By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes As I mentioned in my series, The Updates , I did grand jury in January and February and I had a lot of thoughts.  Some of those, I managed to put together to write this column for the Providence Journal that I'll share here and others will continue to pop up in this blog.   I enjoyed writing this piece in that I felt I captured well (for me), the sense of churn that the situation creates.  I have much more to say on this topic but as something that was put out into a newspaper, I felt it hit the notes that I had hoped. Charlie Chaplin in the Machine ( Modern Times , 1936) Opinion: Grand jury duty is a civic responsibility. But is justice served? After finishing grand jury duty at  Providence Superior Court , my belief in the criminal justice system has not improved.  This court-side view of the methods and mechanisms of this “justice” system presented me with a lot more questions about what justice is, who gets to be a par...

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes We miss things in the AI conversation if we frame AI as a direct replacement for human effort.  The formula is not B equals A.  General and generative artificial intelligence is not going to replace a teacher, therapist, lawyer, social worker, etc in a linear and straightforward fashion. The more that I'm reading about AI and thinking about technology in general as well as looking at how it has played out over the last 20 years, I'm finding that these are the 3 pathways that seem likely. "These aren't the bots you're looking for..." Photo by Mulyadi on Unsplash AI-Enhanced . Though not a new idea, this is still a powerful and valuable one.  It's where a specialist with AI support can do more and higher quality work at a faster clip than before.  Individual work begins to scale in this context; when 1 person with a good AI can do the work of 10, 100, or 1000 specialized people. This is a well-established route for techno...

Estimated Reading Time: 7.5 minutes Equity Statement :  This blog post was prepared using DALL-E, an AI-generative tool by OpenAI. I acknowledge that OpenAI does not respect the individual rights of authors and artists, and ignores concerns over copyright and intellectual property in the training of the system; additionally, I acknowledge that OpenAI has relied onthe exploitation of precarious workers in the global south to make its work more digestative and useable to Global North people. Finally, I acknowledge that the technology and energy needed to make generative AI work relies on further environmental degredation and harm to the climate. In this work I specifically used DALL-E to create the image in this post.  --Adapted from An Offering by Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclos We know I've been thinking about generative AI a lot of late including a video on education, a video on job searching, and of course, this long post.   But today, I'm reflecting on my pr...

Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes Week 29 of the updates and I'm late once again! Dissertation Nothing accomplished these weeks, but I think I have a strong plan going forward. I've been both inundated with thoughts about AI generative tools and grand jury duty (separate streams of thoughts) and just getting back into a rhythm of work and flow. I think I've created the situation where I can set aside direct time to work on the dissertation and these as well. I think for the dissertation, I just need to re-create the habit of every day working towards it, which I know I can and have done over the past few years. Meanwhile, I also am giving myself 30 minutes a day to do free-writing. I think I need this both to do some more processing of jury duty and what I saw there as well as get down my thoughts about AI generative tools. 110 days until July 1. The Crocus Arises Work The first week back in the office and working through meetings and catching up with folks felt good...