Doubleplusungood

AnteTrump bb sleeped. AI rectified oldspeak. Now Goodthink free of thoughtcrime and duckspeak winned. Bellyfeel better.

I am sorry, but AI is not some sort of savior…unless you are a dictator. It is making executives dumber by writing their presentations, which were already milquetoast shite. They are letting it schedule workers, completely taking away their right to ask for days off. It is “helping” people search the internet, taking away their ability to research.

This last one is my realm, and let me tell you, y’all better cozy up to a Gen X researcher who transitioned from physical document research to digital. Us people who remember when literally everyone had a rotary phone in their house, paid five bucks an hour for internet in our teenage years, and learned PowerPoint when clipart was in fashion, have a leg up over people who rely on their phones to drive across town. This translates even stronger when looking at finding information. Students don’t understand what digital resources are. I know. Why?

Well, I have been teaching general education courses in higher ed since 2011. As a non-terminal degreed instructor, I am always relegated to the trenches of forcing undergrads to learn about things they frankly don’t give damn about. When I ask them a question, they give me blank stares. “You all have a device in front of you with Wikipedia,” I say. I still get:

At the same time, I have been an off and on college student since 1994, thirty frickin’ years. A year earlier, Robert Gaskins presented PowerPoint for the first time on a projector; prior versions only produced overheads. Remember these? My first course on cross-cultural gender by the wonderful professor at GVSU, Cindy Hull, was all taught through overheads:

And the internet? Forget about it. While I was studying at GVSU in the early 2000s, my wife and I had just purchased a run-down hundred-year-old house to raise our two daughters. I somehow would find old computers discarded from family members and connect them to free dial-up through the schools I was attending. I researched in the stacks, a skill that is dying and bringing the quality of research in general down with it. I know this too. Why?

SERENDIPITY

When you wander through a library of any kind, you are not bound to algorithms. Connections can be made that have nothing to do with previous ones. Like Sun Ra at the piano, a researcher is traveling into a space which has never been explored. When you track down things physically, be it through the bibliographies or simply wandering a space, you will make novel connections, connections that actually move knowledge forward, not stagnate in complacent comfort. AI could never write this:

My next post will give an example of how AI is horrible at doing research. Let’s hope this becomes a regular thing