Robot owls: "The question that remains in my mind," writes Imogen West-Knights in the latest issue of The Dial, "and in the minds of many of even its most dedicated users, is: what is Duolingo actually teaching you?" (Emphasis mine.) What indeed? Duolingo won't
I'd originally planned to take today off from the newsletter – a little post-Thanksgiving respite from my writing (and your having to read it). But the steady drumbeat of AI hype hasn't stopped, so how can I? (You're free, as always, to not-click.) I really
It's been absolutely fascinating to watch the narrative about AI shift over the last few weeks – from very boisterous claims that "AGI (artificial general intelligence) is just around the corner" to a rather big "maybe not." According to some researchers, the current approach isn&
I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles Indulge me briefly here while I return to Second Breakfast's origins: a few words on cultural narratives, technology, and aging athletes. Because tonight at 8pm Eastern (after I get home from ballet class), I'll probably tune
"Well, at least Mussolini made the trains run on time." Except he didn't, of course. Mussolini sought to convince the world that fascism delivered Italy into a technologically efficient order; and the story was part of the dictator's careful (and successful, even) crafting of
I'm not really sure what to say. But phew, I sure as hell won't turn to ChatGPT to compensate, because my god, I'm grieving – "election grief is real" – and some advanced text predictor that promises to compensate for my "loss for
I send The Extra Mile to paid subscribers of Second Breakfast every Monday. But I wanted to talk about yesterday, and I wanted to talk about tomorrow, and I thought that maybe everyone should receive this one, that maybe everyone could use a little cheering on and cheering up, a
In 1902, Rudyard Kipling published Just So Stories for Children, a collection of short, origin stories of how various animals acquired their best known features: "How the Leopard Got His Spots" and so on. Kipling had first told these tales to put his daughter to sleep, and “you
There's been quite a bit of mumbling and grumbling in the last few days (weeks? months?) that this whole AI thing might be a bubble and that the bubble might be about to burst. "The AI bubble is looking worse than the dot-com bubble," MarketWatch cautioned