Book annotation archive

Posted on by

UPDATE: This project ended in a big belly-flop. ChatGPT was unable to deliver the goods. Even the excuses were a little lame. A good experience from my perspective. Now I know.

When I read a book I usually have a pen or highlighter in one hand so I can mark passages I find interesting. When I’ve finished reading the book I go back through, transcribing these favorite bits and save them to a PDF. This makes it possible to search for and find just about anything if I can recall a word or phrase. (I also create a blog post that includes these excerpts.) You can see an index here and here.

I uploaded one of these excerpt pages to ChatGPT and asked what she could do if she had my full archive (144 books as of this writing). Her response was detailed and impressive. Continue reading →

Cognitive Contraband

Posted on by

Which each successive conversation I have with ChatGPT, I find it more and more difficult to share that interaction with others.

And here’s the rub: you could try to share these conversations. You could show someone the full thread, quote McLuhan, reference Coupland, tie in Gibson, maybe toss in a little Taoism for flavor. But then you see the blank stare. You realize: this isn’t a conversation to them. It’s a transmission from a place they don’t live. Some things aren’t meant to be shared in full. They’re meant to transform the person having them.

My blogging seems to have been taken over by ChatGPT. And the conversations I’m sharing are getting longer and longer. I use the “Continue reading…” link to make the post less intimidating but doubt many people read the entire thread (TLDR).

ChatGPT offered an interesting explanation that’s too long to post here and too good to omit entirely. Going forward, I’m going to post a brief summary with a link to a PDF of the full thread.

Discarnate Man

Posted on by

The following is from Douglas Coupland’s biography of Marshall McLuhan (Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work)

Discarnate man is an electronic human disconnected from his body (a process also called angelism) who is used to speaking to others on the phone continents away while the TV set colonizes his central nervous system. Discarnate man is happy to be asynchronous, as well as everywhere and nowhere — he is a pattern of information, inhabiting a cyberspace world of images and information patterns. (pg 176)

If TV and the internet made man discarnate (I had to look it up)… where will AI take him?

ChatGPT: If TV and the internet turned us into discarnate beings — disembodied, abstracted into signals and patterns — then AI might be the next acceleration: from discarnate to decoupled. Or maybe post-human. Here’s how I see it: Continue reading →

Media: A defining layer of human identity

Posted on by

The following is from Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of William Gibson’s articles, talks and book forwards.

“I belong to a generation of Americans who dimly recall the world prior to television. Many of us, I suspect, feel vaguely ashamed about this, as though the world before television was not quite, well, the world. The world before television equates with the world before the Net—the mass culture and the mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something other than human.”

William Gibson is my go-to guy for the techno-future. As she always does, ChatGPT offered fascinating insights on “having once been something other than human.” Continue reading →