Finished reading: Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. Read this one, & Out of the Silent Planet, with my daughter. We’ve both loved both books, so it’s on to That Hideous Strength! 📚
Currently reading: The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne 📚
Currently reading: The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature & Ideas by Geoffrey Hill 📚
Really, Wordlebot? Really??
Current listening: Anouar Brahem’s beautiful, haunting new album After the Last Sky. Brahem is accompanied by two brilliant peers, Dave Holland on bass and Django Bates on piano. 🎵
Latest newsletter: The brilliant idiot & the wise fool: aphorisms on two ways of life
Grateful to have caught Bill Charlap at the Dakota tonight. The trio included the great Kenny Washington on drums and, unexpectedly for me, David Wong on bass.
An absolutely incredible set. Highlights were Charlie Parker’s scorching “Segments” & the encore, “Some Other Time.” 🎵
I wrote a short essay on Chinese architect Liu Jiakun for my newsletter. Liu, who won this year’s Pritzker Prize, is an architecture whose work I find stunningly beautiful.
Latest issue of my newsletter:
“The Wolrd is Run by Brilliant Idiots” and what we can learn from Holy Fools about how to respond.
One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.
RIP, Martin Marty.
The story of the foolish wiseman—on Thomas More, Niels Bohr, & the power of paradox in a black-and-white world.
Finished reading: Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han 📚
Finished reading: Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams. Subtitle: 99 Stories of Azrael.
Holy smokes this is a cool book. Vintage Williams, wild & strange & unforgettable. 📚
Finished reading: Lord Emsworth and Others by P. G. Wodehouse 📚
Currently reading: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges 📚
Currently reading: Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams 📚
Two absolutely killer albumss released today. One could do worse than spend the weekend listening to these two. 🎵
Hollis Robbins, "AI & the Last Mile"
Here’s a very insightful essay on the changing role — and increasing importance of — human judgment in the world of AI: Hollis Robbins, “AI & the Last Mile." A couple excerpts:
While we worry about AI replacing human judgment, the real story may be how AI is creating a market for that judgment as a luxury good, available only to those who can pay for the “last mile” of human insight. […]
The “last mile” will become the new gated community, where inside the velvet ropes are expert humans with discernment.
Surely these dynamics will play out in education, too, where most students will get the generic, “slightly off” AI bots; elite education will still be AI-centered, but a more personalized experience.
The one caveat I’d add: it does seem like knowledge graphs offer one possible way to bring this “last mile” forward, and build it into the AI dev process from the start. If we can successfully leverage knowledge graphs to minimize or eliminate hallucinations, we could change these last-mile dynamics and create truly democratizing AI tools. 🤖
Parables are strange; finding your life transformed into a parable, even stranger.