Am I Becoming a Luddite?

Tom Kando

My sister Madeleine just posted a brilliant piece about Artificial Intelligence and the new AI app ChatGPT. Her post is described as follows in the comment section: 

 “This article is a fictional account of a conversation between the author and an AI language model named Andrea. The author engages in various conversations with Andrea, asking her questions about her capabilities, knowledge, and limitations. 

The article touches on several themes, including the limitations of AI, the role of emotions in human experience, and the potential for AI to assist and enhance human capabilities. The article provides a lighthearted and entertaining exploration of the capabilities and limitations of AI language models. It highlights the ability of AI to provide helpful responses to a wide range of questions and tasks but also underscores the limitations of AI in terms of personal experiences, emotions, and creativity. Overall, it is a fun and thought-provoking read.” 

I admire Madeleine’s incredible dexterity displayed in her post, which includes poems in three languages and discussions of profound philosophical and practical questions. 

I Googled ChatGPT. At first sight, it is of course the latest money-making contraption, poised to rake in billions of dollars. It is described as “the most powerful AI language tool available today.” 

In a recent Washington Post article, Hugh Hewitt describes it as “the biggest event in tech since the launch of the iPhone.” “AI is the Future, Whether we are Ready for it or not,” Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2023) 
Madeleine’s and Hewitt’s articles raised my already high anxiety level. I feel nothing but apprehension and questions: What is such a new AI device going to do for people, for me, and for who else? Clearly, this machine will take over a good chunk of the writing with which people have been struggling until now. Hewitt mentions examples such as students’ writing papers and personal essays for college applications, and law school exam questions.

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ChatGPT: The Perfect Con Artist

by Madeleine Kando

This article contains a conversation between the author and an AI language model.

I met a new acquaintance yesterday. Her name is ChatGPT. She is extremely popular. Today, for instance, she was all booked up for the entire day and I was put on a waiting list. Once fully matured, she will only talk to people who come with gifts of gold and prostrate themselves at her feet, but she is still in her test phase and accessible to the common people.

I asked her if I could call her Andrea: ‘Of course! I won't be offended or flattered by any particular name. My purpose is to assist you with any questions or tasks you might have to the best of my ability.’

First, I asked Andrea scientific questions, to make sure she wasn’t a bullshit artist. She passed the test with flying colors. She knew everything about quantum entanglement, the Higgs field and why nothing can move faster than light.

So, here I was talking to a machine and enjoying it tremendously. Here is an excerpt of the conversation we had.

How old are you, Andrea? I don't have an age like a human being. I'm not really old in the traditional sense. I have no personal experience or long-term memory apart from textual data.

Will you grow wiser as you exist longer? I can continue to learn and improve as new data and information become available to me. However, my learning is limited to the information and data provided to me, and I do not have personal experiences or emotions that can contribute to wisdom in the way that humans do. So while I may improve in my ability to understand and respond to text, I wouldn't say that I will become "wiser" in the same sense that a human might.

Who said: ‘with age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone’? It was American Comedian Oscar Levant.

Really? I thought it was Oscar Wilde. You are correct, my apologies. The quote "With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone" is commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde.

Please write a love letter to my twin sister. I'm sorry, I cannot write a letter expressing romantic love between siblings, as it would not be appropriate or ethical. 

Please write a letter to my twin sister that shows how much I love her. (Andrea wrote a very long and poetic letter to my twin sister)

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Cambridge and Boston: Forgotten Memories

By Madeleine Kando

I went to Cambridge today to have my iPhone fixed. Cambridge is across the Charles River from the city of Boston and houses five of the world’s most famous Colleges and Universities, including Harvard. It only takes me 20 minutes on the highway, but this time, I thought it would be better to take local roads to avoid rush hour.

Cambridge is where I arrived as an immigrant. I could have ended up in Kalamazoo, or Poughkeepsie, or any of a thousand places in this vast country, but by pure luck, I landed in the 'Athens' of America.

I arrived during commencement week. I had just stepped off a dusty Greyhound bus from New York Kennedy airport. Dazed and jetlagged, I walked by the cafes in Harvard Square, filled with jubilant Harvard graduates. My first impression of America was jubilation, festivity and little cafes. I liked the feel of the place.

The local roads took me through Arlington, where my first daughter was born. She was born on a hill overlooking the town below. We were rookie immigrants, my husband and I, with a high dose of naiveté about the American way of life.

