If you read this blog, you know DFW is one of my favorite writers. I even named my book app, in part, after him. So I could be short about String Theory — it’s a absolute pure delight to read — but, of course, I won’t.
String Theory – David Foster Wallace (2016) – 150 pages
String Theory is a collection of 5 DFW essays about tennis. It mostly covers 90s era tennis — Sampras and Agassi — but it closes with 2006 Federer. With DFW’s untimely death in 2008 I find it rather pleasing that by attending the 2006 Wimbledon final, Wallace got to witness, and write about the phenomenon that Federer is. And writing this in 2020, it is even more remarkable that Federer is still playing and competing with the best. Think about that for a second will you.
That said, his piece on Federer is not the best in this collection. But with Wallace that doesn’t mean it’s bad, because for any other writer such an essay would still be the summit of their writing career.
Though it seems with Federer that Wallace was, understandably, genuinely awestruck and smitten in such a way that he finds it hard to describe what makes Federer so special. And that probably says more about Federer’s remarkable talent than it does about Wallace’s.
But it is not just that what sets this essay apart from the others for me, but it is that there is less of Wallace himself in this specific piece. His surprised, bemused and bewildered observations of sometimes unrelated random events or encounters, sprinkled trough his essays, either in footnotes or the main body, are what make his writing so enjoyable. You can find this in most essays, but just a little bit less in the Federer one.
Take his complete letdown by the bland biography of famous tennis player Tracy Austin. I find it hilarious because it bothers him so much. Even though that (hilarity) was not the goal. Because, mind you: in the end, even from such a dull an uninspiring sport biography, Wallace manages to ask valid questions about genius and talent and let’s you know the premise was not to be agitated and write amusingly about that, but to ask questions.
The essay about Michael Joyce might as well be the greatest thing ever written about tennis (or dare I say, sports in general?). It’s a complex and nuanced, highly technical, hyper personal but still general analysis of what constitutes greatness. He makes you see things with different eyes, while he is learning to see it for himself. Just amazing.
The lack of this personal observations with the Federer essay are a breeding ground for questions. Was this deliberate? Does this mean he was bored with this style? Was it a style? Questions you can endlessly debate.
Fact is never has their been a greater collection of stories about the game of tennis than what you’ll find in String Theory.
Today is February 21st, David Foster Wallace‘s birthday. So it’s rather fitting that today I finished reading his magnum opus: Infinite Jest. The notoriously long and difficult book from 1996 with visionary insights on modern life. Infinite Jest is one of the biggest books ever written, and it certainly is the biggest book I have ever read.
It took me somewhere between 50 and 60 hours over the course of four months and I — had to — read several other books in between to cool off. So, it was quite the experience. I will try to write some of those personal experiences and observations down here. This post will not discuss or try to dissect the work and themes itself. Many, many, many books and articles have already tried to do that.
I knew about Wallace and his challenging writing style, and he always looked intimidating. But last year I picked up ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and it was one of the greatest and funniest things I have ever read (specifically the title essay). And while I was reading that book I tracked down a copy of Infinite Jest. I clearly remember my hesitation. It looked terrifyingly dense. Over 1100 pages in the smallest possible font and hardly any line breaks. And this was just the typesetting, let alone the content! But I bought it anyway, with no real plan to actually read it, yet… But in October I watched ‘The End of the Tour’ — which I greatly enjoyed — so I just had to know what this was all about.
There it was. Fresh.
Did I enjoy it?
Infinite Jest is not your typical enjoyable reader-friendly book. It is also definitely not a funny book. And it certainly wasn’t intended to be. There are multiple horrific scenes of rape, incest, mutilation and drug abuse (and their consequences i.e. faceless babies). Overall it has a very serious tone and message and I don’t think I expected that.
So whether I enjoyed it in the traditional sense is the wrong question, but I am still glad I read it.
Why am I glad?
Infinite Jest is unlike anything else I have ever read.
