The cloister & the starship ⊗ An environmental triumph ⊗ End GDP mania

The cloister & the starship

This one is an amalgamation of a few things. First I was reading Neal Stephenson’s talk turned article, Emerson, AI, and The Force (with a title like that, how could I not?!) in which he discusses how AI is disrupting traditional education by allowing students to bypass learning through conversational tools, which undermines genuine self-reliance. It’s not spectacularly good, which is why I kept digging, but quite worth a read. In it he mentioned Derek Thompson’s The end of thinking, where he argues in turn that the real crisis is not machines stealing jobs but humans outsourcing their minds to AI, which is degrading reading, writing and deep thinking. It was already in my list, as was Benjamin Breen’s The Age of Books and the Age of Brainrot, where he proposes that declines in deep reading and writing—exacerbated by algorithmic “brainrot” and classroom shifts to screens—threaten the cognitive habits that sustained serious thinking. His is a more historical perspective, all worth a read if you are worried about AI v education.

Stephenson also mentions Niall Ferguson’s concept of the cloister and the starship. Sadly, the “official” post is paywalled on Substack so I read other versions of it, AI’s great brain robbery — and how universities can fight back and The Cloister and the Starship. Both were disappointing, starting with long sections that read very techno-optimist and take the industry’s words for truth, he sees the problem, proposes a fix, but doesn’t do much critique. In the end, the better take was Bryan Alexander’s Teaching with AI: the cloister and the starship, in which he mentions that “some find the historian Niall Ferguson disagreeable or politically abhorrent.” So there. And we’re done with my meanderings on the topic. To wit, here’s what it actually is, quoted from Ferguson.

1. Create quarantined space in which traditional methods of learning can be maintained and from which all devices are excluded. Call this “the cloister”.

2. Inside the cloister, allocate time to a) reading printed books b) discussion of texts and problems c) writing essays and problem-sets with pen and paper, and d) assessment via oral and written examinations.

3. Require time in the cloister to be around seven hours a day, leaving time on board the starship, as well as vacations, for the use of AI. [Ed. Woah!]

4. Revise admissions procedures to ensure the university attracts students capable of coping with the discipline of the cloister as well as the opportunities of the starship.

5. These suggestions might seem like an over-reaction to the challenge posed by AI — in effect, a return to the monastic origins of the European university in the medieval period. However, my inspiration for the cloister is not history but science fiction. In this model, the starship is as important as the cloister.

In other words that might register with people other than higher education students; split your day between old school reading, writing, thinking, and time doing the same with the spaceship computer. It’s not wildly innovative, but, like other concepts, having it framed like this seems more actionable or at least memorable than just “man, I really need to not do everything with AI.” It’s also another twist on the idea of deep work.

Perhaps further outside the clear connections, it also reminded me of the Eudaimonia machine, which I’ve previously written about here and here. It’s “a multipart floor plan that effectively funnels employees[, workers, creators, thinkers] through various spaces with the intention of triggering different mental states. The layout consists of an entry gallery, a social salon, a multi-person office, an archival library, and the chamber—a site for deep work.” One can easily think of the cloister as one more space in such a setup.

I also see a link to one of my worries about AI. If the people most adapted to effectively (in which I include them not lying or hallucinating) use LLMs are some form of senior practitioners who know field X to be able to judge the output. If those systems in turn replace juniors, than who can climb from student to some variation of junior to senior? Perhaps a cloister-ish way of organising learning, in school and at work, could provide some form of path to effective human-in-the-loop use of AI.

Next, I’ll come back again (and again) to one of my favourite thoughts on AI, Holly Herndons’ framing of LLMs as Collective Intelligence, “a kind of aggregate human intelligence. It’s trained on all of us.” If we see LLMs as a compressed form of a sizeable share of our knowledge, that we can chat and collaborate with, then how better to learn how to collaborate with this sum of knowledge than by making sure you experience/know/start mastering that knowledge found in the conceptual cloister? The “place” would be where you “pay your dues” to the understanding of human knowledge, the dojo where you keep training and honing your brain on said learnings, and become fluent enough in “our” thinking throughout history to be able to more effectively collaborate with these “alien familiars.”

Finally, the field of AI is likely in a bubble, what kind of power and price will be available to the average person in 5 years? Hard to tell. If LLMs are CI, then questions of ownership, access, and governance become even more central. Who controls this synthesis of human culture? Who benefits from its extraction and deployment? And so, I have to conclude by quoting master Eno.

All my misgivings about AI really are to do with the fact that it’s owned by a group of people that I don’t trust at all. I don’t trust their taste, I don’t trust their morals, and I don’t trust their politics, and that’s a problem for me—that the whole technology is in the hands of the wrong people.

An environmental triumph 400 million years in the making

For a bit of whiplash after all of the above on computed “intelligences,” how about some deep time natural intelligence “just” doing its thing while potentially saving our hides? Conservationists are using ancient mycorrhizal fungi found in forest soils to boost tree survival and restore degraded ecosystems. Transferring locally adapted soil, or inoculating saplings with fungal pellets, improves growth, drought tolerance and resilience to pathogens. In agriculture, mycorrhizal fungi can raise yields, cut fertiliser needs and help sequester carbon in soils. Protecting and restoring fungal-rich soils is a practical, scalable tool for climate mitigation and healthier landscapes.