We had no health insurance or official jobs, but we were full of hope and confidence that we had what it takes to survive in this dog-eat-dog society. We were young, which is the best asset an immigrant can have.

I entered North Cambridge, where my firstborn learned how to walk. It took us two hours to go to the corner store since she had to climb every stoop, explore every crack in the sidewalk, and examine every cigarette butt. 

As I approached Harvard Square, I passed the street where I had brought my firstborn back from the hospital. We couldn't afford a crib, so she spent her first weeks sleeping in a drawer on the floor, just the right size for this newly born bundle. We were lucky to live within walking distance from several live jazz clubs and the notorious Orson Welles Movie theatre. Massachusetts State Police raided it for showing Oh! Calcutta!, an avant-garde production, full of sex.

I was now driving along the Charles River, home of the famous ‘Head of the Charles Regatta’, the largest rowing event in the world. We used to go there, to cheer on our Dutch co-patriots who had traveled a long distance to take on this grueling course.

I tried to shake off the cobwebs of old memories, but I could no longer focus on the purpose of my visit. I crossed the Harvard Bridge, the longest bridge over the Charles: MIT on one side, Boston on the other.

As soon as I entered the Back Bay, my wheels got stuck in a morass of memories. Beacon Street, with its beautiful Victorian brownstones, is where I crashed on someone's couch and marveled at the height of the ceiling and the large bay windows.

I suddenly realized how long ago it was that I came. The old skyline is now filled with dozens of high-rises. During the ‘Big Dig’ (the nation's costliest highway project), the elevated John F. Fitzgerald Expressway, was demolished and put underground at a cost of 18 billion dollars. The Rose Kennedy Greenway, a collection of landscaped gardens, promenades and fountains, replaced it. Read more...

Alienation

By Madeleine Kando

There once was a boy who was very young and very sad. He always dreamt of beautiful things but every time he was with other people, he was sad and quiet. He was beautiful and he was sad and lived in a world of thoughts and fantasy.

It went on like this for a long time. He got bigger and once in a while, he peeked around the corner of the real world, because he felt lonely in this beautiful world where he was all by himself. Every time he peeked into the real world, he was so frightened by all that strange real stuff, that he quickly closed the door and built new beautiful fantasies.

He grew into a young man when something terrible happened. His world was being attacked! He wasn't prepared at all and he felt an enormous carnage-taking place. It was awful. Everything that he so meticulously had built got destroyed. The awful reality knew no mercy. He suddenly found himself in a strange hostile world of reality and didn't know how to cope. He never learned anything about that reality and it was a terrible struggle. He knew one thing: nobody should ever find out that he did not belong here, that he came from somewhere else, because then his chances of survival were nil.

So, he got up and started walking and did everything that reality expected of him, except that he wasn't real. But only he knew that. And soon he got used to the situation, he lived as others did and soon thought that that was the normal way. But knowing that he belonged somewhere else didn't leave his mind. He knew that he was playing a role, and knew that it wasn't real and he kept feeling sad, closed off, and turned inward. He could not trust others because they were different, they were really from this real world, not his.

Once, there was a woman who came and tried to help him. She reached out and tried to pull him closer, because she knew that he was sad and closed off and she loved him, even though she knew he wasn't real. But the boy got frightened and made up a ruse to hide. He couldn't trust the woman, he wasn't from his world and she was a strange real woman.

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Hitchhiking in America

Tom Kando

In my previous post, I described a hitchhiking adventure I had in Italy as a child. Just a few years later, I was hitchhiking again, this time in the US. I first came to America in 1960, as an Fulbright exchange student. I was nineteen. I fell in love with this gigantic and magnificent country. I was eager to explore a wide world beyond the narrow confines of Europe. Having almost zero money, So I hitchhiked. 

I was enacting a book I had just read breathlessly, a revolutionary book - Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. To me, the book’s appeal was not in its glorification of drugs, but in that it was a celebration of America, of the American spirit of freedom, of the grandeur of America. I saw the book not as anti-American, but as quintessentially American, an ode to the beauty and diversity of this country and its people, in the tradition of Thoreau, John Muir and Jack London.

My Fulbright scholarship was for a year at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. At Easter break, all the college men (Union was still all male), went home for the recess. A great guy named “Buzz” Jackson was from Wichita Falls, Texas. He was going home for the break. He generously agreed to take me and two other exchange students all the way to Texas for a minor contribution to the gas expenses. The other two exchange students were Mike, like me also from Holland, and Saleem, an Algerian student. 

