Claude doesn't know when it's lying or when it's telling the truth. It doesn't know anything. It's a computer program. It manipulates symbols according to mathematical rules. It doesn't know what the symbols mean. It doesn't know how the symbols relate to real-world facts.
Here's another obvious-seeming question: Why should would-be censors be granted power over libraries? Instead of concocting expensive schemes to get around attempts at censorship, how about if we address the problem at the source by protecting libraries, which won't cost anything?
> how about if we address the problem ... which wouldn't cost anything?
This is not a Philosophy 487 essay, where clever arguments about "should" have the power to determine your, um, er - your essay grade.
Reality is that they already have a great deal of power, and are gaining more.
Could you explain your idea for "addressing the problem at the source ... which won't cost anything"? I'm concerned that that's just a "if all the Supreme Court Justices suddenly decided to do the Right Thing..." daydream.
Addressing the problem at the source would be a broad-based political movement that demanded enforcement of the First Amendment and a restoration of constitutional norms. That kind of political movement isn't a pipe dream -- two political scientists have extensively studied how nonviolent popular movements have overturned dictatorships: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240678278_Why_Civil...
Democracy did not come to exist because our rulers graciously granted it, but because the people demanded it and fought for it. Our current abandonment of democracy is not happening because the rulers have so much power, but because we the people continuously grant them power through our own inaction. A broad-based political movement could successfully halt the slide toward fascism and restore democracy.
I am sure many people will dismiss this idea as naive. I would ask them to consider two possibilities: (1) Maybe the perception that political action is futile is not a rational judgment based on facts, but a cultural prejudice based on a fashion for cynicism. (2) A widespread perception that political action is futile is a necessary condition for authoritarian government. People who believe that political action produces practical results are more likely to engage in political activity that restrains the power of elites.
I don't know how you imagine longtermism is relevant to this discussion -- the crisis is happening right now in front of all of us and the need for action is right now.
The threat against libraries is just one part of a broader threat against all freedom of thought, speech, and criticism of the government in the United States. The key issue is not just the one question of whether children have access to books (although that is very important); the key issue is that the government has no right, authority, or business trying to control what is said and thought.
I love how you write "ideals" as if it's a dirty word. In a general political crisis like the current moment, ideals really do matter. You can't fight an authoritarian government unless you're willing to stick your neck out, and people only stick their necks out when they believe that principles are more important than their immediate self-interest. The whole purpose of an authoritarian government is to silence opposition through threats and bribes. If you don't believe that some principles are more important than possible losses and gains, you're always going to be vulnerable to being victimized by authoritarian government. This has concrete, practical results -- idealists can win because they take action; cynics will always lose because they won't act. In a time like this, cynicism is not the smart play.
1. The states never had the right to secede. U.S. Constitution, Article VI: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
Article I, Section 10: "No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation .... No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War ..."
It is abundantly clear in the records of the Constitutional Convention, the text of the Constitution, the debates on ratification, and the Federalist Papers that the intent of the Constitution was to create a supreme national government, not a league of states.
2. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the authority to regulate currency. Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have power ... To coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof ..."
When I was in my late teens, right about the time this article came out, I was an ignorant, naive, first-time computer user. My college had some Canon Cats in the computer lab. I didn't know the first thing about computers, and I didn't understand the difference between the PCs and Macs in the rest of the lab and the Canon Cats. There was never a line to use a Canon Cat, so I tried it. By Raskin's standards, I should have been the perfect Cat user. Being completely ignorant, I had no preconceived ideas about how a computer should operate. I found the Cat utterly incomprehensible. Then someone demonstrated a Macintosh to me, and I immediately understood it. Take that anecdote as you will.
I'm curious if the manual was made available to you. The reason I ask is that in the linked article he said the manual was part of the user interface. Also, from what I recall, his opinion on intuitive was that it was more important that it worked well after learning how to use it, vs somehow knowing it without being taught. (I'll double check my copy of The Humane Interface when I get back to it.)
edit: back, here's a quote:
> [...] I asked people unfamiliar with the mouse to use a Macintosh. My protocol was to run a [game that only used clicking, with the keyboard removed]. I would point to the mouse and say, "This is the mouse that you use to operate the game. Go ahead, give it a try." If asked any questions, I'd say something nonspecific, such as "Try it." The reaction of an intelligent Finnish educator who had never seen a Macintosh but was otherwise computer literate was typical: she picked up the mouse.
> Nowadays, the might seem absurd, but [mentions the scene in Star Trek where Scotty does the same thing]. In the case of my Finnish subject, her next move was to turn the mouse over and to try rolling the ball. Nothing happened. She shook the mouse, and then she held the mouse in one hand and clicked the button with the other. No effect. Eventually, she succeeded in operating the game by holding the mouse in her right hand, rolling the ball on the bottom with her fingers, and clicking the button with her left hand.
