In the air there's a feeling of... panic around drones and wind turbines. And ChatGPT getting into bed with WhatsApp.
Let me begin with what what might happen in a few weeks when ChatGPT gets injected into WhatsApp’s bloodstream. Engadget just reported that “starting today, if you add 1 (800) CHAT-GPT to your contacts — that's 1 (800) 242-8478 — you can start using the chatbot over Meta's messaging app.”
I have seen friends bailing out of WhatsApp, solely because of information overload. Imagine when we start seeing people enamored by AI copying and pasting nonsense they receive after chatting with this weird AI. I feel I want to write a scathing sequel to Chat Republic. (If you know, you know.)
Brace yourself!
Is “My bad” a “No biggie”?
Word salads and newly minted phrases. Don’t you love them? You, dear reader probably contribute to the firehose—as I do, too. We transmit more words on our social platforms in a month than someone our age did thirty years ago via snail mail, or memos. But have you realized how quickly we begin using new words and phrases that fly at us from the ether?
My work puts me at the receiving end of neologisms: a high school. Words come out of preteens and teens so fast, if Samuel Johnson was alive he’ll be producing a dictionary every few months.
If you got a 12- or 13-year old at home, you would have heard words such as ‘sigma,’ and ‘cooked’ that I won’t even bother explaining—or mansplaining.
Yesterday a friend used the word ‘kerfuffle’ and I smiled, restraining myself from firing off a rejoinder. That word has been around, but is more texture than, say, ‘‘snarfu.” (Or the pedestrian word screw-up.)
Have you noticed older kids now use ‘low key’ and ‘gaslighting’ as adjectives and verbs? What? You do it too?
So I asked my former linguistics professor, Dr. Thiru Kandiah who is now retired in Perth what he thinks. (FYI: He types entire paragraphs on WhatsApp, and he’s 85.) I asked him what we ought to do when phrases like ‘My bad’ creep in on us. Should we label it as disgusting slang, or just move on? His insight was very interesting.
“The inevitability of language change is an unalterable fact of human existence and experience,” he said, as if he was reprimanding me for being a language snob! He pointed to a whole branch of linguistics called Historical or Diachronic Linguistics.
As such:
“And the fact is that the language we are using is different from the language as it has been used earlier or in other places and situations (for example, by Shakespeare, the writer of Beowulf, Molamure, Gandhi, whoever), while still remaining the “same” language. And the most useful way of accounting for that is NOT to judge those differences in terms of decline, degeneracy and suchlike but to recognise that these differences are an important part of our REGULAR usage NOW.” (Emphasis, his.)
Thanks, prof!
WINGED CREATURES IN MY BACKYARD?
As I write, there’s a huge hullabaloo about unidentified drones, apparently the size of school buses, hovering over some US cities. My cynical view is that it’s something homegrown that we may soon hear about.
Though I’ve been a robotics for years, I am very skeptical of self-driving cars (basically bots on wheels) and military drones (now used to execute people in foreign lands). Meanwhile I was recently made aware of another drone experiment by Amazon. In my neck of the woods, apparently—Phoenix.
What do you think? Are we being primed for instant gratification to support business models like this? Personally I don’t want anyone’s drone hovering over our karapincha trees. There’s already way too much surveillance going on. Amazon has been getting in military drone contracts, in case you didn’t know. After all it’s low key business as usual.
GREENWASHING?
Speaking of winged creatures, I wrote about this in an Op-ed about wind turbines in Sri Lanka. It was published last week the DailyFT, a local paper in Sri Lanka. The story is complex. There’s the ecological and avian disruption side to it, and also the local economy that’s being choked. And then, there’s the controversial Indian investment from a tech billionaire Gautam Adani. I interviewed many people for this piece.
In Sri Lanka, the supreme court may soon weigh in on a legal petition against Adani Wind Energy which has plans to install more turbines in a sensitive area in the north of Sri Lanka. Clean energy, and wind turbines sound wonderful. Except that the devil is in the details, especially the poor due diligence behind planting 650-foot high wind turbines, with a wing span of 590 feet in the flight path of millions of migratory birds. That flight path is known as the Central Asian Flyway that spans 30 countries. Here’s a link to that article.
ABUSED BY A CHATBOT
This is one of the saddest stories I have read, and puts a huge asterisk on AI and its use of chatbots. Please read it at your discretion. It was titled When the "Person" Abusing Your Child is a Chatbot. It comes from a very reliable source, the Center for Humane Technology.
TIKTOK. Tick tock…tick tock…
Speaking of Chatbots, the popular chat app is under the microscope in the US. The Supreme Court just agreed to hear TikTok’s challenge (by Chinese parent company ByteDance), as it contests that banning operations in the US would be a free speech issue. In January, alongside the hoopla surrounding Trump’s cabinet picks, there will be oral arguments about TikTok.
eBOOKS BY MY STUDENTS.
I saved this shout out for the end. Every six months I find myself bragging about how my students surprise me, and themselves. My final semester assignment is for them to write, edit, format and publish a 24-page book. They even design the front and back covers, and solicit reviews. (If you’re in education you will recognize this as a ‘summative’ assignment.) So here’s a glimpse of some books I place on digital bookshelves for my five classes. Approximately 130 books in December alone. More than a dozen of them are shortlisted to be published as real books in January, and they will be in a Little Free Library I manage at the school.
Thank you for reading this far. If you like any of these stories, please let me know what it was about. And if you could share this newsletter with someone, that would be wonderful.
Happy Christmas!
Would you shortlist some of your students books and publish them please