CSotD: Humpday, That’s My Grumpday
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Got a case of the collywobbles from Sunday’s Lio, because this is the time of year I used to be coaching the spring season of soccer back when I had small children.
I also coached in the fall season, but that was run entirely by the local youth soccer league, and the kids who played then wanted to play soccer.
The spring season was under Parks & Rec, and they put out a brochure of all the activities you could choose from, assuming your parents were going to make you choose something.
So the fall teams were gung-ho soccer fanatics, while the spring teams always included some kids who were there because their parents wanted them to be there, not because they wanted to be there.
I’m not sure I’d have kept signing up to coach in the spring if I hadn’t had so much fun coaching in the fall.
I’m adjusting to AI, and if I did a lot of coding, I’d use it for that, but I don’t, so I don’t.
Most of the time I find it annoying, because it’s getting smarter but it’s at the point now where it thinks it’s a whole lot smarter than it really is. Which means when you do a search, it often tells you things you didn’t ask about, and you have to scroll way down to find the thing you actually wanted to know about.
BTW, Jeeves has given up the ghost, which came as quite a shock, since I had no idea it was still around. I hope hotbot and Webcrawler are okay!
Anyway, Adam has finally had a book published and it’s selling well, which makes having his son knock out a sequel with AI that much more galling.
I suppose that it sampled his novel and can reproduce his style, but I’d prefer to believe that, no, it can’t reproduce his style, because, no matter how well-programmed and sophisticated it is, it’s still just a damn machine.
Though if you get an MFA or attend too many writers’ conferences, you, too, will learn to extrude the sort of fashionable prose that gets praised, and as long as people are programmed to like that sort of writing, the machines can probably be programmed to duplicate it.
A machine, for example, can imitate Jane Austen’s romantic plotlines just as well as the living people who write mushy sequels and adaptations of her work, but show me one that can be as screamingly funny in criticizing society.
Machine or living person.
As Rabbits suggests, one of the problems comes when AI is tasked with evaluating AI.
Never mind chatbots that can imitate mediocre writers; I’m looking for the self-driving car that will create less chaos than the ones piloted by bad drivers.
If nothing else, it would be nice if self-driving cars could be programmed to stop for school buses, but so far it’s not happening.
Though if you’d like to contemplate a truly horrible idea, click on this link. It seems to be related to the Rabbits gag: A company that makes the damn things explaining how swellegant they’re gonna be.
I’m hoping that minor system failures will provide the pushback we need, but I fear a sort of Fahrenheit 451 situation where a small group of people who remember how to think wander around in the forest doing so while everybody else sits like Mildred Montag, having vacuous fake conversations with their interactive screens.
Though schools have to modernize in other ways if people are going to learn how to think. That means rejecting foolish technological “modernism” but also moving out of a 19th-century factory model. Homework is an excellent example, because the point of homework is not to learn new things but to practice what you’ve been taught in class.
Ideally, that means providing ten minutes at the end of class for kids to start their homework while the teacher is there to guide them through any barriers they encounter. But that requires scheduling long enough periods to allow both instruction and guided practice.
A pair of German exchange students told me they couldn’t believe how American kids leapt up and ran when the bell rang. In Germany, they had time to ask the teacher questions or kick back with a Coke between classes.
In a lot of American schools, if the teacher doesn’t shut up as soon as the bell rings, you’re late to your next class, and don’t dream of going to your locker or to the bathroom until your 20-minute lunch break.
Chatbots and Chromebooks aren’t our only, or greatest, academic problems.
Here’s a May 4th gag that genuinely cracked me up. Someone mentioned the other day that Millennials are turning 50, which makes me wonder if aging bothers them more than it bothered my generation.
We sang “Hope I die before I get old,” but that sentiment fades with age. And maybe it’s all that Back to the Earth stuff we preached, but I’m delighted that women in our cohort have embraced gray hair, because (A) it rocks, and (B) it looks silly to see a “blonde” wrinkled woman with a bald or gray-haired wrinkled man.
I wasn’t familiar with Bob Unell’s work and assumed he was a youngster, but he’s white-haired, and a political cartooning fixture in Kansas City, which makes this puzzling, since I thought maybe it meant younger people didn’t realize that the advice to Ben Braddock was a load of hooey back in 1967, too, though Ben was more polite about it than this fellow. (And most plastic is not really recyclable.)
I’ve got no advice for this year’s graduates, because I’m glad to not be facing the job market with crushing student debt, AI snapping up entry-level jobs, and the cost of living outpacing sanity.
The point of the scene was that the guy offering the “Plastics” advice was a jackass. Everybody has a plan for you, and the best plan is to put on your scuba gear and stay at the bottom of the pool until they go away.
At least today’s society is better geared to little girls with holes in their ears. Not much else has changed.
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