Do you ever wonder what one AI lab’s worth of funds would do to for research on and preservation of nature? Imagine one round of OpenAI Stargate bs being spent on biomimicry research?

Laced throughout, weaving an intricate, microscopic web, are the mycorrhizal fungi she’s after — fungi that have spent 400 million years learning to live in symbiosis with plants, including the trees throughout Bole Woods and at least 80 percent of all species on the planet. […]

“You can have higher yields, higher productivity and lower costs when you invest in working with nature instead of against her, and invest in feeding life into the soil rather than fighting it with chemicals,” Buckman says. […]
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Because mycorrhizal fungi are small and supple enough to penetrate soil more effectively than plant roots, they offer myriad protective benefits to their symbiotic partners, including support in times of nutrient or pathogen stress, drought tolerance and shelter from toxic substances through the absorption of heavy metals. […]

In just a few short years, Rhizocore has treated more than 600,000 trees across the U.K., Europe and Australia, reporting improved survival and growth rates in its field trials. Sitka spruce, a key timber species in the U.K, has shown a 20 percent increase in both survival and growth rates with the pellets, Rhizocore says. In the effort to rebuild damaged ecosystems, “it’s got to start from the soils upwards,” says Petra Guy, a Rhizocore data scientist.

§ End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity. “For sustained growth, governments often reach for tried-and-tested ideas, such as loosening regulations to build more roads or expand airports — giving less thought as to whether that growth is inclusive or undermines sustainability goals such as SDG 12 (responsible consumption and production) and SDG 13 (climate action). Because GDP is the emperor of all indicators, everything else becomes subordinate to it.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• At The Edge of Here. “In this book, you will find four possible futures co-created by the core contributors using Media Evolution’s approach to collective imagining called Collaborative Foresight. Their future scenarios are brought to life by stories of characters living in these worlds, written by the author Paul Graham Raven and illustrated by Jon Koko.”
• The Art of Futures Thinking. “This course sharpens the participants ability to harness their imagination through Futures Thinking and Futures Literacy, an essential 21st-century skills for imagining, questioning, and shaping alternative futures. Leaning on Futures Literacy principles, it encourages collective intelligence and divergent thinking to expand perspectives and embrace and appreciate the value of not-knowing.”
• Artisanal Futures: computing for a community-based economy. “Once we recruited our participants from Detroit worker-owned businesses, we started at the micro-scale. How can laser cutters, 3D printers, AI fashion design, digital soil sensors and other technologies empower production without sacrificing what artisans love about their work?”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• The Next Four Years. “First, can AI analyze eight months of U.S. government upheaval and write a near-term speculative fiction novel that predicts an imaginable future for America? And next, can AI automatically update that novel daily based on the 24-hour news cycle without any human editorial intervention?”
• How two new reports from OpenAI and Anthropic reveal a global split in AI’s application. “for personal tasks, with people valuing it more as a real-time advisor for decision-making than as a tool for automating work. Separately, new data from Anthropic reveals a growing "AI divide," where wealthy nations and prepared companies are rapidly advancing with automated AI, while others risk being left behind by a widening technology and skills gap.”
• Famed roboticist says humanoid robot bubble is doomed to burst. “Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up call for investors funneling billions into humanoid robot startups: You’re wasting your money.”
• Deutsche Bank issues grim warning for AI industry. “Economists keep warning that the US economy is being propped up almost entirely by an enormous boom in the tech and AI sector. Should the rest of us be worried?” (I’m going with yes here.)

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• There will always only be one Jane Goodall. “Indeed, what set Dr. Goodall apart was her ‘deep empathy’ for both animals and humans and her ability to connect with people around the world. … In numerous books, documentaries, interviews and speaking engagements, Dr. Goodall spoke out about the need to protect the world’s wild animals and their habitats. She was ‘driven by an uncompromising desire to be able to protect that which she was studying,’ Mr. Walston said.”
• Double harvest: Vertical solar panels and crops thrive side by side. “Our measurements show that wheat and grass-clover mixtures grow just as well between vertical solar panels as in open fields. At the same time, the panels produce electricity in a daily pattern that better matches energy demand.”
• Grid-scale batteries in Scotland stabilize power. “Without moving parts, the lithium battery storage site—the largest in Europe and located in Blackhillock, Scotland—simulates inertia using power electronics. And in an innovative twist, the battery site can also provide short-circuit current in response to a fault, just like conventional power generators.”

Asides

• Vale Stephen Biesty: cross-section king. “Anyone around my age and above a certain threshold of autistic will have burned much library time on this amazing ‘90s run of DK books.” (Via {D} 154)
• What was behind David Bowie’s genius? His archive holds the answers.. “When David Bowie died in 2016, he left an archive of about 90,000 items, carefully cataloged and boxed like a museum collection.”
• 80 of the Most Iconic Guitar Intros. “Watch as Paul Davids plays 80 of rock’s most iconic guitar intros, including ones from Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, The Kinks, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, Joan Jett, AC/DC, Blur, and The White Stripes.”