What an excellent article. Thanks so much for this. Loved this quote: "Theft itself becomes a conversation, rather than just a crime, when a wealthy person does it. When one capitalist robs another, my experience is that they tend to discuss among themselves how to restore the thief to good standing without destroying anyone’s life, livelihood, or privacy."
I also read this as a parable built on Shakespeare’s Tempest with the magician father and the wide eyed daughter celebrating a brave new world. I had to do some major mental maneuvers but in the end it worked. —MS
AI and any dreams of a technocratic paradise are built around the idea that we are Minds, whereas we are first and primarily Monkeys. Social apes. Status seekers and social manipulators.
Is it more dystopian to simply spy on my high school students' laptops when they write in-class essays and never assign out of class essays? Based on the essays they write under my surveillance, they're doing pretty good! Of course I work in an (mostly blue-collar) exurban school where our installation of this software on every student laptop bothers no one, I doubt this would fly at a prep school.
I do wonder if the college pedagogy really had any accountability back in my day (early '00s) either. Nearly everyone I knew in my English major looked up summaries of books and skimmed them for text evidence to support thesis statements that were often similar to arguments made by scholars on JSTOR about similar books. I was a sucker and got obsessed with the books and making an original argument about them.
I stopped reading the books for English class starting around grade 10. Just looked up extracts online in the Amazon "Look Inside Your Book" feature and would cobble together some thesis based on some googling. But I don't know if I'm really the model that our educational system should be built around
Oh yeah I’m much more of a fan of “you pick a classic from this list and talk about it with your group, and I’ve read all the books so I know if you haven’t read it”
Great story, I appreciate how you didn't portray Miranda as simply ignorant but rather as someone who's part of a scheme that's been going on for a long time.
This is so good. I wandered into this post, groggy from a nap and thought I was reading an article about a student named Miranda for a while. No notes.
Agreed that class will be the last thing shattered by AI, if it ever shatters it. This piece reminds me of a 2021 article in Current Affairs dealing with the nature of accounting for wealth: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/01/trumps-taxes-and-the-nature-of-money
"Your net worth is a number. A capitalist’s worth is a conversation."
What an excellent article. Thanks so much for this. Loved this quote: "Theft itself becomes a conversation, rather than just a crime, when a wealthy person does it. When one capitalist robs another, my experience is that they tend to discuss among themselves how to restore the thief to good standing without destroying anyone’s life, livelihood, or privacy."
Glad you liked it, I think about it all the time!
hugely embarrassing ask on Substack but could someone please explain what this is sayinh
I also read this as a parable built on Shakespeare’s Tempest with the magician father and the wide eyed daughter celebrating a brave new world. I had to do some major mental maneuvers but in the end it worked. —MS
I hadn't thought of that! Thanks for that reading
I am so uncultured I did not get that reference
I'm not sure not getting a Shakespeare reference is so very uncultured
AI and any dreams of a technocratic paradise are built around the idea that we are Minds, whereas we are first and primarily Monkeys. Social apes. Status seekers and social manipulators.
Good story.
Thanks
Very interesting read. Thanks.
Thanks!
Is it more dystopian to simply spy on my high school students' laptops when they write in-class essays and never assign out of class essays? Based on the essays they write under my surveillance, they're doing pretty good! Of course I work in an (mostly blue-collar) exurban school where our installation of this software on every student laptop bothers no one, I doubt this would fly at a prep school.
I do wonder if the college pedagogy really had any accountability back in my day (early '00s) either. Nearly everyone I knew in my English major looked up summaries of books and skimmed them for text evidence to support thesis statements that were often similar to arguments made by scholars on JSTOR about similar books. I was a sucker and got obsessed with the books and making an original argument about them.
I stopped reading the books for English class starting around grade 10. Just looked up extracts online in the Amazon "Look Inside Your Book" feature and would cobble together some thesis based on some googling. But I don't know if I'm really the model that our educational system should be built around
Oh yeah I’m much more of a fan of “you pick a classic from this list and talk about it with your group, and I’ve read all the books so I know if you haven’t read it”
Great piece. It’s like a “parable” though I’m not sure I know what a “parable” is.
Great story, I appreciate how you didn't portray Miranda as simply ignorant but rather as someone who's part of a scheme that's been going on for a long time.
That's a great piece!
Thanks!
This is so good. I wandered into this post, groggy from a nap and thought I was reading an article about a student named Miranda for a while. No notes.
Thanks!
It’s way worse than you think.
Woo hoo! A first-rate SF story. Very sly. An easy 4+ stars (of 5) for me.
Has Rich Horton seen it?
Woah. What a ride.
“read good”?
Really dug this one
Thank you! That means a lot.
This is just so good.
Thank you!