Irwin Chen

LLMs are lossy. So what?

ai

LLMs are never going to perfectly simulate human consciousness. That's not the end goal. Like any massively earth-shattering technology, it will see just how far it be developed.

In a wide-ranging interview with Ted Chiang in the Los Angeles Review of Books (I love that their acronym is LARB), the acclaimed sci-fi author pushes back against the notion that mathematics could serve as a universal language: "Math can describe physical phenomena with incredible precision, but it's terrible at describing human experiences."

This made me stop for a moment. Let's say this is true, that we can't describe human experiences with math. And if we agree that what LLMs and the whole neural network project is trying to do exactly that (ie, simulate or approximate or generate human experiences

Cybernetics, Feedback Loops, and Norbert Weiner 🤓

cybernetics

How Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theories from the 1940s have become fundamental to our mental models of the world

The idea of feedback loops is so fundamental to us now that it's odd to think that there was even a need to explain it.

And yet, this peculiar British 1981 show called "The Greatest Thinkers: A Personal View by Edward de Bono" exists to do just that. It (or rather, Edward) presents Wiener's vision of feedback loops between humans and machines—a concept that would later become fundamental to video game design and pretty much everything we do with computers today.

Among the highlights of this unintentionally campy show are:

The Eternal Present of Social Media

orality

How social media's endless present is creating a new kind of cultural amnesia

The Eternal Present of Social Media — Photo by Dan Roizer / Unsplash

Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies that have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory. A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythical river in whose waters lost souls sought absolution, and received it in the form of oblivion.
— Gurwinder Bhogal, "Social media is engineering amnesia: We’re trapped in Big Tech’s mind maze"

Social platforms are quietly rewiring

i feel better after i type to you

ai

The human drive to form emotional bonds with digital entities hasn't changed since ELIZA - AI has just gotten better at completing the circuit.

The recent Daily episode following the death of Adam Raine, induced by ChatGPT, reminded me of a less tragic but similarly sad book, i feel better after i type to you, which was a book published after the 2006 leak of entries typed into the AOL search box. Reading through the raw unedited transcript of one user's search queries felt like listening to a person whispering to an oracle, almost like looking into a person's bare soul.

That was a one-way transcript, just the question but not the answer, though purportedly there were responses. But, in this recent incident and

The Shift from Orality to Literacy

literacy

Imagining the way the technology of writing and reading reconfigures one's brain

Last night, as I was watching this anime series on Netflix called Orb: On the Movements of the Earth (チ。―地球の運動について―) with my two sons, this scene came on at the end of Season 1 Episode 9, and it struck me as the perfect entry point to the concept of orality (apologies for the bootleg quality and lack of sound):

0:00

/1:45

The series, based on a Japanese manga drawn by Uoto (魚豊) from 2020-2022, is a quasi-historical fiction centering on the discovery of heliocentrism in 15th Century Europe. It is a speculative portrait of a time

Back to Life, Back to Orality

Journalism

Just last week, we heard this pronouncement from D. Graham Burnett, a historian of Science and Technology at Princeton on the Hard Fork podcast:

YouTube Short excerpt from a longer segment on the Hard Fork podcast featuring D. Graham Burnett.

Great insights here. Let's go through them line by line. Graham says:

Longform immersive literacy is coming to an end as a widespread cultural phenomenon.

"Longform immersive literacy" is such a good way to frame deep reading and books. I like the distinction he's deliberately making between deep, contemplative, analytical, "good" reading and fast, cursory, easily distracted skimming, "not so

Posts by Irwin Chen