Andy Crouch
10.5K posts
Andy Crouch
@ahc
Partner @praxis_hq // Author, The Life We’re Looking For | The Tech-Wise Family | Strong & Weak | Playing God | Culture Making
19081 USA Beigetreten Nisan 2007
0 Folgt33.8K Follower
Day 3 of an app a day.
It was a beautiful, sunny Friday in SF today. So I made a little daily weather app:
skyglyph.netlify.app
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@a_fellow_of I do "love" my very favorite tools, though, and I do "love" America (assume massive clarifying distinctions here), as you say; so I suppose by extension I could also love AI!
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@a_fellow_of Whereas AI is the work of human hands, an extension of tool-making if not idol-making; and AI's status of intelligence / mind / soul is (quite like idols', actually) quite hard to pin down.
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I wish Christian discourse on AI was more interesting to me
It’s not quite weird enough—we have a weird and wild world in front of us!
I want smart Christians like @ahc to read @drmichaellevin’s stuff and grapple with whether AI might be analogous to (say) an animal to care for
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@a_fellow_of Unfortunately my hunch and therefore argument, which may be disappointing to you, is that AIs ultimately function much more like idols than like any of our fellow creatures (or even "aliens" we might one day encounter).
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@a_fellow_of Ooh, this is indeed very interesting! I actually JUST turned in a book chapter on "the very old problem of other intelligences," including a section on animals specifically, alarmingly without having read Levin....
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The one sentence in Meghan's essay I disagree with, that I'm afraid will cause knowledgeable people to laugh mordantly, is the one about liberal arts colleges being immune to the pressure to scale educational "productivity." :)
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And honestly, institutions also need formed customers / donors / constituents who want (and will pay for / underwrite) something other than efficiency narrowly understood.
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Fabulous essay by Meghan Sullivan, not just applicable to universities.
comment.org/what-is-the-un…
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AI companions will build on all that development, but will interact with you personally with exceptional emotional responsiveness and fidelity.
They are going to be huge, far bigger than TikTok.
If we let them.
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TikTok (and YT) then take off because the faces of "Creators"™️ are FAR more attractive and expressive than your median friend, and fill even more of the visual field.
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The history of visual media is increasing emotional power, closely related to the proximity and size of the face.
1-shots are rare in traditional cinema because the screen is so large.
TV uses more 1-shots but the screen is still across the room.
The phone changes everything.
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Before the rise of parasocial relationships (TV/celebrity < social media < TikTok < AI companions) the only real choice most people had to survive as adults was to go through that kind of growth. Now we have adequate alternatives for many people.
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I think this is already correct for most people over roughly 13.
"Preferring emotional contact with other humans" as an adult is the result of spiritual and emotional transformation in response to the ruptures and disappointments of relationships. Can't be taken for granted.
James Cham@jamescham
Often haunted by this Danny Kahneman remark from 2018, which I increasingly suspect might be correct and might be obviously correct very soon: Yann LeCun said yesterday that humans would always prefer emotional contact with other humans. That strikes me as probably wrong. It is extremely easy to develop stimuli to which people will respond emotionally.
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@dbasch @jamescham Peet's has brand equity (this is literally the first time I've ever received information about the quality of CafeX [what a terrible name :) ]). Try the self-checkout lines at your local grocery store vs the traditional ones and see where people go . . .
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@jamescham Always is too strong. But most of the time, humans prefer contact with humans. Go to SFO, see how many people stand in line at Peet's, compare with CafeX. CafeX is better and cheaper too.
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Often haunted by this Danny Kahneman remark from 2018, which I increasingly suspect might be correct and might be obviously correct very soon:
Yann LeCun said yesterday that humans would always prefer emotional contact with other humans. That strikes me as probably wrong. It is extremely easy to develop stimuli to which people will respond emotionally.
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@JoshuaBrake True, true! I did ponder (after posting) the role of learning the in-distribution material. That's part of undergrad for sure, but all with the end of graduating people ready to be out-of-distribution, and for that I think AI's shortcuts for both learners and teachers don't work.
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@ahc Maybe in the strictest interpretation. But I do think it can be used to help you more effectively explore the in-distribution content which is the foundation for out of distribution thinking.
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I tend to think that the only point of higher education is to make you the kind of person who is out of distribution — whose continuations in responses to prompts cannot be predicted. If that is true, AI is, by design, of exactly no help to either students or instructors.
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