Continue reading A New Book: A Quaker’s Life in Our “Interesting,” Tumultuous Times
A New Book: A Quaker’s Life in Our “Interesting,” Tumultuous Times
Category Archives: Think piece
Yikes!! AI Is Coming for My JOB — Even Though I’m Already Retired!
Tom Edsall writes a very valuable weekly column in the New York Times, and he’s paid a lot of attention to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Like other observers, he’s particularly concerned about AI’s developing impact on jobs and society, present and future.
In his June 5 column, Edsall picks the brains of several scholars who are delving deeply into these matters. One piece of what he found jerked me upright. Continue reading Yikes!! AI Is Coming for My JOB — Even Though I’m Already Retired!
Will NPR’s Internal Dissenter Outlast My Cabbage??
There’s a purple cabbage in my fridge. Cabbages will last pretty long if they are kept cold. But I plan to take it out one day soon, chop it up, then cook it with onions in a simple but delectable recipe I learned from my late lamented next door neighbor, Ms. Hazel. It’s good.
But this post isn’t about a recipe. It’s echoing a vegetable question I read about while dipping into online newspapers from England in late October 2022. Continue reading Will NPR’s Internal Dissenter Outlast My Cabbage??
Early Abortion & The Priest With Two Stethoscopes
Kansas & Wyoming, 1958-1960
In those old days of the (pre-Vatican Two) Catholic Church, they used to say of people like me that we had “lost our faith.”
In my case, it wasn’t quite true. That year, 1958, as I turned sixteen,I didn’t lose my faith. Instead, I discovered I just didn’t have any.
I was a junior at a Catholic boarding school, St. Joseph’s Military Academy, in western Kansas. How I got there (my family was then on an Air Force base in Puerto Rico), and what led me to realize my faithlessness are stories told in another place (for the curious, details are in the memoir, Meetings).
Continue reading Early Abortion & The Priest With Two Stethoscopes
Chatbot fantasies
Spend enough time with ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots and it doesn’t take long for them to spout falsehoods.
Described as hallucination, confabulation or just plain making things up, it’s now a problem for every business, organization and high school student trying to get a generative AI system to compose documents and get work done. Some are using it on tasks with the potential for high–stakes consequences, from psychotherapy to researching and writing legal briefs.