Happy Birthday!

I've noticed that most of my students have bought the physical books for my classes and are marking them up more than in the past. Perhaps what they're craving is an experience that a machine can't replicate...the human experience of pleasure, confusion, illumination, etc. that comes w/ reading.

My general sense is that my students, like Thoreau, feel overwhelmed by the challenge of just knowing how to be a decent human and to flourish in a world suffused with injustice and indifference. Society is telling them that new technologies will solve all the problems, but the youths are skeptical.

The way I try to de-AI-ify my classes is that I emphasize at the beginning and throughout the semester that all we're doing is reading some interesting shit other humans have produced, talking about that shit, and writing about it. Humans have been benefitting from that process for centuries w/o AI.

Easily: The Residence

'Nunez’s narrator cites an unattributed author: “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.”'

Feels dramatic pre 2020 to post 2020. Still have as many amazing students who blow me away but the disparity between those who can do anything and those who can barely function is widening…

And I don't know if the answer is: everyone is too traumatized to do work and we need to reinvent society. Or if it's more like: generations are losing their cognitive abilities and willpower due to destructive technologies. Or: we all have post-viral brain damage. Or: all of the above.