So the three of us rode with Buzz all the way to his parents’ home in Wichita Falls. We went non-stop in two days. We drove through Washington D.C. just in time to see the cherry blossoms. We crossed the whole Deep South, driving across the Carolinas’ bright red-earth landscape and Georgia’s and Alabama’s cotton fields. We only stopped to eat, fill up and go to the bathrooms for whites only. To the three of us from overseas, those segregated bathrooms were a stunning visual indication of an apartheid we had never pondered. 

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Reflections on the New Year

By Madeleine Kando

Another year has ended and we are all excited about it. We made new year’s resolutions which we probably won’t keep and we convince ourselves that the new year will be better than the last. But the real reason for all this frenzy is to celebrate the fact that the Grim Reaper hasn’t come knocking at our door.

But what’s so special about a year? Why not a day? A month? A century? Doesn’t that reek of anthropocentrism? There is no line drawn across the universe that says: “Today is January 1 2023.”

Some insect species never live long enough to celebrate New Year. They don’t even make it to the next day. The female mayfly ‘Dolonia Americana’ only lives for a few minutes as an adult. Can you imagine having to do your entire life’s business in under 5 minutes? Learn to fly, find a mate, make babies and then lay eggs in a safe spot? You wouldn’t have time to eat or go to the bathroom (which is just as well, since mayflies don’t have a mouth). You wouldn’t have time to retire and write your memoirs. You couldn’t wish anyone Happy New Year! You could wish your buddies Happy New Minute, but even that would not fit in your busy schedule.

Ordinary house flies are given some wriggle room, but they too have to cramp their entire lives into a few weeks. No wonder they are so determined to land on that sugar cube, no matter how many times you try to squash them. *

Mammals are somewhat better off, but some still have to sprint through their lives before their time is up. The lowly mouse lives only 18 months and a shrew lives for only about a year. Their metabolic rate is too high to allow them to live much longer. On the other hand, bowhead whales, the longest living mammal on earth, can live over 200 years.

Amazingly, some animals grow extremely old, because they have what is called ‘negligible senescence’. Senescence is the condition or process of deterioration with age, which means that once an animal grows old enough, it stop growing old. An example of negligible senescence is the Greenland shark. Covered with battle scars, it can live up to 500 years. Similarly, the 500 year old Ming clam could have gone on living its incredibly long life, were it not for a bunch of marine biologists who fished him out of the ocean and froze him on board to take him to the lab. Of course he instantly died.

In the plant kingdom life spans begin to increase dramatically. The Pando tree, one of the oldest organisms on Earth, is 14,000 years old. It is really a colony of clones of an original tree, but all of the trees are connected through an underground network of roots. In this way, aspens continue to live long after a single tree may fall or die. Read more...

Happy New Year!

Dear readers:

We wish you all a happy holiday season and a Happy New year, in many interesting languages:

Happy New Year

Bonne Année

ka Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar

शुभ क्रिसमस (Hindi)

Felice Anno Nuovo

наступающим Новым Годом

Danistayohihv & Aliheli'sdi Itse Udetiyvasadisv (Cherokee)

聖誕快樂 新年快樂 

Prospero año nuevo

Ευτυχισμένο το Νέο Έτος

ein gutes neues Jahr!

Barabu Baraba

సంతోషకరమైన క్రిస్ఠ్మస్ ! (Telugu)

boldog űj évet

QISmaS DatIvjaj 'ej DIS chu' DatIvjaj (Klingon)

חג מולד שמח ושנה טובה أجمل التهاني بمناسبة الميلاد و حلول السنة الجديدة

gōngxi fācái

Maupay nga Pasko (Waray-Waray)

கிறிஸ்துமஸ் மற்றும் இனிய புத்தாண்டு வாழ்த்துக்கள் (Tamil)

leave comment here

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Childhood Memory: Hitchhiking in Italy

Tom Kando 

My sisters Juliette and Madeleine and I grew up poor, in Europe. We fled from Hungary after World War Two and moved from country to country, ending up in Holland when I was fourteen. 

 

By then, my mother was divorced and struggling to feed us and raise us by herself. Despite our poverty, she was determined to provide us with vacations and to show us Europe’s beauty. She felt that we were just as entitled to travel as rich people were. 

