A.I.-generated garbage is polluting our culture. Increasingly, mounds of synthetic A.I.-generated outputs drift across our feeds and our searches. The stakes go far beyond what’s on our screens. The entire culture is becoming affected by A.I.’s runoff, an insidious creep into our most important institutions. Consider science. Right after the blockbuster release of GPT-4, the latest artificial intelligence model from OpenAI and one of the most advanced in existence, the language of scientific research began to mutate. Especially within the field of A.I. itself. … (New York Times)
How to eat like a Stoic. The ancient Cynic and Stoic philosophers were very interested in food. (At the end of this article you’ll even find a modern recipe for Stoic soup.) They talk both about what we should eat and how we should eat it, if we want to live wisely and gain strength of character. For instance, we’re told of the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus: “He often talked in a very forceful manner about food, on the grounds that food was not an insignificant topic and that what one eats has significant consequences. In particular, he thought that mastering one’s appetites for food and drink was the beginning of and basis for self-control.” … (Stoicism by Don Robertson)
Inside the AI competition that decoded an ancient Herculaneum scroll. On a warm Saturday night at the end of August last year, Luke Farritor, an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska, was sitting alone in a corner at a house party in Omaha when his iPhone pinged. The music was booming, and Farritor, 21 years old at the time with a boyish face and black rectangular glasses, was surrounded by other students drinking and mingling. He opened the message. It was from Ben Kyles, a 45-year-old computer scientist and pianist from British Columbia, known to Farritor as “Hari Seldon”—Kyles’s online avatar, named for a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Kyles had some news to share. He had just finished digitally unrolling some high-resolution scans of carbonized papyrus. He’d uploaded the images, he said, to a shared server. “Dude,” Farritor replied, “this is awesome. I’ll run it very soon.” Kyles’s papyrus was from Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town on the Bay of Naples, at the base of Mount Vesuvius, that is home to the only preserved library from classical antiquity. The collection of papyri—from which about 1,800 mostly unreadable scrolls and fragments have so far been extracted—was interred under 60 feet of material deposited by pyroclastic flows, at temperatures greater than 900 degrees Fahrenheit, during the same eruption that destroyed Pompeii in C.E. 79. Without enough oxygen to burn, the scrolls were baked into charcoal—a blessing because it allowed them to join the small trove of papyri that has managed to endure since antiquity, all of it protected from humidity in some way or another, whether inhumed in Egyptian sands or singed by fire. But it also means they cannot be unrolled without turning to dust. … (Scientific American)
Earth to NASA: you could use some philosophers up there. The window to apply to be a NASA astronaut — a window that opens only about every four years — closes this month, on April 16. Though I’ve submitted an application, I don’t expect to make the cut. The educational requirements for the astronaut program are clear: Applicants must possess at least a master’s degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), a doctorate in medicine or a test pilot school graduate patch. Though I have a Ph.D., it’s in philosophy. (And though I’m an Air Force pilot, I’m not a test pilot.) I hesitate to tell NASA its business. But I think its requirements are closing the astronaut program off from important insights from the humanities and social sciences. … (New York Times)
Seneca’s Trojan Horse. Why did a Stoic like Seneca spend so much effort writing violent, angst-filled dramas? During the philosopher’s lifetime he was best known as Emperor Nero’s chief advisor and speechwriter, and as a virtuous Stoic whose works were widely read by the well-educated. But Seneca was a polymath who dabbled in two surprising sidelines: proto-scientific thinking and writing bloody tragedies. Moonlighting as a proto-scientist made sense. Ancient Stoics believed nature had ethical implications, and Seneca weaves philosophical points into his investigations in his book, Naturales Quaestiones. He didn’t see science as a separate topic so much as an extension and explication of Stoic philosophy. But the incredibly violent plays? There was no shortage of people accusing Seneca of hypocrisy in his lifetime and in subsequent eras, and we might conclude that he was violating his own philosophical advice. … (Classical Wisdom)