eye on the ball, if we are worried about what history informs us of a possible future.
This past week in the small town of Berlin, NH, a candidate for the office of President of the United States was asked a simple question: “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” The candidate’s2 answer was anything but simple, or even to the point, let alone “presidential.” The word “slavery” was omitted; the topic not even reflected.
The next day, the spin rooms were working at high RPMs. The candidate when asked about her answer said, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that.”
Except – and this is the thing – she didn’t say it when asked. A subject like the U.S. Civil War should be the low-hanging fruit for any candidate for national office – we are in a time when so many pundits have been predicting that we are sitting on the threshold of a modern civil war.
This is the type of question for which one does not get a “do-over” or make-up exam.
This is the exemplar of the kind of question a Republican candidate should absolutely OWN, given that party’s birth in the same cause that led to the Civil War. The folks who are forgiving the candidate her verbal trespass tell us that the Republican Party has forgotten the concept their party’s name embodies.
But history tells us this is nothing new. A previous republican president of the past century, the guy who resigned rather than face the music, was impressed with the trappings of court when visiting heads of state in Europe, and in preparation for a visit by the British Prime Minister, gussied up the guards with ceremonial uniforms complete with fancy hats and tasseled tunics.
It was the President’s design, and it was panned by critics as being, among other things, “too monarchical” and compared to those you would find surrounding a head of state in a banana republic.
It’s worth remembering that story now, because a few parallels have been made between that guy who resigned and inmate P011358093, the the proclaimed front-runner for the party that has lost its way. Today, we have a candidate who has said he would be a dictator on day 1 if elected. He has said many things, many horrible things, on his way to leading the pack, and they need to be heard for what they are: words that describe what he intends to do if he gets his hands back on the levers of power.
The next closest candidate in the race, if polls are to be believed,4 can’t come to admit why the Civil War was fought – even though the Declaration of Secession of the very state she governed stated slavery was the reason for that state, among others, to secede.
Meanwhile, inflation is down. Jobs are up. Most metrics by which we measure the success of an economy indicate that the past three years have been very, very good to our nation, in no small part because out current President acted in a somewhat revolutionary way: he turned public policy toward raising up its average citizens instead of rewarding its wealthiest, the latter a trend begun under an actor5 in the biggest role of his lifetime.
We are at the beginning of a new year, the first ten months of which will be full of noise, more noise, and then some noise on top of all that. Bread and circuses will appear everywhere a crowd can gather, and much time, pixels, and airwaves will be spent confusing the people so they don’t vote in their interest. Or in the interest of the nation and the world.
We live in a democratic republic, but less and less so in recent years, as the ironically-named Republican party works feverishly to transform our nation into an autocracy, or oligarchy, or some other form of big-ass banana republic.
A republic is, as was explained years ago to sell the notion of one of our own by folks like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, a government whose fundamental principle is “…that the sense of the majority shall prevail.”6 One needs only look at this past year to see ample evidence tat the GOP is working toward the opposite principle. Perhaps the most obvious and egregious example of this is a former football coach turned U.S. Senator who singlehandedly degraded military readiness and our defense posture around the world by refusing to allow military promotions to continue for most of 2023, leaving whole branches with interim leadership – all for a cause for which that the vast majority of the general public disagrees with him.
The sense of the majority no longer resides in the leadership of the GOP. The Republican Party is not what its name suggests.
All this is nothing new to you, dear reader. If you are here, you are likely already of a similar mind. So what to do?
I don’t know. Getting a signal in past all that noise is a Sisyphean task, but we cannot let up. We cannot give up. Because if we do, they win. And that’s a future, for 2024 and beyond, that I don’t want to be a part of.
And so…welcome to the new year. Take a deep breath, and find some time to make some time to make a difference, however small, on your side of the playing field.
Things are not what they seem. But they don’t have to become what they appear to be coming to.
Good luck – for all of us – in this new year.
- If you would prefer, our noise-to-signal ration is terribly high. ↩︎
- I would prefer not to use names of folks I don’t support on my blurg. You can look ’em up if you don’t know of whom I am talking. ↩︎
- I would prefer not to use names of folks I don’t support on my blurg, but if they earn an inmate number, I’ll allow that descriptor into my prose. ↩︎
- Polls at this time are not to be believed. But the give us an insight into what folks are thinking about when it comes to the horserace, so they are not without value – only without as much merit and value that is too often accorded them in the absence of easier reportage this early in the game. ↩︎
- Rhymes with RAY-gun ↩︎
- Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist” 22, in C. Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers (1787) (New York: New American Library, 1961), p.78 ↩︎
Life has kept me busy. Of course, who hasn’t been kept hopping these days? Most folk I know are, well, busy, be it keeping up with work, managing health issues, dealing with their families. When I set myself down in the home office to do some kind of activity on this computing thingy, I find myself doing work – that is to say, working on material brought from the job, spending extra time in an edit doing tweaking, mixing, and such other things as I might fuss over before I send a project out for review.
