The Knockout Round
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 in to what looks to be one of the most-watched boxing matches in history: Mike Tyson v Jake Paul. And I have some thoughts...
Not a lot of thoughts on boxing per se, mind you. I’m wildly indifferent about the sport. What I know about boxing's rules, about its training, its stars comes almost entirely from popular culture — from popular culture, to be clear, of another era: Rocky sprinting past Independence Hall and up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rocky punching frozen carcasses in the meat freezer. The most memorable – or perhaps, more accurately, overdetermined – training montage sequences in all of film might be the ones in Rocky IV, where Rocky's "natural" approach – running, chopping wood, pulling a sled in the frozen Siberian tundra – is contrasted to Drago's "techno-scientific" one – all tracked, measured, controlled, engineered in a Soviet lab.
But maybe all of boxing is overdetermined – we attach so much cultural and political weight to the sport, to its most famous bouts, to its villains and victors. From Jack Johnson to Muhammed Ali to Imane Khelif, the sport is inextricable from how we talk about race and gender, how we talk about refusal and retribution and justice, how we define greatness.
I think folks will tune in to Netflix tonight not just to watch some violent mano-a-mano (although sure, there's some of that) but to find meaning in, to attach a story to the fight, the outcome: Gen X versus Gen Z. The fighter from the streets of Brooklyn versus that asshole from YouTube. Iron Mike versus the influencer.
The latter seems key, I'd say, to understanding – broadly speaking – this awful American moment: how "content" has become "culture"; how digital technologies are bending over backwards to appeal to men; how celebrity seems smaller and sadder; how talent and expertise are too expensive to develop or maintain — passé, I guess, like Tyson himself, too old and too slow. Where once, there was formidable, frightening power, now what…?
No one really wants to root for the old world (and I‘m surely not here to defend boxing or Tyson either); but holy shit, just look at this wretched alternative we've manufactured.
Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: "Why the deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise."
Nobody Expects Cartesian Dualism: "'Let us Calculate!': Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination."
A Penny Saved: "83% of students at Urban Assembly schools are from low-income households; Counselor GPT brings them a level of individualized attention that some families pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to access through a private counselor" – from a PR pitch I received this week.
A Penny Wasted: "Did OpenAI just spend more than $10 million on a URL?" – Chat.com now redirects to ChatGPT. "Open AI's Next Model Raises Questions about AI Advances Hitting a Wall."
Not Good: "Anthropic hires its first 'AI welfare' researcher." Screw undocumented immigrants, right? Let's pour money into legal support for machines.
Not Interesting: "Reddit’s ‘Interesting as Fuck’ Community Rules That AI-Generated Video Is Not Interesting."
Not Useful: Apple AI notification summaries.
Error Handling: "Building a mental model of a large-language model."
Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Dan Meyer observes that "Teacher AI Use Hasn’t Budged in a Year." From Ben Williamson: "Critical keywords of AI in education." "Are AI study aids cheating?" – is this even the right question? "We Must Help Our Students Engage with AI." Must we? (“Engage” is such a weird, weasel word.)
Click Here to Learn Nothing: "Duolingo’s new eyerolling emo chatbot Lily briefly replaces CEO on investor call to showcase its AI technology." Duolingo's founder Luis van Ahn calls this a "killer feature." Sure, whatever, man. (Arguably, the second greatest trick the devil played was convincing people that flashcards – digital, "AI-enhanced," or otherwise – are how you best learn a foreign language.) "Google Learn About takes AI chatbot answers a step further." I've tried all week to get this to give me an answer to the questions I'm working through right now book-wise, but the damn thing just errors out. How on earth will I ever do research?! </s>
More Academic Garbage: "For-Profit Academic Publishers Love LLM Garbage." Hell, so do open ed folks, so shrug emoji. "One in 20 new Wikipedia pages seem to be written with the help of AI." "How ChatGPT Brought Down an Online Education Giant" – the giant here is not Wikipedia, but Chegg. Regardless, we're seeing a real embrace of the enshittification of knowledge so congrats, everyone.
Bullshit Jobs, Now with More Automation: "Who Needs an AI Doppelgänger?" – John Herrman on workplace "agents." (I’ll try to write out some more thoughts on agents and agency and B. F. Skinner in Monday’s newsletter maybe. Or you can just use that Google Learn About tool and have the robots tell you what to think.) "Nvidia CEO Says Working Next to AI Employees Will Be Normal." I also got a PR pitch this week on “AI automation and silent firing” — that is, companies opting to buy more software rather than hire employees. So look for that trend in The Wall Street Journal. "B.S. Jobs and the Coming Crisis of Meaning."
Super-Unintelligence: "How Elon Musk’s Supercomputer Freaked Out AI Rivals." "AI-Generated Elon Musk Inspiration Porn Is Viral on Facebook." "The push for Elon Musk to lead American AI policy is already starting."
Computing is a Weapon: "The AI Machine Gun of the Future Is Already Here." "How the Media Missed the Rise of the New Tech Right" – hashtag not all media. "AI is powerful, dangerous, and controversial. What will Donald Trump do with it?"
The End: "The Last Chance for AI Oversight Is Gone."
No, Really. This is the End: Mark Zuckerberg drops his first single, and it’s a cover of “Get Low.” (You don’t have to click. You never actually have to click.)
Thanks for being a subscriber to Second Breakfast. Paid subscribers will hear from me on Monday, with thoughts on Martha Stewart, Alex Van Halen, and more – things you might not think are relevant to AI and education, but hot damn, you'd be wrong.