Not only has Wallace an utterly uniquely distinctive style which is impossible to copy, but above all — this book makes you work! Some books you can read in one sitting, with Infinite Jest I could do 20 pages per hour at most, before I was spent. I could not read this book for hours on end. Because it demands your complete and undivided attention. And this can be exhausting. And at times it felt my life was on hold reading it (would I be able to finish it, where is this going?).
Nothing in the story is left unexplored and Wallace’s vocabulary is unmatched (there are over 20.000 unique words in Infinite Jest, this is only rivaled by the dictionary I would think…). And on top of that, he makes up his own words to fit a specific mood or sentence. This makes the reading experience draining.
However, no word seems wasted. Every word seems vital. It is verbose but still perfectly tight prose.
All these things make it a different, but rewarding, reading experience.
A book book
I was also left with the idea that this experience can only exist on paper (or at most maybe an audiobook). There is no other way to convey the meaning — which just happen to be expressed by words — of this book. You cannot retell the story, you cannot film the scenes, you would lose everything. I know there are also translations, but I worry that a translation wouldn’t provide the same experience.
Wallace demonstrates and justifies with Infinite Jest that writing is an art form of its own and that reading is a different experience from anything else.
Hey, me too Bill! Just read it.
All this seems difficult
On top of all this, it is also mostly a non-lineair story, jumping from the ‘Tennis Academy’ to the ‘Recovery House’ and all over the place. The story seems like loosely connected collection of shards. And you could almost crack it open anywhere and have the same experience as when you start on page one. I think this is deliberate: it makes your brain work. You have to make the connections yourself. Just like there are no explainers or introductions anywhere.
But I suspect this also aided Wallace’s writing? I sense these fragments, sometimes only separated by a double space, are different writing days (?) because they sometimes differ heavily in tone, ideas and intensity.
So what’s it all about then?!
There are many, many different themes and many different ideas in this book. Just as there are a couple of general commonalities. One commonality that stood out specifically for me is that every character in this book is flawed. And trust me, there are many characters. Drug addicts, wheelchair assassins, rapists, dealers, handicapped, deformed, talented athletes who threw their life away, you name it: but every character is flawed.
Suffering
This brings me to what I personally derived as one of the main recurring subjects of the book: suffering. Everyone and everything is suffering from something. The human condition, and in particular its flaws, are at the center of what drives the story.
Wallace himself states that one of the main messages of Infinite Jest is that “pleasure is dangerous“. Specifically: too much pleasure. We are flawed human beings with little to no self-control and a need for pleasure. And this causes problems.
Maybe that’s why he makes the reader work so hard in what could have been a self-referential book title. Pleasure should always be balanced out by hard work.
Breaking its back!
This Wallace guy is quite the character!
Yes, you are nothing short of a genius when you can write like this. And from his collection of essays I had already concluded, he was a chameleon, able to effortlessly jump between different styles. But I have often wondered how deep he had to go as a writer to write Infinite Jest. Because whoever wrote this must have balanced on the brink of madness and peered over (I had the same experience with Virginia Woolf).
But this is also what kept me from enjoying the book to its fullest I think. I don’t mind working hard for a book. But when I read Infinite Jest I was 50% of the time immersed in the story and 50% of the time thinking: how did he do this?! How does his brain work? How can someone write this? It really threw me off.
But either way, in the end, just that may be one of the most rewarding experiences from this book. It’s like you get to spend some time in the mind of a genius, and you may not fully understand the machinery and mechanism but you are certainly in on the outcomes.
Now what?
I heard a great quote: “you might just finish the book and see hints of Infinite Jest in everything that is around you“. I think that is true, this book cannot but leave a mark, and make you see the world through a different lens. And I am glad I am in on it now. And yes, Wallace in 1996 was able to foresee and extrapolate developments with regards to humans and their relation to pleasure (whether this is technology or drugs) that raise questions that are alarmingly relevant today.