Lately, too, when I set myself own in this chair to write, I find myself writing for work. My job hasn’t changed, per se, but the focus of some of what I do has shifted somewhat. These days I am writing to document what I do – the great Brain Dump as we call it in my quarterly reviews. With more staff in our department, and, lets face it, the imminent reality of my aging out toward retirement in the actually foreseeable future, it is incumbent upon me to delegate more of what I do to others. I can’t keep doing it all, myself, especially now that I am not alone. Which is nice – but there needs to be a conduit between my grey matter and the tasks our new folks are picking up.
I also get to work more on communications-oriented writing, especially to promote the strategic alignment of our larger department within the division, and the university writ large.
All this is nice, but I need to start carving out time in the new year to write more for myself. To work on projects that have been piling up, one way or another, on the desk here in the home office.
It can be done. Life has been busy, but, let’s be real – not any busier for me as for many others. One person in particular continues to astound and amaze me with her daily output. She writes, each day, for us; for all of US. Her output demonstrates a discipline and ethic that humbles. I type of Heather Cox Richardson, whose substack column, Letters from an American, should be required reading across the board.
Richardson has a new book out; as she’s been hustling around doing the author boogie, she keeps cranking out the daily submissions. Each day I see her name in my inbox, I am awed.
Yesterday’s filing, for Thanksgiving Day, was, as usual, inspirational, and I leave you with her final words from yesterday:
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
And in 1865, at least, they won.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-23-2023
This next year is gonna be the weirdest on record. Fasten your seatbelts…
Happiness is a trail by a river.
Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. ~ Rachel Carson
On Monday, March 27, six innocent souls were taken at a Christian school in Nashville Tennessee: three of them children. Immediately, the flood of thoughts and prayers was so overwhelming, it solved the problem in an instant.
We had decided as a nation we’ve finally gone too far.
I’m lying, of course. As I type this, it’s Wednesday morning in the Pacific Northwest, March 29, and already since Tuesday there have been 25 more people killed and 62 wounded by firearms in 77 new incidents. Further proof that thoughts and prayers have no effect, and further proof that, apparently, we feel we still have not gone far enough to warrant any preventive action.
Yesterday, the day after the students needlessly lost their lives in their school, Barry Black, a retired Rear Admiral who serves as the U.S Senate Chaplain spoke at the opening of that chamber’s business:
Lord, when babies die at a church school, it is time for us to move beyond thoughts and prayers. Remind our lawmakers of the words of the British statesman Edmund Burke: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.’ Lord, deliver our senators from the paralysis of analysis that waits for the miraculous. Use them to battle the demonic forces that seek to engulf us. We pray, in your powerful name, amen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/28/us-senate-chaplain-tennessee-shooting/
Amen.
Meanwhile, several people who were elected to work in the same building as Barry Black opted to remain paralyzed. As common as “thoughts and prayers” is a response from a certain group of lawmakers to these shootings is the complaint that people are too quick to politicize [insert latest shooting].
Yesterday, the House Majority Leader said, “I really get angry when I see people trying to politicize it for their own personal agenda, especially when we don’t even know the facts.” He suggested that all “the other side” (wait – there’s another side to an epidemic of gun violence where it’s okay…?) wants to do, “…is take guns away from law-abiding citizens before they even know the facts…”
Fine. Let’s not act hastily in response to Tennessee. How about we only use facts from last year’s shootings? Parkland? Sandy Hook? Columbine?
How soon is enough damn time for these people to pull their heads out of the NRA’s ass and do something?
We have the facts already, from so many, many shootings. Let’s use them.
I don’t want your guns. I just want the guns to quit killing people in our homes, business…and schools.
Most of us are familiar with Edmond Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac, a poetic play in which one man’s true identity is kept hidden behind another’s. I’m paraphrasing quite a bit, but the 19th century play has been performed and adapted almost continuously since its debut, finding great success on the silver screen in Steve Martin’s classic modernization in Roxanne and the gender-flipped version in The Truth About Cats & Dogs, and the small screen, showing up in venues as diverse as The Brady Bunch and Bob’s Burgers.
The story follows this general line (with apologies, to folks who want a better synopsis – and to my high school French teachers): A person who can’t express themselves well is aided by one who can, all to woo another, and hilarity ensues when the person providing the wooing words to the wooer has to come to terms with their own feelings for the woo-ee.
I bring this up because recent advances in technology have me concerned that we’re coming into an age of a cybernetic Cyranos, and it has implications we’re not going to fully understand until long after these new tools have been used for some time and become embedded in our culture and lives. The tools I speak of (as you may guess from my title) are the chatbots powered by generative “artificial intelligence” (AI) algorithms, such as ChatGPT and Bing.
My career has been in higher education, and over the years I have witnessed technological attempts to improve the response to plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct. Back in the day, it was easier than it is today to, say, get a term paper from someone geographically distant and present it as one’s own work locally. Cheaters could cheat, and could do so more easily, because, let’s face it: nothing was connected. Eventually, though, the internet came along and ruined everything. For starters, it supersized the market for, shall we say, papers on demand. But, at the same time, we started to see more and more work being submitted digitally, which allowed software tools to make some of the verification process an easier, more automagic one.