> These experiments make the point that an interface's ease of use and speed of learning are not connected with the imagined properties of intuitiveness and naturalness. The mouse is very easy to learn: All I had to do, with any of the test subjects, was to put the mouse on the desk, move it, and click on something. In five to ten seconds, they learned how to use the mouse. That's fast and easy, but it is neither intuitive nor natural. No artifact is.
> The belief that interfaces can be intuitive and natural is often detrimental to improved interface design. As a consultant, I am frequently asked to design a "better" interface to a product. Usually, an interface can be designed such that, in terms of learning time, eventual speed of operation (productivity), decreased error rates, and easy of implementation, it is superior to both the client's existing products and completing products. Nonetheless, even when my proposals are seen as significant improvements, they are often rejected on the grounds that they are not intuitive. [He goes on to talk about how if it going to be significantly better than it will end up being different than what people currently know, but the clients still want it to be similar to Windows...]
The Humane Interface section 6-1
Having refreshed myself on what he said, and re-reading what you wrote, I don't think he would say that you should be able to walk up to his computer without having someone show you how to use it, or looking at a manual. And as you said: "Then someone demonstrated a Macintosh to me" just like when he said he'd show people how to use the mouse.
Yes, the Canon Cat had a built-in manual, and I checked the manual quite thoroughly. I learned to use the Cat after a fashion, but even when I understood the Cat a little bit, it still didn't make any sense to me. It especially didn't make sense that there were no separate files and no clear cut way to save your work. By design, the Cat had a single, infinite scrolling text workspace. Documents were separated by a special return code. The user never needed to save a file, because all actions were automatically saved. I now know that the Raskin's theory was that users shouldn't be bothered with thinking about saving or file structure, but at the time it was hugely confusing to me. Most of what the Cat did was invisible to the user. Raskin thought that saved users mental overhead, but all it did was give the user no feedback on what the computer was doing.
The Macintosh, by contrast, was quite transparent to the naive user. It was very easy to understand that if you saved a file, the file was represented by a little picture that you could move to a folder icon or a disk icon. No naive user of the 1980s had any experience with an infinitely long scroll, but the desktop metaphor of file and folder icons was easily understood.
The no-separate-document interface of the Cat was, I think, a huge mistake. That might have been the way Raskin thought people should use computers, but it was a greater conceptual leap than users could easily understand. Non-computer people who were used to typewriters were used to working on separate documents; they thought in terms of writing letters, memos, reports, and manuscripts, and they expected all these documents to stay separate objects.
In the section of The Humane Interface you quote, I think Raskin exaggerates the non-intuitiveness of the mouse. People in the 1980s were familiar with the concept of a pointing device through playing Pong and Centipede. Even before I'd seen a Macintosh in real life, I'd seen the Mac ads and knew what the mouse was supposed to do. As Raskin says, no one needs more than 10 seconds to understand a mouse. It takes a lot more than 10 seconds to understand the Canon Cat.
OK, how qualified do you have to be to criticize tech companies and tech leaders? Mainstream journalists write for the general public, which means that ideally, journalists write to express the perspective of the mainstream public. Is it possible that the public have valid criticisms of the technology sector? Are tech companies and tech leaders above criticism?
I don't want to read endless tech criticism. If I'm reading tech journalism chances are I'm interested in tech and new exciting stuff. Imagine a car magazine publishing nonstop about how cars are killing the environment.
For a second I got excited, because I thought Mangione was being charged with actual dueling, à la Burr and Hamilton. Then I read the article and realized it was talking about conflicting charges, not charges of dueling, and suddenly the story was much less colorful.
I think you misunderstand the nature of art. You say that creation is merely reworking past ideas. That might be true if art were mere decoration or a formal game of manipulating symbols according to rules. But the true purpose of art is to communicate human experience, which always varies from individual to individual and from one historical period to the next. Humans are always having new experiences and having new thoughts and emotions about those experiences. High-quality art seeks to say something new, original, and specific to the artist's perspective, the culture of the moment, and the deepest concerns of the audience. LLMs can't develop any of that -- AI doesn't have real experiences to reflect on and has no desire to communicate.
Obviously, I'm talking about art at its highest level -- the average Marvel movie does not have such lofty goals, and I have no doubt a machine can reproduce all the same tired tropes of a Marvel movie. If all you're familiar with is derivative pop culture, I can see how one might think that AI can do just as well. But I don't think anyone who has ever had a profound engagement with a work of art would agree.
I am sure there will be an explosion of AI-generated content in the coming months, but I suspect this will inadvertently advance everyone's aesthetic education. More and more people will be disappointed by AI-generated "art," and I think they'll start to appreciate genuine human creativity more.
