Intelligence
Postcard #48
Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.
Thoughts, tools, and treats
This week is about different facets of the ‘I’, which nowadays inevitably relates back to the ‘A’.
Literary intelligence I
Sam Kriss: „I hate it. I find it viscerally disgusting; a cold shudder like someone’s poured jelly down the back of my neck. I hate that it’s everywhere; I hate that when I read basically anything now I’m constantly on alert, twitching like a schizo in an underpass. Is this thing really what it says it is? Is this person actually a robot in disguise?“
Literary intelligence II
Henry Oliver: „What happens when a great writer trains their own model? Or when they use a series of prompts that guide the LLM to a new sort of intertextual writing? Or when AI companies train their models to be better writers? Or when a young person no one has yet heard of emerges with a strange new sort of writing based on their years of AI prompting since their childhood?“
Cognitive and social intelligence
In a powerful reply to Carl Hendrick’s informative article on cognitive surrender, Norma Sancho argues that „in many contemporary educational settings, the student has already been abandoned before the chatbot appears.”
Superintelligence
Daniel Muñoz reports on his first meeting with someone exceptionally „determined to get the most out of every moment of their life—out of every conversation, every decision, every burrito.“
Noteworthy
„The liberal vision (...) is beautiful, it’s more fun, it’s more prosperous. It’s more peaceful in a lot of ways. It’s louder. It might be a little more obnoxious, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the neo-Victorianism on the left and the weird ultra, you know, national, like ethno-nationalism on the right.“
—Greg Lukianoff on The Dishcast
A mystery link leading into the unknown
„The order...“
As always,
Dirk
P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.