At times I thought: when I am finished I am never reading this again! But at other times I thought: this is exceptional I should reread this every so often. (Somewhere in the first few hundreds pages is a story of an addict waiting for a hit. It is quite something). I also made hundreds of yellow marks I want to revisit for various reasons and I want to read more by Wallace. Also there are many Infinite Jest resources I want to read to see what I might have missed (I suspect quite a bit). However, there are also many more books I also want to read of course.
Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just like uh, your opinion, man.
Should *I* read it?
Yes. However, I can’t promise you will enjoy it. And it is an expensive investment of your time (then again, finishing a great video game costs the same amount of time). But the experience of Infinite Jest will be rewarding because it will be unlike anything you have ever read.
Lock the door, turn off your phone and enter the mind of David Foster Wallace.
David Foster Wallace could write. And not just write, he could really write extraordinarily well. In related news: water is wet.
Wallace’s writing struck me as an epiphany, a beacon of light, a clear and unmistakable differentiator between merely good writing and exceptional writing.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace (1997) – 353 pages
I have known about DFW for some time now, and I have seen his famous commencement speech several times. It strongly resonates with me. As some other interviews do. But his writing? It seemed intimidating.
Infinite Jest, his magnum opus, is this famous thousand page multi-layered beast of a book. So I thought I start with something lighter. ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing…’ is a collection of essays and so it seemed like a good starting place.
It is a collection of 7 stories and essays on tennis, state fairs, TV, irony, David Lynch and a very entertaining cruise among other things. (Each story could validate a blogpost by itself — there is just so much there). Wallace demonstrates with academic skill his philosophical insights on modern life with the essays about other writers, TV and irony. But he is, just as easily, able to make you scream with laughter when he describes a highly anticipated and ultimately disappointing experience with the dessert tasting booth at the state fair. This man could seemingly do anything with a pen.
The words, and sentences (and footnotes!) all just seem to ooze effortlessly out of him. His voice is radically clear and distinct and his vocabulary and attention to detail are unmatched. It is very obvious Wallace operated on a different level, intellectually and talent wise. And I often stopped reading and wondered about how his depression got the best of him in the end, and whether this much talent and severe depression are somehow two sides of the same coin. Because judging by his writing, I don’t think he experienced the world the same way most people do (whatever that is).
The first thing I did after finishing this book, was head to a bookshop where I bought Infinite Jest. It still looks intimidating, but I can now only assume it must be a definitely fun thing to read.
1. Encourage the development of (something, especially something desirable). “the teacher’s task is to foster learning”
TLDR: I made a personal bookshelf management web application and named it Foster and you can find it here. Here’s what I did — with gifs–, so you might build your own.
Name
I named it Foster. Because of *this* blog post — it accompanies the application, so it’s self-referential. And also, because I am currently reading David Foster Wallace‘s magnum opus Infinite Jest. And lastly, the word ‘foster’ makes a lot of sense otherwise, just read on π
Background
I like to read and I like to buy physical books — and keep them. Over the years I tracked both of these things in a spreadsheet. But this became unmanageable so I needed something else.
Something like Goodreads but self-hosted. So, preferably a web application where I could:
track my reading progress
keep track of my bookshelf
But I couldn’t find anything that fit, so I knew I probably had to roll my own. In simpler times MS Access could do this sort of thing in a heartbeat. But it’s 2019 and I wanted a web application. However I am not a web developer and certainly not a frontend developer.
But when I came across https://books.hansdezwart.nl/ I knew this was what I was looking for! So I emailed Hans. He was very kind in explaining his application was self-coded and not open-source, but he did provide some pointers. Thanks Hans! So with those tips I built my own application (front and back) from scratch. And I decided to pass the knowledge on, with this blog.
