The Extra Mile

I'm reading four books at the moment: Ethan Mollick's Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, and Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. I'm always juggling more than one read at a time – Kin and I are listening to Kimmerer's book in the evenings, and I'm listening to Turkle's on my runs and at the gym; I've got Mbembe's book on my Kindle, and Mollick's is a hardcover, sitting on the end-table next to my chair in the living room, where I spend most of my time reading.

I like reading multiple books at once – I like how the sentences and the styles and the substance confabulate in my head; some ideas resonate, some are dissonant. (I like reading multiple non-fiction books at once. I struggle to do the same with fiction; I'd rather immerse myself in just one other story-world at a time.) It's like my own little corpus for training my internal thinking model – except there's far less environmental destruction. And I actually paid for these books. But you know: the output’s kinda unpredictable. Sometimes, I just make shit up.

And I guess I'll just throw this out there: why use an LLM for “research” when you can read books?