The experience I'm about to share is not "grr kids these days" nor "I'm tougher than these chumps" but rather "I'm genuinely sad kids are missing out on deep reading" Where I went to college (the first three yrs), we had slightly shorter fall/spring terms and a one month January term (aka J term)--
Recently, I tweeted about how in 90s/00s it was common to be assigned a book to read in 1 or 2 weeks. Many younger people replied they'd NEVER been assigned that much reading even while getting graduate degrees. Others said they hadn't been assigned entire books AT ALL in h.s....only excerpts.
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Books I enjoyed from September, including vibrant anticolonial fantasy, lyrical meditations on writing, a postmodern blend of history and myth, and a provocative dissection of cultural trends privileging flow and immersion. 💙📚
Reminds me of something Toni Morrison once said: "All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was."
opened up to where i left off on this le guin book & immediately had to highlight this entire passage bc this is still an issue in so many books
Uranians by Theodore McCombs (May 2023)! Also love Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe, although it's not as recent (2020)
However, as Walton argues, "We should at least consider the possibility that AI science fiction be not only an especially bad context for thinking about ML, but also an especially bad context for thinking about capitalism, racism, colonialism." /end
Instead of old paradigms of totalizing AI, we can take up materially grounded depictions that do not obscure technical limitations & social harms. A neural network is not, after all, a sentient entity but a function with an ungodly number of parameters trained on vast amounts of energy & data. 5/
(Of course there are plenty of exceptions. E.g. Seth Dickinson's description of ML in his new novel Exordia is precise and incisive, but this type of critique seems all too rare.) 4/
There's a morass of aggrandizing rhetoric around ML in contemporary SF, an emphasis on "coolness" rather than clear-sighted assessment of its harms & limitations. @vajra.me@ancillaryreview.bsky.social 3/
What sets this essay apart is its focus on the specific, technical underpinnings of ML as well as its material harms. Contemporary SF often depicts ML using twee anthropomorphisms or as all-powerful, omniscient entities—but has been curiously reluctant to engage with what ML actually *is*. 2/