The Foster fronted (I am still adding books)
This is what the Foster frontend looks like. It’s pretty self-explanatory: I can search *my* books, track and see reading progress, track collections, click through to book details and see the activity feed (more on that later). Oh, and it’s fast! β₯
Frontend
The five different parts in the frontend are: ‘Search’, ‘Statistics’, ‘Currently reading’, ‘Collections’ and ‘Activity feed’. They are presented as Bootstrap cards. The frontend is just one index.php file with a layout of the cards. All cards (except ‘Search’) are dynamically filled with content expressed as a div class. The class content is generated by one JavaScript function per card, which in turn call a PHP file. And the PHP files just echo raw HTML.
Other than the index.php file there is one search.php file to make up the frontend. This file takes care of presenting the book details, search output, log and lists views (more on that later). So, most of what can be done and seen in the frontend is handled by the search.php file.
The frontend itself is of course nothing unique. It’s just a representation of the data. The backend is a bit more interesting!
Database
The frontend was the easy part. At least it was after I figured out the backend! I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the database design and what the backend would have to do. I thought the design for such a small application wouldn’t be too difficult. But I surprised myself with the number of changes I made to the design, to get it just right. And I wanted to get it right because:
General rule of thumb: when you start with a good design, everything else that comes after will be a lot easier.
Self-explanatory view of the database design
The multiple foreign-key relations between tables (on ids etc.) are not defined in the database. I choose to do this in the code and the JOIN queries.
It’s not hard to understand the database design. And yes, the design could be a little tighter — two or three tables — but let me explain!
Log, actions and states
One of the main things I spent time thinking about are the actions and their respective states.
I figured you can do one of five things with a book (actions):
You want a book
You get/buy/own the book
You start reading it
You finish reading it
You purge/remove/sell/give away the book
Makes sense right? You could even call it the ‘book life cycleproces‘. With one input and one output.
HOWEVER! Some books you already own without wanting them first. Or, you can read the same book more than once. Or, you can give a book to a friend, and buy it again for yourself. Or, you can finish reading a book, that you lent — from a friend or library — so it is not on your shelf anymore. All of these things happen. So actually the ‘life cycle’ actions are not a chronological fixed start-to-end tollgate process, it’s continuous and messy.
Book log
Every new action is added to the book log. In the frontend the last 25 entries to the book log are presented as the Activity feed. Every action has a timestamp when an action got logged and a date for that action. Which are two different things. So when I now add a book to my shelf that I acquired 4 years ago, the book log timestamp is now, but the date for the action is 4 years ago.
The Activity feed
With this log I can keep track of books even after I got rid of them (because selling/purging is just one of the action for a book). This is important because this way I don’t lose the log history of a book.
Also I can add books to my wanted list even if I have owned them before (maybe I gave them away etc.). And I can start/finish reading the same book more than once. It doesn’t matter, because it is just a log entry.
Now here’s the interesting thing. With all this log information I can generate four states:
Books I want
Books I own
Books I have read
Books I had
These states are generated by specific hardcoded queries per state. They are generated on the fly by what is in the log file, and where the most recent log records prevail to decide the current status.
And with all this:
Foster will track the complete history per book andat all times represent all books I want, own, have read or have owned, at that specific moment in time.
Lists
I could have defined these actions as a list: but lists are simpler. Let me explain.
I tend to collect and read specific genres of books, e.g. music, management and computer history books. So I tend to organize books like that. These descriptions/genres are all, of course, just lists.
Some books can be three of these things at the same time: part biography, part computer history part management. So one book can be a member of more than one list.
In the Foster backend I can add or delete books to and from as many lists as I like.
Easily adding/deleting books from a list with the same dropdown menu (click for a gif)
I can also easily create new lists. Say: a list of books that I want for my birthday, or books that are on loan, or books that are signed by the author etc. I just add one new list to my table, and the list will be instantly available in the backend and presented in the frontend.
Collections
In the frontend the action logstates and the different lists are grouped together under the Collections card. As stated the first 4 collections are populated from the log, and a book always has a last state. The others are just lists.
I can create or delete as many lists as I’d like, and it won’t affect the book log. This way I can organize my book collection far better than I could physically (a book can only have one spot on your physical shelf).
