Learning – Christopher Wink

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Initially set in 1992, later editions of the science fiction classic “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” updated the setting to 2021. And so, we have now lived through Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel.

Perhaps best known as inspiring the 1982 Harrison Ford movie Bladerunner, the novel won mixed reviews at launch but has developed a cult following. Dick (1928-1982) is not remembered as a great writer as much as a great thinker (Minority Report and Total Recall also inspired by his stories), and that’s felt truer still after a new wave of artificial intelligence hype.

The title plays off a subplot of the book in which the humans who remain on earth (after nuclear fallout) covet the status symbol of a living animal, as opposed to artificial ones. So, the question is whether androids (the increasingly human-passing machines that the main character is chasing) would dream of electric ones? Its big theme: What defines humanity, especially if machines increasingly recreate many of the skills we identify with? I enjoyed the book, and below share notes for my own future reference.

What happens to our digital remains after we die?

By 2100, the dead could outnumber the living on Facebook, and other social platforms like it.

Centuries of hiding the dead away may come to a close as our “digital remains” may keep our ancestors around us at all times. We ought to have a plan.

So argues the Oxford researcher Carl Öhman in his new book The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care.”

The book is a mix of philosophy, technology and information sciences. It’s rich, light, short and important. I recommend it. Below I share my notes for future reference.

Living and working with AI

Artificial intelligence is a marvel that generates two unnecessarily extreme reactions: This will solve all our problems, or it will actually kill us all.

“If we focus solely on the risks or benefits of building, super intelligent machines, it robs us of our abilities to consider the more likely second and third scenarios, a world where AI is ubiquitous, but very much in human control.” That’s from the 2024 book by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick titled Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. As he writes: “Rather than being worried about one giant AI Apocalypse, we need to worry about the many small catastrophes at AI can bring.”

It’s a great read gathering the moment we are in right now. I recommend it. Below are my notes for my future reference.

The New Geography of Jobs

In 1979, Seattle and Albuquerque were comparable regions, in population, in reputation and industry.

That year, young Bill Gates and team moved their fledgling computer company Microsoft back home to Seattle — and that changed everything. A generation later, Albuquerque native Jeff Bezos decided to move his own early ecommerce company Amazon to Seattle because Microsoft built an ecosystem there. Today, Seattle is a top-tier innovation economy, by my news organization’s own measure, and Albuquerque isn’t even on the map.

Where once regional economies sought physical capital, they now pursue human capital, and there’s a flywheel effect for people even more than the agglomeration effects of industry. So argues the influential 2012 book The New Geography of Jobs, written by economist Enrico Moretti.

This matters because like manufacturing in the 20th century, the knowledge sector is the driver of the economy today. All those “tradable jobs” create all the non-tradable ones that follow. Put another way, if you lcoate a tech firm or manufacturing plant in a town, then a Walmart will follow — but not the other way. All those productive workers make everyone else more productive too, for three big reasons: complementarity, better technology and externalities.

Globalization was supposed to mean “the world was flat” Instead, geography matters even more. Below find my notes for future reference.

Word Origins: how etymology interprets English

How language evolves is better understood today because of a few obsessively written forms, and the development of comparative techniques. This is etymology, a science of irrational human culture that requires the balance of simple elegance and rigorous complexity.

The obscure science of etymology is broadly known but not widely considered. Years into a curiosity with linguistics, I picked up the 2005 book from lexicographer John Ayto called Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z.

It wasn’t quite what I expected — less a detailed account of the process and more a charming walk through hundreds of word origins to demonstrate the start and stop discovery process. It still does better convey the process, and fits alongside broader popular books on linguistics

Below are my notes for future reference.

Why has war lasted for thousands of years?

The first recorded war involved the Sumerians in Mesopotamia almost 5,000 years ago. Prehistoric war is thought to be far older. Can we ever get rid of it?

Margaret Mead said war is older than the jury system but no less an invention to address conflict, and so it can be removed. As the anthropologist Douglas Fry more recently wrote: “War like slavery before it can be abolished.”

Whether peace or war is the more natural human state is disputed and complicated.

That’s from the 2024 book Why War?, which recasts an old question that previous literature has addressed, this time from British historian Richard Overy. The book is largely a review of the literature on war. All the disciplines in these chapters build on each other, starting in evolution, biologically evolved to demonstrated aggression.

“Warfare,” Overy wrote “ is not in our genes, but for our genes.” There is still a role for historians (and therefore journalists) to interpret the specific human actions of “why THIS war” but there is also a broad universal answer to the question Why War: It’s been an effective means to resolve dispute, despite considerable cost, so war emerged from our systems by hijacking our instincts.

Or as the author himself concludes: “The co-evolution of culture and biology for most of the long human past created conditions within which nature and nurture together, not either one or the other, reinforced the resort to violence when regarded as necessary or advantageous.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

What are luxury beliefs?

Rich people say one thing, but they do another.

Tech executives don’t let their kids get addicted to screens. Activists who called to defund the police lived in places that didn’t rely on cops. Well-paid professionals say marriage isn’t necessary for a kid to thrive, and publicly self-efface by saying their success was luck, but they’re much more likely to get and stay married than working class families — and they make sure their kids work hard.

These are all examples of “luxury beliefs” a catchy concept from foster kid and Air Force veteran turned new young conservative thinker and writer Rob Henderson. He expounded on the topic in his February 2024 memoir entitled “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”

As he wrote: “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”

I enjoyed his bestseller, and found it thoughtful and critical. Because of our partisan era, it’s easily pushed by one side and dismissed by another. But I think his perspective has merit for all, even those who don’t like everything he has to say. I certainly appreciated it.

Below I share my notes from the book for future reference.

How Rome fell

Leaders of the late Roman Empire faced at least as many threats from within as without. Over-extension, declining trust in its institutions, falling middle class and a series of ineffective leaders that failed to address these looming threats all contributed to the decline of antiquity’s greatest force.

That’s the theme from “Home Rome Fell,” published in 2010 by British historian Adrian Goldsworthy. I picked it up for my own sense of every amateur historian’s favorite period.

Over nearly 500 pages, the book adds considerable depth to the simple tables we learn in high school. Speaking of which, I recreated one of those over-simplified tables below, heh.

753 BCE: Rome is established	509 BCE: Roman Republic established	27 BCE: Octavian made first Roman emperor	476 CE: Germans depose last Roman emperor	1453: Ottoman Empire overthrows Constantinople
Rome’s Period of Kings (244 years)	Roman Republic (482 years)	Roman Empire (503 years)	Byzantine Empire (977 years)

Below are my notes for future reference.

The Singularity is Nearer

This generation of artificial intelligence bots have passed the famed Turing test, as we once knew it.

Experts may quibble with the rules, and we’ll continue to move the goal posts. Now, though, generative AI needs to play dumb to trick humans, because they move too fast, can write too convincingly and have too-comprehensive knowledge to be any person.

That’s from the new book from futurist Ray Kurzweil called “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI”. It’s a followup to his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near.”

He’s among the best known, and longest-running champions of the kind of digital superintelligence that is called the singularity, which he says is coming — he estimates it by 2045, and has a bet with a friend that by 2029, AI will pass an even more rigorous Turing test he helped establish. His book is a wild romp of optimism and confidence. Anyone digging into the conversation will appreciate it. I recommend it.

Below I share notes for my future reference.