dreamroll

 Yep I'm back on my bullshit.

This week's episode is Tech Won't Save Us, "Do AI Chatbots Belong In Schools? ft. Tom Mullaney" 

I bet you're going to be real surprised at the answer.

The cool thing about this episode is that it looks at chatbots in the history of ed tech in general. I've often said that the ultimate goal for education is that you'd have 50 students or so warehoused in a classroom, completing modules on screens, disciplined by non-unionized babysitters, while a handful of teachers get paid to write and perform lessons. But that was overly optimistic; those teachers would get paid too much and you can have LLMs write it instead. 

It's not that all ed tech is bad. It's just that most of it, historically, has been 1) garbage and 2) in service of privatizing and degrading education. 

It shouldn't surprise me that the following approaches to combatting LLMs in schools have failed:

1) The catastrophic, world-destroying environmental cost
2) Intellectual property
3) The cognitive damage it does to children (we have accepted causing brain damage to children in schools, thanks to covid and sports)

Possibly all that remains is the legal liability battlefield. I've had some luck, when chatbots get forced on us, in pushing back by asking if lawyers have reviewed liability if one of the company's products causes the kid to kill themselves or commit a violent crime, given that its architecture is based on software that has caused kids to die by suicide and murder others. No one has seemingly thought about this so it's always a relief hearing tech journalists like Paris Marx and teachers like Tom Mullaney pushing back on the consensus that "personalized tutors" are maybe not a great thing to be inflicting on children.

Last night, I went to see Sumud + Clinical Silence at the Redwood Theatre, put on by East End Acts and featuring Omar El Akkad, Tarek Loubani, Dorotea Gucciardo, Jay Geerts, and Samira Mohyeddin, with a dance performance by Mona Ayesh. It was long, intense, and heartwrenching. As Omar El Akkad put it, there is nothing that you could say that will get me back in line in regards to Palestine. However. I make a point of not watching gory footage—not because I don't care, but because it doesn't help the victims in any way for me to be upset. Sumud in particular is shockingly graphic, featuring an American anesthesiologist who travels to Gaza to provide medical support.

( some details that might be triggering )

I'm hard to shock. These are all things that I know, objectively, and yet when I'm confronted with them so bluntly I can still be shocked. It's important to still feel things.

This afternoon, I went with ioplokon to see a rather spectacular production of Fiddler On the Roof in Yiddish. I was also genuinely moved—these are my people, this is the culture that I can be proud of, even if I'd be as at odds with it as Tzeitel and Hodel are. It's really well done and if they remount it wherever you live, go see it. In a juster parallel universe, Yiddish is my first language, and it was really beautiful to hear it spoken. Also the actor playing Tevye is just jaw-droppingly good.

Of course, there is one part in it where, having been evicted by the Tsar's men, everyone must leave Anatevka. While Tevye, Golde, and their two youngest daughters will find safety in America, Hodel is stuck in Siberia and Tzeitel and Motel will go to Poland, to an historically uncertain fare. Yente announces that she's going to Israel, and this got a smattering of applause from some people in the audience who do not see the irony in a story about a group of people who are routinely stripped of their homes and possessions and forced to uproot, under threat of extreme violence, over and over again.

(The irony was, I think realized in the production itself, which throws its strongest sympathies behind the socialist student Perchik and his vision of a better, multicultural, and just future.)

I don't have a particularly clever way to conclude it, beyond that I'm glad I saw both things, I hope other people will see them and talk about them.

I assumed Dreamwidth was down the last few days but nope, my VPN no longer likes it, anyway. Hi. Whoops.

Just finished: Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg. I loved this, I need you all to read it 1) to understand certain aspects of my identity and 2) so that I can scream about it with someone else. 

I want to particularly note the prominence of Exodus, which is a book/film that had a huge influence on me as a kid, turned me into an insufferable Zionist for a couple years, actually had a massive role in ending the Hollywood Blacklist, and no one ever talks about as a work of Riefenstahl-esque propaganda. Night Night Fawn devotes a large segment of its middle act to the film and its role in shaping Barbara's relationship with Israel, as well as with her husband and ultimately her son (who she names after a secondary character). 

Anyway, it is really good. Incredibly good.

Currently reading: The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed. This is the third novella in The Annual Migration of Clouds, which I haven't read, but it follows a side character on a completely different story. So. Post-apocalypse, climate catastrophe, weird parasitic infection, society trying to rebuild. It's set in Alberta, which is cool. Henryk, who has made some kind of mistake that has led to a death back home, leaves his relatively safe community to travel to his uncle's much less safe village, where there are still raiders and bears. But, critically, there is a tree farm, which is vital in regrowing the forest. Everyone is deeply unfriendly to him. It's kind of cool reading the third in a series when you haven't read the other two because so much of the worldbuilding is backgrounded. Also, she's just a hell of a writer.