Adding books with the Bol.com API
This is where the magic happens! Bol.com — a large Dutch book retailer — has a very easy API you can use to query their book database. I use it to search and add books to my collection. With one click I can get most book details: title, ISBN (=EAN), image, description etc. And I can pull them all into my own database. Including the image, which I then copy and store locally. Like this:
Adding a book via bol.com API (click for a gif)
Of course I can also edit book details when necessary, or just enter a book by hand without the API. Sometimes Bol.com does not carry a book.
Backend
The bol.com search API is the start page of my backend. The other important backend page is an overview of all my books. Clicking on the titles brings up an edit view of a book. But most importantly I can quickly add or delete books from lists here AND add actions (started reading, finished).
I have defined jQuery actions on the <select option> dropdown menus, which provide a popup — where I can fill in a date if necessary — and which trigger database inserts (there definitely might be some security concerns here: but the backend is not public).
Security
The frontend is open for everyone to see. I don’t mind sharing (my podcast list is also public), also because I always enjoy reading other peoples lists or recommendations. The backend is just one .htaccess password protected directory. In my first database design I had a user table with accounts/passwords etc. But the .htaccess file seemed like the easiest/quicker solution for now.
Tech
I built Foster from scratch, no Symphony/Laravel or what have you. And I am a bit annoyed surprised there is still no MS Access RAD equivalent for the web in 2019 (i.e. a all in one tool: from DB design to logic to GUI design to runtime).
I know Django does most of the backend for you , so I briefly looked at it. But for Foster I still ended up using PHP / MariaDB / Bootstrap 4 / JavaScript / jQuery. It’s a familiar and very portable stack that you can mostly just drop and run anywhere (and most answers are on StackOverflow π€).
I’ve thought about using SQLite, but I am very familiar with MySQL/MariaDB so that made more sense. Also I learned more about Bootstrap than I actually cared about, but that’s alright. And I wrote my first serious piece of JavaScript code ever (for the dropdown select actions). So that was fun.
All in all: I spent a few days pondering the database design in the back of my mind. And 4 evenings programming front and backend. And now I am just polishing little things: which is a lot of fun!
Further development
Right now, I still have around 200 more books from my library to catalogue correctly — that’s why some dates are set to 0000-00-00. But here are a few possible new features I am thinking about:
RSS feed for the activity log? Now that I am bulk adding books the activity feed is not so relevant, but when things settle down, who knows, people might be interested. After I wrote a draft of this blog I implemented it!
Twitter integration? Posting the log to a dedicated Twitter feed.
Adding books by scanning the barcode / ISBN with your phone camera? If I can just get the ISBN I can automate bol.com API to do the rest. Might speed things up a bit (and might be useful when you run a secondhand bookstore π).I created an iOS shortcut that does exactly this! It scans the book barcode/ISBN/EAN and opens the Foster edit.php URL with this ISBN number and from there I can add the book by clicking ‘Add’ (all book details are available and prefilled by the Bol.com API). It’s great!
Storing/tracking more than books? CDs, DVDs, podcasts I listened too, movies I watched etc.
Multi-user? In the first database design there were multiple users that could access / add the books that were already in the database but still create their own log and lists. I think I could still add this to the current design.
As you can see in the database design, there is a remarks table. I haven’t used this table. A remark is a ‘blog’ (or a short self-written review) of a book, that can be presented with the book details. This is a one-to-many relationship, because you might want to make new remarks each time you reread a book. But, I currently blog about every book I read, so the remarks might be just an embedded blog link?
Just share the source already!
“Foster looks nice. Please share the code!” No, sorry, for several reasons.
I made Foster specifically for me. So chances that it will fit your needs are slim and you would probably still need to make changes. In this post I share my reasoning, but you should definitely try to build your own thing!
When Foster was almost done, I learned about prepared statements (did I mention I am not a web developer?)… so I had to redo the frontend. But I haven’t redone the backend (yet): so it’s not safe from SQL injections or other pretty bad coding standards. Open sourcing it can of course generate code improvements, but it would first make my site vulnerable.