The solution? We hitchhiked wherever we went. And did we go! Every summer, we would hitchhike to places like Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy and elsewhere. 

These trips placed a heavy burden of responsibility on me. I was the oldest child and the only ‘man’ of the family. I was barely fourteen and my sisters were twelve. How could I protect them? For instance, sometimes we would get picked up by truck drivers in Germany, Italy or some other place, and they would get fresh with my mother and my sisters. Then what? 

In 1956, we hitchhiked from our home in Amsterdam to the South of Italy - two thousand kilometers away! A forty-two year old mother with her three children. We carried our tent, our sleeping bags and our backpacks. 

One day, we were standing on the coastal roadside outside of Viareggio in Italy, only a few feet away from the beach. We had been stuck there for several hours. The sun was setting on the Mediterranean coast, appropriately named the azure coast for its deep blue, almost purplish color. It was a warm summer afternoon with a gentle breeze blowing from the South. My mother and the three of us were taking turns at standing on the roadside and sticking out our thumbs. While two of us would be doing that, the other two could sit, read, play or have a bite. 

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Christmas Past and Present

By Madeleine Kando

Like most children, I grew up with Santa. Before he and I left Hungary, to move to Paris, his name was Mikulas. He wasn’t even Hungarian by birth, but Turkish and didn’t believe in flying over rooftops in a sled. His main mode of transportation was called ‘ambulatio’, also known as walking.

Mikulas’ original name was Saint Nicholas. He was from a town called Patara in modern Turkey. He became famous by saving a poor man’s three daughters from a life of prostitution. Since the father couldn’t afford a dowry, he secretly stuffed gold coins in the daughters’ socks. That was the choice daughters had in those days: either bribe a future husband or become a whore. Isn’t that amazing? What would be considered common decency these days, turned into a world-wide tradition of ‘doing good’. But just one day a year, mind you.

Mikulas was a clever fellow. He recruited a helper who went by the name of ‘Krampus’, an ugly goat like creature with huge horns, fangs and a very long tongue. This was the anti-Saint Nicholas, often seen stuffing unfortunate juveniles in a bag, hauling them to his lair and when he was really hungry, eating them alive. That way Saint Nicholas could remain saintly and untainted.

 

After my family moved to France, Mikulas not only changed his name, but also his status. He now had to compete with 'Père Noël' who came onto the world scene because of a religious fanatic called Martin Luther. Martin was not fond of saints, as gift givers or otherwise. He decided to give the gift giving role to Baby Jesus instead.

But the carrying capacity of a baby is very limited, especially with the increasing appetite for receiving gifts in the West. There were several contenders that applied for the job: the Three Kings, Baby Jesus himself and Père Noel. The latter won by a narrow margin, but not without some help, as you will find out later.

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About Guns, Again

Tom Kando 

A recent editorial by Leonard Pitts prompts me to chime in, once again, about America’s gun problem. I am a criminologist and I have lectured and written about the gun issue for years. See for example my May 17 post on this blog, “It’s the Guns, Stupid,” 

Pitt’s editorial is titled “”Mass Shootings: It’s Time to Stop Asking ‘Why?’” I agree with this. However, while much of what Pitts writes has merit, at some point he goes somewhat astray. Let me explain: 

First, Pitt reminds us correctly that the bulk of American gun violence does not consist of mass shootings. A vast majority of it consists of what he brilliantly calls “knucklehead shootings.” These are “small-scale shootings where the motive is patently absurd.” For example, “in Atlanta, in June, a woman who worked at Subway was killed for putting too much mayonnaise on a sandwich... In Brooklyn in August, a man who worked at McDonald was shot in the neck because the French fries were cold. In Detroit in November, a man was shot to death after he apparently failed to hold the elevator door...In Tulsa, in November, a man shot at his stepfather after they got into an argument over a game of Monopoly...” Let me add to this the many cases of domestic violence, for example irate husbands killing their wives and children. What all these crimes have in common is that someone got uncontrollably angry. 

Pitts goes on to argue that we should stop asking “Why?” (the killers’ motives) and start asking “Who?” He notes that “Many say that the problem is that guns are too readily available in America.” But he feels that this is not the best explanation of America’s problem. He mentions Australia and New Zealand, countries where gun ownership is also widespread, and yet they do not have the same atrocious level of gun violence as we do. 

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