our machines are tools and not our friends

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman (1855)

For over a decade, social media have helped me explore different aspects of my learning and my profession, much more than I could have on my own or in my community. I often feel more affinity for some of my online connections than for my local neighbours. Living with contradictions can help develop critical thinking. Social media have enabled more of us to live like artists, constantly redefining ourselves and our work. Despite what is happening at Twitter, other options for connecting online are emerging, such as the open covenant ‘fediverse’ and Mastodon.

I intend on continuing to embrace contradictions, explore new ideas, and be a work of art in progress. Much of this I will do while connected via some form of social media. As more of us do so, we might be able strengthen our commons, work for a better society, and promote democracy. The past two decades of living a very active online life has helped me contain more multitudes. I would highly recommend it.

I find the manual nature of my sense-making is an essential part of it. The continuous act of writing a blog post — for over 19 years — forces me to think a bit more than clicking once and filing or having it served up from an automated system. The routine of reviewing my social media favourites and creating Friday’s Finds is another manual routine that I find helps to reinforce my learning and add to my knowledge.

The juggernaut of emerging generative large language multi-modal models may result in the total decoding and synthesizing of reality. These tools are removing the requirement to think first and make sense by doing. They can obscure our sensemaking. Relying too much on artificially-generated knowledge may stunt our own sensemaking. Even more importantly, it’s the connections and knowledge-sharing between humans that keeps civilizations alive — how culture drove human evolution.

“What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on? … We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done). So what happens next? I don’t know, I only have questions. None of which you’ll find on StackOverflow.” —Peter Nixey 2023-03-26

The machines are our tools, not our friends. Let’s make sure we know how they work and what is behind them by learning with and from each other.