But most importantly: Building a web application to scratch your own personal itch and learning new things can be one of the most fun and rewarding experiences you will have! And I hope this blog is useful to you, in achieving that goal.
I’ve been on a bit of a Jonathan Franzen bender lately. I frequently write about him on my other site. The kickstart for all this was a book club meeting about Crossroads for which I not only read the book, but also watched and read a dozen or so Franzen interviews. Older and newer interviews.
What really struck a chord with me was not so much the specific Crossroads discussions in these interviews, but the things Franzen says about reading and literature in general.
And I noticed similarities in interviews that are sometimes decades apart.
I created a supercut video of two specific Franzen interviews that are 20 years apart. In this video a younger and older Franzen talks about reading, literature and love. See if you can spot the commonalities.
David Foster Wallace kicks off the video (who else?). If you didn’t already know that Franzen and Wallace were friends you can tell by just watching them converse. It’s a delight.
In the YouTube description I also link to the two original videos, which are much broader and interesting in their own right (do watch them!) but this supercut specifically highlights ideas Franzen has about reading and literature.
Here is a list of questions (one of these is rhetorical*). The questions serve partly as a videoguide as they are answered in the video. But you can also try and discuss them beforehand, or even after watching the video (e.g. for your own book club).
Questions
What good is reading anyway? Why read?
What does Wallace say about it, what did Franzen’s mother say about it (fiction)?
What are we missing nowadays (according to Wallace)?
Are people that read “a priori not of the mainstream”? How do you feel about that?
Do you have examples of a text where: the more you look at it, the more you find in it?
Should reading be entertaining, what does ‘entertainment’ mean?
What is the only driver of change (according to Franzen)? Do you agree or not (if so why)?
What should come first in literature (according to Franzen)?
How does this match up with what Wallace says about this?
Will the power of technology be so strong that fewer people will able to find a private space in which to develop a relationship with books?
What is love other than pleasure in the company of?*
The video ends with 2016 Franzen making remarks about technology. Remarks that perfectly tie in to what Wallace — in 1996 — says at the beginning of the video about the influence of technology on reading.
I woke up Sunday morning with an unnerving feeling. A feeling something had changed. A disturbance in the force if you will.
I know that look
Mainstream media seems blissfully unaware of what happened. Sure, here in the Netherlands we had a small but passionate demonstration on primetime TV, but e.g. the NY Times so far has *nothing* π¦π¦
But something most definitely happened. My personal internet bubble has erupted the last few days with tweets and blogposts and it was the top story on every tech site I visit. I have never seen so many people’s minds blown at the same time. It has been called the end of the college paper as well as the end of Google. Things will never be the same. Or so they say.
Top three
I am of course talking about ChatGPT by OpenAI it is based on GPT-3. It’s not AGI, but it’s definitely a glimpse of the future.
This post is to gather some thoughts and …. to test this thing.
When GPT-2 came out a few years ago it was impressive, but not in an earth shattering kind of way. Because you could still place it on a scale of linear progress. That this thing existed made sense. And it was mostly fun and also a bit quirky. People experimented with it, but the hype died down soon enough iirc. This was however the prelude.
GPT-3 was already lurking around the corner and promised to be better. Much better. How much? From what we can see now in the ChatGPT implementation the differences are vast. It is not even in the same ballpark. It is a gigantic leap forward. To justify the difference with GPT-2, GPT-3000 would be a better name than the current name.
GPT-3000
Deceptively mundane start screen
The impressiveness is twofold:
The correctness. ChatGPT all feels very real, lifelike, usable or whatever you want to call it. The quality of output is off the charts. It will surpass any expectations you might have.
The breadth. There seems to be no limit to what it can do. Prose, tests, chess, poetry, dances (not quite yet), business strategy analysis, generating code or finding errors in code or even running virtual machines (!?) and simulating a BBS. It can seemingly do anything that is text related; if you are creative enough to make it do something.
