Again, there is no plan for running our universities without federal funding, or foreign students, at scale. But the public has no idea about this because no. one. is. telling. them. this. They expect their kids are still going to be able to do all the things at college in the next 4 years, & well:

Congratulations! Well deserved!

Yes! I couldn’t believe he teaches more than one.

“This is the skin of a Leftist, Bella.”

Like it or not this technology is here to stay and if you don’t use it you’ll fall behind in your industry

Same. While universities are being financially gutted and we’re already working long hours, we’re supposed to magically invent a new pedagogy that substitutes their (for profit) products for well established teaching methods so what will remain of university budgets can be diverted to them.

*utopia

We would do well to pay attention to both the benefits and the costs of generative AI. We should consider if we’re willing to pay the profound cost for those benefits. Many who think we shouldn’t are met with this weird historical revisionism where no technology has ever had costs associated with it

The focus on gains and not losses has continued with generative AI. Not only in our discussions of that technology. But in the use of history to stifle criticism of it. All emerging communication technologies have always only been good, and everyone pointing harms was just silly and wrong.

There were also other shifts in the relationship the musicians had with the music (it was no longer embodied, but externally fixed). And it allowed for music to be more standardized, reducing regional variation and distinctiveness.

But musical notation also shifted the locus of creativity from the group of musicians in the church to the singular composer who wrote and fixed the notation. And so it changed the relationship between community, creativity, and music making. You gained something and you lost something.

He uses the example of medieval church music. Before the invention of musical notation, the entire cannon of church music was memorized and taught as an oral tradition. Capturing it in writing decreased the time it took to learn the canon & made it possible to transport music across larger distances

Carey points out that each new communication technology both removes boundaries and erects new ones. Basically, we gained some things, and we lose some things. But we tend to focus on the gains/boundaries eliminated and don’t notice the losses/new boundaries.

There’s also the “yeah, well, Plato said writing would make us all stupid too” argument. There are really important insights that can come from comparing the history of emerging communication technologies. But, “all critique has always been stupid moral panic” is not one of them.

In the words of a very cranky welfare state scholar who once spoke at a grad seminar of mine: you all need to study history, boys and girls.

Neat periodization of technological revolutions hides the messiness of historical contingency.