Today, plagiarism software is a big business, with enterprise-level tools deployed as a normal part of course management software. It’s not just for academia – businesses deploy these tools, and individuals using tools like Grammarly can even do a self-check before submitting their work or school projects. Even lawmakers are turning to these tools.
In less than half a year, though, the new generation of AI tools has been making headlines for the “human-like” responses created when given a prompt, to, say, write a poem or do a report on a specific subject. These new chatbots have been harvesting data from the internet, and using heuristic algorithms to catalog word-use patterns to which they then compare their own outputs, creating a feedback loop of generative critique to then reshape the response to resemble human output.
Now, I’m not a computer scientist, but that’s how I understand it. Point is, we now have machines that are capable of developing iterative understandings of patterns at a blazing speed, and just as quickly parrot those patterns. The results, I will admit, are impressive.
Sometimes scary. Not always in a good way, either…
A few months ago, the trustees of a public university were listening to a presentation from an administrator about the ongoing process of developing a new strategic plan for the campus, and he began by saying that someone in the office thought it would be fun to ask a chatbot to write a strategic plan for the university. “Actually,” he said, “it turned out pretty good.”
There is a great deal of faith that such documents will be written and vetted by the humans hired for those jobs…and yet, across the field of journalism, we have, in fact, seen some human reportage jobs trickling away while these systems are beginning to be engaged.
Which brings me back to my career. I’m what is referred to as “a creative” – that is, I create content in audio and video media…and I work in higher education. For that first distinction, think about the implications if a machine could just do what I do… In fact, this reminds me of a joke told by Woody Allen in his days as a standup comedian:
My father worked for the same firm for 12 years. They fired him and replaced him with a tiny gadget that does everything my father does, only much better. The depressing thing is my mother ran out and bought one.
For that matter, what about the folks who write strategic plans? I’ve heard from a pretty good source that a chatbot already does a good job with that task…
Joking aside, my side of these ivy-covered walls is the least of it: the implications on the teaching and learning mission of any college is being challenged by these technologies. Task forces and committees are springing up on campuses around the world to explore a very basic question: what in hell is being unleashed upon us? The implications for educators and for students are all immediately transformative. We are, today, now in a world where a person can create a term paper by robotic proxy.
Fortunately, many of these term papers are going to have flaws. My own experience dabbling with one product, ChatGPT, has shown that the machine has an easy relationship with lying, often creating, let’s call them “alternative facts,” and presenting them as if they belong in our universe of truth. You can even get them with citations…to non-publications written by non people.
Like I said earlier: the results are impressive. Sometimes scary.
If I were to write an essay and submit it to my job or for a class with fabricated “facts” and imagined sources, I would be called a lying liar. The eggheads who built these systems prefer not to say that these bots are lying in their responses, and I get it – lying is a harsh, very negative term. One could try to fancy it up by using a longer word that most folks probably don’t know means the same thing, like “prevarication” but even that’s too harsh. Because it’s true. Instead, they insist their systems are “hallucinating.”
Great…the bots are tripping and these works are just their fever dreams…
Now, even with the caveat that I know it is not right and proper to paint all students with the same big brush, it is not unthinkable that a student on a deadline could use a tool like this to create a quick draft of an essay using a real-language prompt…and not go much beyond the draft, since, hey, it is pretty good…and it’s already 2am and the essay is due at 8. It’s going to take some time for the anti-plagiarism systems to develop heuristics to learn to detect algorithmic output over human expression.
Quite frankly, it’s got a good chunk of the ivory tower types with their undies bunched up to their necks.
Let us be fair, here, and remind ourselves we can’t just point at students as a cause to worry about potential technology abuse – it can happen on the other side of the equation, too. It is eerily possible to imagine this scenario: an instructor uses a chatbot to write a lecture. You can even imagine using other AI tools to create a deep fake video for his online class to view.
I say this with such certainty because a faculty member at the Wharton School of Business who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship did just that. Not to cheat the system, but to demonstrate the breadth of opportunities these generative AI tools allow.
Which brings me back around to Rostand’s creation, you know, the guy with the big nose and great way with words, Cyrano de Bergerac. He was the unknown source for the voice of another. With the penetration of (anti)social media into almost every aspect of our daily lives, who is to say we’re dealing with the people we think we are?
Should this matter? Well, we are still struggling as a nation to cope with the impact of social media on a wide range of cultural and political issues, up to and including elections for the highest offices in the land. Who – or what – is generating the words (and images and sounds) that go viral, influencing others with propaganda? Who – or what – is generating the body of knowledge used to teach, and adding to it in academic response?
It is very likely that not only is the proverbial horse long out of the barn, and we are well beyond any hope of closing the barn doors, but that horse has met with others and is actively breeding.
Pay attention to this story, as it’s only just beginning.
After 33,307,137,180 miles, it’s that time again to schedule a visit into the shop to kick the tires, check the fluids, and adjust levels. No major breakdowns (knock wood), but I have been hearing some strange noises from the joints and transmission lately.
As we go around yet again…
Remember when a terabyte seemed like a like an unimaginably ridiculous metric shit-tonne of storage?
I do.