Sure it’s just ‘a machine learning system that has been trained to generate text and answer questions’. But this goes a long way (of course there are also critical voices).
And for the record: I was surprised by a lot of examples I saw floating online. Even though I shouldn’t have been.
Unlike any other technology that came before, GPT-3 announces loud and clear that the age of AGI is upon us. And here is the thing; I don’t know how to feel about it! Let alone try and imagine GPT-4. Because this is only the beginning.
GPT-3 is proof that any technology that can be developed, will be developed. It shares this characteristic with every other technology. But there is another famous human technology it shares a specific characteristic with i.e. the atomic bomb. The characteristic being: just because we could, doesn’t always mean we should.
This guy knows
But alas, technology doesn’t wait for ethics debates to settle down.
And now it’s here, let’s deal with it.
First thoughts
I am no Luddite, though I am very much a believer that new things are not necessarily better, just because they’re new. But with GPT-3 I do feel like a Luddite because I can’t shake the feeling we are on the brink of losing something. And in some cases — within a matter of days — we have already lost something; which was ultimately inevitable and also happened extremely fast.
Me?
People have always been resistant or hesitant when new tools arrive. Take the first cameras — or decades after those, the digital cameras — instead of seeing possibilities, people initially felt threatened. Which is a very human reaction to new things that challenge the old way of doing things. It’s the well-known paradoxical relation we have with innovation of tools. Paradoxical, because in the end the new tools mostly always win. As they should. Tools are what makes us human, it’s what separates us from almost every other living being. Tools pave the way forward.
And this is just another tool. Right?
But here is the crux. Somehow this seems to be more than just a tool. The difference being that the defining characteristic of a tool is that it enhances human productivity and GPT-3 seems to hint at replacing human productivity.
Decades of hypothetically toying and wrestling with this very theme (i.e. can AI replace humans?) in sci-fi has all of a sudden become a very real topic for a lot of people.
No, I do not think it is sentient. But it can do an awful lot.
The future belongs to optimists
Let’s try and look at the arrival of GPT-3 from an optimistic perspective (yes, this could be a GPT-3 prompt). My optimistic approach is that GPT-3 (and AGI next) will force us to make us more human. Or even better: it will show us what it means to be human.
Because GPT-3 can do everything else and do it better (for arguments’ sake lets just assume that better is better and steer away from philosophical debate about what better even means).
GPT-3 will cause the bottom to fall out of mediocrity, leaving only the very best humans have to offer. Anything else can be generated.
So what is that very best that makes us human? What is it that we can do exclusively, that AGI can never do? What is so distinctly human that AGI can never replicate it?
One of the first things that came to mind for me was whether AGI could write something like Infinite Jest or Crime and Punishment. Literature. Earthshattering works of art that simultaneously define and enhance the human experience. Literature in my opinion is the prime example of the ultimate human experience. Could AGI … before even finishing this question: yes, yes it could.
Is that a bad thing?
What we’re seeing is the infinite monkey theorem in action. AGI can and will produce Shakespeare. The data is there. We have enough monkeys and typewriters.
Not a typewriter. But you know the scene.
As long as you feed it enough data it can do anything. But who feeds it data? Humans (for now). I am not ready to think what happens when AI starts to talk to AI (remember Her?). For now it feeds and learns from human input.
What are you smiling about?
Maybe AGI is where we find out we are just prompt fodder and humans are not so special after all? Maybe that’s why I woke up with an unnerving feeling.
The proof is in the pudding
Or maybe, it is because ChatGPT could enhance everything I have written so far and make it more clear and concise.
Because it definitely can.
Of course I tried this and it gave the following suggestions.
First part
The blog post was too long so I had to cut it in two parts.
I agree
Second part
The first paragraph here is actually the eight etc.
This is good advice
I have chosen to keep the original text as-is with the screenshot suggestions so you can see the difference.
