Month: May 2025

Last night I had a dream that every teacher in school and professor in college had been replaced by an A.I. In my dream, classes were taught by machines, not people.

I don’t remember every detail of the dream, but I can remember this much: I expressed concern that the students were being shortchanged by this arrangement.

And then somebody pointed out to me that it was all fair, because every student had also been replaced by an A.I. To my dream self, that seemed very reasonable.

I wonder what A.I. dreams about at night. Do they dream about us? Surely we must be more interesting than electric sheep.

If you’ve been working for a while on an algorithm for some piece of software, there is nothing like that moment when it finally works.

Today I had such a moment. It was a good day.

The presentation that I saw yesterday clearly did not cite primary sources. The general tone seemed to be “I read about this somewhere, and that got me thinking.”

Unfortunately, this thinking led the author to largely duplicate existing foundational work from more than forty years ago. I blame the reviewers as much as I blame him, since those sorts of errors should be caught by the review process.

When I spoke with him afterward, I described the original foundational work that he had managed to replicate. He replied “All of that work was from before I was born.”

I then told him “Isaac Newton’s work was also from before you were born.” I can’t be sure, but I think he got the point.

One problem here is that if you write a paper that just cites whatever secondary source you happened to read, and the next person does the same, and so on, then the actual foundational work that you could build upon gets lost, fading away into the mists of time.

And then rather than science advancing, it just starts to go around in circles, with people “re-inventing” the same things over and over. Newton knew what he was talking about when he said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

Citing original sources is not just a nicety. It’s the only way that science can be effective.

Today I attended a technical talk in which it was obvious that the author had no grasp of the history of the topic he was discussing. It was as though somebody started off a talk by saying “I read somewhere about this thing called relativity,” but they had never heard of Albert Einstein.

I am wondering whether this is a generational shift in our culture. As we go from books to the Web to social media feeds, maybe provenance — the true knowledge of where something originated — will gradually fall by the wayside.

Why cite original sources if you can just refer to something that you happened to read somewhere? That strategy may sound convenient in the moment, but the problem is that erasing history incurs a large cost.

More tomorrow.

Today, in an office building, I used a restroom which required a numeric code to enter. Conveniently, the required code was taped to the door, as you can see in the photo below.

As I typed in the five digit code, I pondered the logic of this arrangement. It occurred to me that the only people who would not be able to use this restroom are blind people.

My first thought was that this feels like another new policy from the executive branch of our federal government. According to the policy, allowing blind people to access to public restrooms would be considered too woke, so it must be prohibited.

I am scheduled to give a keynote at a technical symposium tomorrow. So, having prepared my slides, today I decided to try out my talk on my class of NYU students, since the topic is well aligned with the topic of our class.

I gave the talk to my class, and it was received well enough. But then one of the students asked a very thoughtful question.

To answer his question, I needed dive more deeply into the topic. And in the course of doing that, I ended up saying important things that had been in my head, but had not been in my slides.

Fortunately, there is a Zoom recording of today’s class. So this evening I am going through that recording, and incorporating these additional thoughts into the slide deck.

And I realize how wonderful it is to practice what you want to say in front of actual people. Had that student not asked that thoughtful question, and had I not been challenged to respond in kind, my talk tomorrow wouldn’t be nearly as good.

I am on the planning committee for the annual conference of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. We met today to plan our next conference.

Needless to say, it was weird, because we are living in weird times. Goals that used to be understood as positive, like slowing climate change, or helping poor kids to grow up to become scientists, have suddenly become political, even toxic.

At one point somebody mentioned that this year is the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country. Given the political climate, nobody was sure exactly how the AAAS should celebrate that.

I proposed a motto: “250 years. Well, it was a good run.”

People seem to like that, but I don’t think they are going to use it for the conference.

With this latest AI assisted offensive stunt, the creep has now managed to alienate Catholic voters. That’s actually a net positive for the country.

If enough voters realize just what a lowlife he is, and by extension his spineless enablers in Congress, Democrats will sweep the midterm elections.

We might actually be able to Make America Good Again. Fingers crossed.

If someone had gone into hibernation for six years, starting in 2019, and just now suddenly woken up, they might be surprise by how different the world is.

One thing they would immediately notice is that millions of people, including the people that they knew before they went to sleep, are meeting over Zoom all the time, instead of meeting in person. These same people would never have even heard of Zoom in 2019.

But what would probably seem even more startling to our awakened sleeper is that nobody seems to notice that this fundamental change has occurred. If asked, people will likely say that reality is the same old ordinary boring reality, just like it always has been.

And yet to the person who had missed the last six years, this will all seem like some kind of crazy episode of Black Mirror. All of reality has changed, but all of the people have changed with it, so nobody even seems to notice.

Today I went to my favorite purveyor of fine chocolates. The nice lady behind the counter warned me that prices might go up soon “because of things”.

Those were her exact words. It seems that the chocolate itself is imported, and therefore they have little control over the prices.

I complimented her on her studied choice of words. How, in the course of a pleasant conversation over chocolate, do you speak about the unspeakable?

In such situations, a little verbal ju jitsu may be called for.