A truly remarkable synthesis, thank you, and a really interesting push for deeper and wider implications. All the best, and many thanks for the “close reading” 🤓Luciano (Floridi).
I hope I'm representing your perspective here. I have people who love my AI position and people who hate it, so I'm doing something right:) I just started reflecting on the dynamic love-hate in my psyche and am thinking of extending it to LLMs. The first antinomy Impound was self-actualization (one) and poverty (hate). I have writing vs. assignments. I have family vs. tribalism. I'm think these strong emotions derive from the same issue separating voice/style and dataprint. How can you hate a dataprint???
Brain Computer Interface technology is a variable you must account for, unfortunately, too quickly within this topic. Nita Ferahany's Battle for Your Brain text covers this topic well and jumps straight into questions of legality as well as biology. The work she's doing with UNESCO panels of neurocognitive legal rights is so key here. We studied it in our AI and Ethics course as questions of embodied, disembodied, and reimbodied ethics. Interesting to add this question into the "brain in a vat" Harman/Putnam ethical scenario.
Thanks, Scott. I appreciate your bringing some depth of knowledge to this topic. I’m just beginning to understand the big picture. Based on your comment, I’m adding another discussion question: Neural Interface Question: As Brain-Computer Interface technology advances alongside AI writing systems, the boundary between thought and text may blur further. If your neural patterns could directly generate text through AI mediation without explicit prompting, how would this change your sense of authorship and cognitive boundaries? Does Farahany's concept of "cognitive liberty" require new protections in a world where thoughts might be directly translated into published content?
Excellent additions! Dr. Farahany is working on this now through a UNESCO panel. Her book Battle for your Brain really pushes the discussion quickly to where it needed to be probably 10 years ago, in some ways.
Larger questions- do governments honor whatever the panel recommends? Do governments enact legislation that limits corporate profits within the “thought and text” market? Should individuals be able to own and market their own “thought and text” imprint? How does security work? Longevity? Back to us as educators, how do we teach ‘thinking about thinking’ to our students with this new technology, and will we be reliant on technology to teach ‘thinking about thinking’ if thought and text are fused electronically outside the mind/brain we are used to - tied to a product that requires budgeting, etc.
So yes, though Orwell really worked through the logic of language and control and 1984 applies his insight, i’d go back earlier in British writing to Chesterton during the first Industrial Revolution and how he looked at the phenomenon of a system being imposed on a person. Oxford has a History of Intelligent Machines too from 2020 that a brilliant professor [Seth Strickland at CMU] used in a guest lecture for our AI and Ethics class as he took us very, very far back to a story about Albertus Magnus to emphasize the longstanding history of how people value knowing themselves and their own efforts compared to needing a machine to know and understand and think and accomplish. It’s somewhat amazing to be living in this particular time in history where our tools make a technopoly feel inevitable. Inevitability is the core flaw in that line of reasoning though…and to stop here, gratitude for your work to help the rest of us working with the nuanced daily life between concerns of “change” and laments of “inevitability”.
Does Floridi ever consider what Large Language Models can't "do" or "say," especially given that they operate by turning language into a sort of statistics game?
I've been enjoying re-reading poets' and philosophers' discussions of their writing craft, or alternately, their thoughts on language itself. These perspectives, I've found, are fruitful for thinking about the limits of LLMS, and why we might want to resist the transformation of "close writing" into "narrative design."
For example, here is a short video on how Wittgenstein and Whorf might help us consider "What Can't LLMs say": https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJwX7KJhJL6/? If language shapes our reality as they both suggest, then won't LLMs strengthen these invisible blinders through their self-perpetuation linguistic norms?
Or will poetry and rupture find a way through narrative design as well? I'm not sure!
Anyway, thank you for this wonderful write up. I'm delighted to have found your Substack and am smashing that subscribe button!
A truly remarkable synthesis, thank you, and a really interesting push for deeper and wider implications. All the best, and many thanks for the “close reading” 🤓Luciano (Floridi).
I hope I'm representing your perspective here. I have people who love my AI position and people who hate it, so I'm doing something right:) I just started reflecting on the dynamic love-hate in my psyche and am thinking of extending it to LLMs. The first antinomy Impound was self-actualization (one) and poverty (hate). I have writing vs. assignments. I have family vs. tribalism. I'm think these strong emotions derive from the same issue separating voice/style and dataprint. How can you hate a dataprint???
