Weeknote 14/2024
“We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.”
Verbs
Writing: Generative AI is the New Kalashnikov
This week I wrote about some of the dangers I can see lying ahead of us from generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Sora, Gemini and the like. Whilst there are a lot of potential threats posed by AI tools, one that particularly worries me is how they can, and likely will, pollute and corrupt the knowledge ecosystem we operate in. Big swings by bad people will be made using AI - false images of terrorists in possession of nuclear weapons, fake audio of political leaders engaged in corrupt backroom deals and the like are certainly possible, but they’ll be far less common than the much more toxic uses to which these tools can be put. If you think it’s hard to buy a genuine, high-quality item from Amazon, find something good to watch on streaming services, or read an authentic piece of news reporting now, well, just you wait. As gen-AI gets into its groove and floods our online spaces with huge quantities of digital slop we’ll face an epistemological crisis. We can call this AI bullshit - it’s not designed to lie, or trick you into believing something that’s just not true, it’s just a vast, noxious, digital cloud that will obscure any chance we might have of navigating our knowledge ecosystems any more. The question is, are we already too late?
Watching: The Gentlemen and Renegade Nell
Two fun ones this week, both knee-deep in the criminal underworld. Guy Ritchie’s TV series, based on his 2019 film of the same name, has apparently caused a surge in sales of ‘upper-class fashion’. I’m not sure what that means besides people buying bright red trousers and Barbour jackets, but I suppose it’s better than the flat caps and overcoats that flew out the doors, right into the waiting arms of Peaky Blinder’s fans. The show’s a lot of fun and is exactly what you would think a TV series about toffs and drug lords by Guy Ritchie would be. I will say that John "The Gospel" Dixon is one of my favourite TV creations in a long time - not that he’s a nice chap, of course.
In contrast to The Gentlemen, Renegade Nell was not the show I was expecting it to be. From the little I’d read and seen I thought it would be about a woman (tick) who becomes a highway-person (tick) and… that’s that. I didn’t know there would be the weird and wonderful addition that she would also have some kind of fairy-magic-based superpowers as well. But she does. It’s hard not to love Nick Mohammed as the fairy(?) Billy Blind and there are lots of tremendous, scenery-chewing, characters and daring hijinks. Something Anja and I both commented on, which perhaps stood out all the more after the longer, more ‘high-concept’ shows we’ve watched of late, is just how much this show can get done in an episode. And that’s no bad thing at all.
Reading: The Craftsman, Richard Sennett
I’ve been thinking, lately, about how we think, talk, and write about teaching and education. One of the ways that I find interesting, and which doesn’t seem to have much of a presence in modern discussions about teaching, is teaching as craft. To push deeper into this I read Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman this week. It’s a tremendous book and did a lot to further my thinking about teaching as craft and it’s also spun off a lot of other related things to look into, research, or read up on. Something that hit me about Sennett’s book was just how steeped in learning it is. Throughout the book Sennett gently and causally references or discusses philosophy, biology, economics, history, physics, music, art, cookery, poetry, theatre, architecture, urban design and dozens more disciplines. It’s all done effortlessly and only ever to bring greater light to bear upon the point at hand. It’s rich, and full, and carries with it a deep sense of wonder at the world, and a love for learning and thinking that I think a lot of modern non-fiction just misses entirely. The book also has one of my favourite ever book covers.
Reducing: Screen Time
Like every single human alive who possesses a smartphone, except those in comas, trapped beneath the ocean, or living as hermits atop a pole in the desert - I spend too much time scrolling, browsing, watching and generally pointing my eyes in the direction of a screen. I dug into some data and, thanks to cherry-picking my sources extremely carefully, my usage doesn’t seem to be at the very high end of things but just comfortably in the middle. That’s still too much though. So I’ve been trying to get it down. There are a few reasons for all this; better sleep, better mental health, and more time doing other things that are less vacuous and more nourishing. All I’ve done to try and help with this is put the screen time widget somewhere prominent on my phone, have all but a very few apps ‘lock’ themselves after a certain time at night, and put the most crack-like apps on a tight time limit. Over the three or four weeks I’ve been doing this my average screen time per day has more than halved and, although I’d like to trim it a little further, it’s been nothing but a positive.
Words
It’s been a relatively quiet week for us this week. We’ve really been enjoying the joyous dive into spring that the weather seems to have taken and we even had a day or two touching 30C. The trees and flowers have all taken this as a sign to unleash an unrelenting pollen-pocalypse which, for someone who didn’t grow up here, has meant a face that constantly feels as if it’s being rubbed on a raw wool jumper. What is lovely is seeing all of the floaty, motey, fluffy stuff out of the window which sort of makes you feel as if you’re underwater or that the building has come untethered and is bobbing away.
This week I’ve been writing and thinking about AI some more, and in particular how it is the mid-grade, open-to-anyone, generative AI that may well pose some major challenges for us as a society. The big threat here is not the quality of what might be produced, but the sheer quantity. Because of this, I liken generative AI to the Kalashnikov. It’s far from the most powerful or sophisticated weapon but it’s cheap, easy to use, and in everyone’s hands.
All that freed-up time I’ve managed to liberate by scything through my screen time has meant I’ve done a lot more writing and reading this week than normal. Along with The Craftsman (see above), I also took in two detective novels - Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi and Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie. I felt I should probably intersperse my usual diet of science fiction with something else for a change. They were both perfectly fine books but I always find myself thinking, “Why set a book in a country house, or on a little Greek island, when you could set it anywhere you could imagine.” The writer and director Gareth Edwards said something similar in the podcast I mentioned last week. When you have the whole of the human imagination at your disposal why not make full use of all of that creative space? Poirot in space!
- Mitch.