On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Look, I know AI is controversial, but just for a moment, let’s set aside our preconceived notions, our biases, the environmental impact, the massive cost to train and run models, the labor exploitation, the intellectual property theft, the inaccuracies, the mania it causes in users, the destruction of search, the deskilling of professionals, the devaluation of creative work, job losses, and lack of economic value from enterprise implementations.
Wait, what were we talking about?”
—Max Leibman
How should the broad anti-capitalist movement approach climate and other green issues?
“Leftists and environmentalists are close allies in the same cause. There is no contradiction between the two: They both are or should be anti-capitalist. Environmentalism is not anti-human, as some leftists have maintained. Humanity is enmeshed with the larger biosphere so completely that taking care of the environment is taking care of our extended body.” —Kim Stanley Robinson
Finding Peter Putnam via @Chuck Darwin
The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.
His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.
“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.
When they tell you
(and they will tell you)
that with everything happening
it is ridiculous
to still be so concerned
about the pandemic,
remind them that while
war and
conquest and
death
are three
of the horsemen of the apocalypse
pestilence
is the fourth.
—@Plague Poems
