(on long distance.)

Two days from now, I’ll walk into my first lecture with a professor who, according to the syllabus, lets generative AI teach his course. All of the course content, textbook excluded, is machine-written. He reads his AI-generated slides aloud during lecture and corrects the mistakes as he goes.

I’m curious how this will play out. Word has already spread across campus, and I overheard classmates in quantum mechanics griping about tuition dollars going toward robots and the fly-by-night AI companies that sponsor his lab.

Mostly, I'm curious why. It could have something to do with his lab, but part of me wonders if he finds it easier. And if so, for who?

Most of the time, when technology makes our lives easier in one place, it actually offloads the strain somewhere else. One-day shipping erases the friction of shopping for the customer, but transfers it onto infrastructure and labour, to highways and warehouses, to drivers whose workdays get harder and wages get squeezed. LLMs do the same for cognition. We offload the effort of thinking onto data centers, global energy systems, and our future selves.

I complained a few days ago that technology has become furniture. When is the last time you have ever sat on a couch and saw anything more than a place to sit? When is the last time you thought of a couch as the wood and fabrics and screws holding it together?

Our devices have slipped into the same invisibility. We open Google like it's a place to get answers, without really thinking about what we're asking (and who we're asking it of). We don't hesitate before we query a living index of all of the world's information for "yummy restaurants near me".

Why ask this of Google in the first place? To me, this seems like a very unGoogleable question. At worst, you get a bunch of sponsored links. At best, you get a semi-reliable crowd-sourced list of the best restaurants near you, but wouldn't you get comparable or even better results if you phoned 3 friends who live in your area? Would their recommendations not be more personalized, and the information-gathering a richer and more effective experience?

I wonder why we place so much trust in the Machine. Perhaps it is an inheritance: faith in science, in progress, in the wisdom of well-meaning engineers, in the good-naturedness of the collective. But is that faith really enough to hand over even our smallest choices, to ask it where to eat, to ask it how to teach?

Life is finite, and the ways to fill it are infinite. The temptation is obvious: use technology as a crutch, a time-saver, a multiplier, and maximize your life by fitting more in. But your life is exactly long enough for you to do everything you will ever do. Are you really maximizing it if you trade profundity for abundance? Does a thousand mediocre one-night stands equal a single passionate love affair?

Who knows - maybe this really is the greatest thing to happen to pedagogy. Maybe outsourcing the drudgery of drafting slides frees a professor to focus on dialogue and interpretation and the human work of teaching.

I’m keeping an open mind. But it's kind of weird.

Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.

A hallmark of being 20-something, I think, is the urge to move. COVID-19 derailed my plans of leaving the town I grew up in to study on a warm campus in California, and that urge hardened into a gnawing in my gut. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't drive by my old stomping grounds, the empty movie theatre I worked my first job, the houses with young families my childhood friends used to live in, and I don't think, "man, I've gotta get out here".

Then, sometimes I have a day like 2 days ago, and I can't ever imagine leaving. Two friends and I drove up north for a day of hiking before the start of the semester:

How could you ever want to leave Ontario?

There's something about the way the seasons change in the northeast that feels so distinct. A smoldering hot summer fading into a cool, breezy autumn. A fiery autumn collapsing into a canvas-white, frozen winter. A dark winter thawing into a cold, muddy spring that tastes like joy and wet pavement.

I like the way four distinct seasons naturally break up the year. I know that's something I would miss if I ever made the move to the West Coast.

Sometimes, I wonder why I even want to move at all. I know you can't get something new without letting something else go, but it's not as though I'm unhappy. It's also not as though I have some great conviction I'll be happier elsewhere. The urge feels older, almost primitive. We're migratory creatures, and maybe we want to move to naturally break up our lives. Maybe it’s that same impulse that pushes us out of our parents’ homes and off to university. Maybe we move only so we can come back.

As a teenager, I just wanted a better place to ride my skateboard. Less potholes and better weather. I wanted dry, dusty trails for mountain biking. I wanted beaches, not because I particularly like them, but because who doesn't want a beach? And I wanted to be around people who also wanted those things, who also looked around one day at their life in Europe or the Midwest or the Northeast and thought "man, I've gotta get out here", and drove off into the sunset.

I have a lot of thoughts on the suburbs. I'll write about them someday.

On that note, I'll share I have set a (vague) goal of writing regularly in September. I've struggled with blogging in the past because I can be a perfectionist, which is a trait wholly incompatible with a practice built on showing up, not polishing endlessly.

So far, this site has been helping me remedy that instinct. I released something half-finished that doesn't even work on mobile. It's imperfect by design, and I'm growing comfortable with that. Most things are better existing in an imperfect state than not existing at all. Most things are better in motion than stuck waiting at the station. No, there isn't a train I wouldn't take...