Thanks Terry. I appreciate your critique and will seek out Florida's paper. You raise important questions.
This is amazing, Terry!
Brain Computer Interface technology is a variable you must account for, unfortunately, too quickly within this topic. Nita Ferahany's Battle for Your Brain text covers this topic well and jumps straight into questions of legality as well as biology. The work she's doing with UNESCO panels of neurocognitive legal rights is so key here. We studied it in our AI and Ethics course as questions of embodied, disembodied, and reimbodied ethics. Interesting to add this question into the "brain in a vat" Harman/Putnam ethical scenario.
Thanks, Scott. I appreciate your bringing some depth of knowledge to this topic. I’m just beginning to understand the big picture. Based on your comment, I’m adding another discussion question: Neural Interface Question: As Brain-Computer Interface technology advances alongside AI writing systems, the boundary between thought and text may blur further. If your neural patterns could directly generate text through AI mediation without explicit prompting, how would this change your sense of authorship and cognitive boundaries? Does Farahany's concept of "cognitive liberty" require new protections in a world where thoughts might be directly translated into published content?
Excellent additions! Dr. Farahany is working on this now through a UNESCO panel. Her book Battle for your Brain really pushes the discussion quickly to where it needed to be probably 10 years ago, in some ways.
Larger questions- do governments honor whatever the panel recommends? Do governments enact legislation that limits corporate profits within the “thought and text” market? Should individuals be able to own and market their own “thought and text” imprint? How does security work? Longevity? Back to us as educators, how do we teach ‘thinking about thinking’ to our students with this new technology, and will we be reliant on technology to teach ‘thinking about thinking’ if thought and text are fused electronically outside the mind/brain we are used to - tied to a product that requires budgeting, etc.
So yes, though Orwell really worked through the logic of language and control and 1984 applies his insight, i’d go back earlier in British writing to Chesterton during the first Industrial Revolution and how he looked at the phenomenon of a system being imposed on a person. Oxford has a History of Intelligent Machines too from 2020 that a brilliant professor [Seth Strickland at CMU] used in a guest lecture for our AI and Ethics class as he took us very, very far back to a story about Albertus Magnus to emphasize the longstanding history of how people value knowing themselves and their own efforts compared to needing a machine to know and understand and think and accomplish. It’s somewhat amazing to be living in this particular time in history where our tools make a technopoly feel inevitable. Inevitability is the core flaw in that line of reasoning though…and to stop here, gratitude for your work to help the rest of us working with the nuanced daily life between concerns of “change” and laments of “inevitability”.
Thanks much, Scott. You have an important and needed book in you. I want to read it!
This is really helpful, Terry! Thank you so much for doing this work!
I haven’t gotten a chance to read his article yet. My hope is to read through it tomorrow.
I can’t help reading this breakdown and feeling (1) a conviction that he’s probably right and (2) profoundly sad.
I can’t help this nagging suspicion that what he’s talking about is the death of writing, coached as a rebirth of creativity.
I think it’s the phrase “actual writing.”
Here’s my breakdown of his formulation, as I see it here.
(Actual) Writing ——> “Close Writing”
Prompting ——> “Distant Writing
Then, distant writing dominates and close writing (actual writing) becomes a place for specialists.
I can’t help but wonder what this shift in terminology means.
I can’t help but wonder if we’re bending over backwards to attach the word “writing” to something, anything that sort of resembles writing.
Is his analysis an optimistic rendering of a pessimistic idea — branding the death of writing as the birth of “distant writing”?
I haven’t decided yet. I’ll read his article (probably multiple times) before I come to any conclusions.
Does Floridi ever consider what Large Language Models can't "do" or "say," especially given that they operate by turning language into a sort of statistics game?
I've been enjoying re-reading poets' and philosophers' discussions of their writing craft, or alternately, their thoughts on language itself. These perspectives, I've found, are fruitful for thinking about the limits of LLMS, and why we might want to resist the transformation of "close writing" into "narrative design."
For example, here is a short video on how Wittgenstein and Whorf might help us consider "What Can't LLMs say": https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJwX7KJhJL6/? If language shapes our reality as they both suggest, then won't LLMs strengthen these invisible blinders through their self-perpetuation linguistic norms?
Or will poetry and rupture find a way through narrative design as well? I'm not sure!
Anyway, thank you for this wonderful write up. I'm delighted to have found your Substack and am smashing that subscribe button!