Or Kings of the Wyld, which is about an adventuring group that comes out of retirement for one last mission. One of them retired to be a city guard, another a king... pretty good story. Good mix of pathos and humor.
You're right. And before people chime and say
but the billionaires don't have the wealth, because if you add up their wealth, it's a small fraction of the problem!
we need to realize a few things: the billionaire oligarch ultra-wealthy folks (the top 0.1% or so ~ those with hundreds of millions of dollars or equivalent, or more) choose to allocate huge amounts of wealth to frivolities (yachts, etc.), which in turn sucks away resources from real concerns (food, housing, health care, the environment, elder care, education). We live in a world with finite resources and the allocation of those resources matters. There is a zero-sum element at play. In addition, the uber-wealthy control the major global media and also the major political parties, which means that the uber-wealthy control the national discourse & the allocation of national wealth. We need to push back against the ultra-wealthy or else we will be left with a mere pittance. They will call this pittance "basic income," and it will be bare-minimum subsistence living, scraping-by survival income.
Don't be surprised if attempts to tax the wealth of the ultra-ultra-wealthy will be met with a deluge of articles in the news media about how it can't work, won't be done, etc. Tax wealth, not work!
Most of the "sentences," as defined by punctuation, are really just phrases. The article was published on Substack, so not only are there no editors, but apparently no standards. Please take time to edit your work, otherwise it's illegible. I'll take a stab at repeating what I just said, but in that same terse style:
The author used sentence fragments. Hardly 5 words. Barely even phrases. What the hell? Twenty years ago, this would have triggered editorial review. Not now. Nobody cares! It's awful. Here's what bloggers don't want to acknowledge: writing takes time and effort. It's a skill. And guess what? If you write well, people will have an easier time understanding your point. If there ever was one.
The Luddites protested because they didn't own the textile factories they worked in, and so were easily made irrelevant and cast away as more automation took place (they were not anti-progress or anti-techology per se!). Similarly, whether or not AI kills jobs depends on who has ownership of the AI. If the workers and labor classes were to "own" AI, then those same workers could do their jobs more easily, keeping their jobs with more free time and a higher quality of life. If the management or ownership classes were to own the AI, then the owners and managers could capture any efficiency gains for themselves, fire workers, and saddle the remaining workers with more work, to be done with assistance from the AI.
We really just need to automate CEO roles. AI won't ever need a golden parachute, so right away there are huge opportunities for savings.
Weird - I posted the following earlier but it has disappeared.
Invoking Homer as proof of tool-free cognition is flawed. It's been awhile since Humanities 101 for me, but I learned that the repetitive epithets, stock scenes, and metrical formulas of the Iliad and Odyssey were precisely the tools that allowed Homer (and the oral tradition that predated him by centuries) to knit those works together. Oral poetry was itself a cognitive technology. Homer's Illiad and Odyssey were works of oral engineering, not free form artistry. You are a humanities professor -- you should know this. The “tools of thinking” have always included external scaffolds, whether carved in stone, written on parchment, or spoken in hexameter.
Not sure what this adds to or detracts from my position (besides the unwarranted invective). You said exactly what I said. Homer's tools are interior, belonging to the mind itself - although you had some newspeak like cognitive technology and oral engineering. And his poetry was passed on orally for generations, which means that people had to memorize it - which is the point of the mental tools you mentioned: tropes, repetitions, rhymers, epithets, etc. I argue that these mental tools are of the sort that should be learned and sharpened, so to speak (and in hindsight, I forgot to mention imagination), because they are proper to thinking.
Note that Socrates went further than I ever would in the Phaedrus and argued that writing itself is deleterious to thinking on the grounds that it destroys memory - and also interestingly enough on the grounds that the inventors of a technology are the last people who can truly judge its benefit. That is, he argues that writing technology replaces the individual's thought with their parroting a thought that they poorly understand. I understand his point, but do not share his concern, which Plato also clearly did not share.
So to me, the real question isn’t whether students should think without tools—that’s never been the human condition. It’s whether they learn to think with their tools, instead of letting the tools do the thinking for them.
As a professor, I can say that students are definitely letting the tools do the thinking. But that is not secret knowledge.
My complaint though was that the parallel with the saw is the issue. Saws saw, but LLMs do not think (I need not repeat this issue). Students who use them do not think through LLMs. LLMs are a black box wish-fulfillment machine. They are not used to record thoughts, but rather to generate output that students confuse with thought. And, pace Socrates, that is the greatest threat to thought.
My point about coding - which I have been doing for fun since the 1980s (I am on
As for tools - a tool is task specific. A carpenter without a hammer or saw is clearly at a disadvantage. And carpenters have always had these tools. But Homer, for instance, did not even have a pen or ink. He composed orally. The tools of thinking are experience, memory, and logic. My point is that thinking per se requires no external tools. It is the ultimate in freedom.
"Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you hoser." -- Dave Thomas, "Strange Brew"
