I parked my car this morning in the village and walked down to my favourite coffee place for an espresso. Every one of the three conversations I overheard was about people discussing the pros and cons of ChatGPT. Pros seem to be that “it helped me to know what to ask for when I talked to my car insurance company” and cons are mostly “how do we know that any of this is real?” More seriously I’m sitting near folks who work in the arts and the looks on their faces are of the deepest concern. They use it. For …
I think it was 1986-87 academic year that I truly fell in love with the idea of culture. That was the year I began my BA in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and it was during a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada were going through a generational resurgence after recovering from 100 years of state-sponsored cultural, physical and intellectual extinction. I was able to be a witness to communities and organizations recovering by growing deep into traditional practices, and younger generations receiving the teaching of Elders and using them to create new political movements, organizations, economies, governments, and health …
A participant from a 2018 complexity workshop I ran in The Hague, reflecting on an experience. From a piece in The Walrus by Troy Jollimore, a philosophy professor, on his evolving relationship to students, AI and education: The use of AI already seems so natural to so many of them, so much an inevitability and an accepted feature of the educational landscape, that any prohibition strikes them as nonsensical. Don’t we instructors understand that today’s students will be able, will indeed be expected, to use AI when they enter the workforce? Writing is no longer something people will have to do …
The light is returning to the northern hemisphere and we’ve had clear skies for the last 10 days. This is a photo of the twilight with Venus seen from my house looking southwest over Apodaca Ridge. Cloud has since rolled in and a little blast of coastal winter is coming. Republished. The post I sent out last week had broken links. My monthly round up of interesting links. These are posted nearly daily at my Mastodon feed. Democracy & Politics It has been a full month of politics here in Canada and in the US that has shaken a lot …
The photo shows my neighbour Shane at the top his game, and the top of a tree, skillfully falling a 50 meter Douglas-fir. So today is another Friday, which is the day I set aside to do some reading and reflecting, and follow my interests down various rabbit holes. And today the rabbit hole is the crisis of “productivity“ in Canada. The term productivity crops up a lot when policy makers, and those with an interest in how economic policy affects corporate activity begin talking about their worries and fears. Productivity is simply an economic measurement that divides the gross …