E.C. Nevin: “I write about books for myriad reasons other than if being such a big part of my history. One is that there is an immediate connection to the person on the other side. The person about to dive into my work has, by the very act of them setting foot in a bookstore to purchase it, something in common with me. We both love to read. This connection is a delightful tool in a writer’s arsenal. The nods, winks and easter eggs, the allusions to Jane Austen plots and references to genre tropes are fun to write and, I hope, fun to read. As the writer, I feel as though I’m in conversation with a dear friend about a shared hobby.”
FT: “In a recent book called The AI Con, [Emily Bender] and her co-author, the sociologist Alex Hanna, take a sledgehammer to AI hype and raise the alarm about the technology’s more insidious effects. She is clear on her motivation. “I think what it comes down to is: nobody should have the power to impose their view on the world,” she says. Thanks to the huge sums invested, a tiny cabal of men has the ability to shape what happens to large swaths of society and, she adds, “it really gets my goat”. Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, Google and Meta are little more than “stochastic parrots”, a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, is a system “for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning”.”
Mint: “Why should every aircraft not have a digital twin for each of its systems, assemblies and parts? Sensors aboard planes could constantly relay information on their status to digital twins kept under the watch of engineers (or AI). An entire plane could have a digital twin fed with all manner of real-time readings for a comprehensive system to process, simulate scenarios and offer cues. Live interaction between the physical and digital entities could conceivably sort out several problems. The kinks that cannot be ironed out digitally could be flagged for pilots and engineers.”
NYTimes: “Across most of the world, fertility rates are falling. As economies develop, fertility rates tend to decline — and when economies develop especially quickly, fertility rates often plummet to particularly low levels. In many countries they are already below 2.1 births per woman, the “replacement level” needed to keep populations steady from one generation to the next. If current trends continue, by 2050 more than three-quarters of countries will be below replacement-level fertility. By 2100, populations in some major economies will fall by 20 to 50 percent. And because birthrates compound like debt, the further fertility rates drop in one generation, the more they would need to increase in the next one to make up the numbers.”
