“A Certain Danger Lurks There”

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence—but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans:

Today, the view that artificial intelligence poses some kind of threat is no longer a minority position among those working on it. There are different opinions on which risks we should be most worried about, but many prominent researchers, from Timnit Gebru to Geoffrey Hinton—both ex-Google computer scientists—share the basic view that the technology can be toxic. Weizenbaum’s pessimism made him a lonely figure among computer scientists during the last three decades of his life; he would be less lonely in 2023.

There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution. It strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines. By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code.

Weizenbaum liked to say that every person is the product of a particular history. His ideas bear the imprint of his own particular history, which was shaped above all by the atrocities of the 20th century and the demands of his personal demons. Computers came naturally to him. The hard part, he said, was life.

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My Search for the Snow Monkeys of South Texas

Sarah Bird has had a lifelong connection to 150 snow monkeys. (Not many people can attest to that.) She has followed their story since they were transported from Japan in 1972—for a new life in Texas—and is now determined to meet them one last time. There is no fairytale ending, but there is a beautiful story.

The national treasures had become public nuisances. Unless a new home was found, the 150 rogue monkeys would become candidates for either lab studies or the dissection table. When no takers could be found in Japan, a five-alarm alert went up throughout the international community to save these members of the only group of primates whose behavior and matrilineal lines had been studied for over a decade. For six years, scientists around the globe searched for a safe home for the endangered monkeys.

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Ornamental Hermits Were 18th-Century England’s Must-Have Garden Accessory

Shoshi Parks opens this intriguing essay by examining an advert written by an 18th-century British aristocrat looking for a live-in hermit, specifying that he “must be silent, never speaking to the servants who brought him his daily meals. He must wear a goat’s hair robe and never cut his hair, nails or beard.” Such an introduction makes it impossible not to be gripped, and Parks’ gleeful unpicking of this epitome of eccentricity is worth enjoying to the very end.

Neither Stukeley’s hermitage nor Queen Caroline’s boasted a hermit-in-residence. But it wasn’t long before the idea of elevating a hermitage’s authenticity by adding a living, breathing hermit caught on. “Nothing, it was felt, could give such delight to the eye as the spectacle of an aged person, with a long gray beard and a goatish rough robe, doddering about amongst the discomforts and pleasures of nature,” wrote British poet Edith Sitwell in the 1933 book English Eccentrics.

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Georgia’s Largest Industry Faces a Mental Health Crisis

Suicide rates in rural areas are higher than in cities, and increasingly so. Meanwhile, farmers—who are typically older, male, and white, three more factors that increase suicide risk—grapple with newer existential risks to their already-fraught profession, like climate change and a real-estate crunch. A mental-health storm has been gathering for some time; Allison Salerno visits a pilot program at the University of Georgia that seeks to break up the clouds with fellowship and human connection.

Jason is now 46 and married, with children of his own. He still manages the farm in Bowersville, where twice a day—every day of the year—those cows need to be milked. Other chores: mix feed rations for milking and dry cows (pregnant or about to deliver), water and feed the animals, care for those that are ailing, deliver new calves, manage manure, monitor herd health and nutrition—and, depending on the season, prep, plant, or harvest fields. Since 2019, Jason has made multimillion-dollar investments in the business. He borrowed money to build an upgraded barn and become the second dairy farm in the state to use robotic milkers. He bought four of the machines, at about $250,000 each. Jason often worries that to ensure the farm’s future, he could have endangered it—that the debt he’s taken on might lead to the farm’s failure. “I’ve taken all that 70-something years’ worth of effort, and I’ve risked it all,” he says. Having witnessed the aftermath of his brother’s death, Jason never considers dying by suicide, but he’s honest about how tough running the business can be. How does he manage the pressure? “Some days are better than others.” Jason lives too far from Blairsville to participate in the Shed program there—he’s about a two-hour drive east—but he’s the type of farmer Haney would love to reach.

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We Are All Animals at Night

Lana Hall recounts the kindness she encountered working in a massage parlour in Toronto’s Finch Alley during the ’80s. She recalls the camaraderie she discovered among her fellow workers and others — such as cab drivers and convenience store clerks —who too worked through the night in low-paying jobs to serve the needs of others.

At night we’re just animals, I was reminded. The clients, yes, seeking release they couldn’t admit during daylight hours, but also the workers who manned the various portions of the strip mall after dark. The way we cared for each other, sometimes more in silent gestures than anything else, felt connected to our deepest instincts as pack animals. No matter how much I wanted to go home, there was some comfort in the simplicity of that connection.

Women filled my Styrofoam cup at the twenty-four-seven coffee shop across the street from the parlour, glancing wordlessly at the strip of bare skin between my coat and the tops of my stockings, but still making sure my cup was full to the top, passing me extra packets of sugar, sometimes a muffin from the day-old basket. Kids in their early twenties manned the counter at all-night fast-food joints, where I’d go between clients on slow shifts, needing something to wake up my neurons: salt, heat, grease. The shock of cold air on my legs at midnight. We knew so little about each other’s lives—how could we?—but forced into this strange cohort of ragged work hours, I felt we sometimes shared a look of recognition: of people whittling time away as we tended to the incessant hungers of others.

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Catch and Release

If we’re lucky, our journey through education features great teachers. If we’re extraordinarily lucky, one of those great teachers becomes a friend, and even a mentor. In signing up for a class about a novelist he’d never even read, Stewart Sinclair unwittingly set himself on a path that delivered all three. A lovely ode to the figures who guide us more than they might ever know.

Sometimes Schaberg would come into class with a deep outdoorsman’s tan and talk about whatever thoughts had come to him while he was casting along the Mississippi River. He’d just had his first child in the years while I was his student, and it seemed like all of his thoughts led to the river or the boy. It was apparent to anyone who took his classes that Schaberg was a person searching for meaning, who didn’t believe he had any answers, and who wanted his students to get excited about the search. A fisherman can show you how to read the river to figure out the best place to cast your line, but he can’t tell you what, if anything, might emerge from the depths. That’s the nature of the fun.

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What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing

Critiques of ChatGPT’s writing appeared almost as soon as the service became publicly available. But most of those criticisms so far have been fairly vague—variations of “The writing just doesn’t feel human.” I certainly agree, but have also been searching for a clearer argument about why exactly ChatGPT’s writing fails on a technical level.

Laura Hartenberger at Noema delivers exactly that in this cogent, masterful analysis and critique of the content that these types of programs spit out. In doing so, she also wrestles with the central question that has inevitably crept up in the midst of this generative AI hand-wringing: What is good writing, anyway?

When we talk about good writing, what exactly do we mean? As we explore new applications for large language models and consider how well they can optimize our communication, AI challenges us to reflect on the qualities we truly value in our prose. How do we measure the caliber of writing, and how well does AI perform?

In school, we learn that good writing is clear, concise and grammatically correct — but surely, it has other qualities, too. Perhaps the best writing also innovates in form and content; or perhaps it evokes an emotional response in its readers; or maybe it employs virtuosic syntax and sophisticated diction. Perhaps good writing just has an ineffable spark, an aliveness, a know-it-when-you-see-it quality. Or maybe good writing projects a strong sense of voice.

But then, what makes a strong voice, and why does ChatGPT’s voice so often fall flat?

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