But I'll admit that code review is actually not the best comparison, as my PRs don't get reviews from thousands of people from the public - only from other engineers. So I suppose that's actually an argument in favor of Hart.

> True, some readers become indignant at their own inability to follow prose of any complexity or to recognize words any more obscure than those they are accustomed to using when talking to their dogs.

I do think that there is value in using precise, obscure words to convey precise, obscure knowledge (as with Hart's pogonotrophy example).

However, if all critique is dismissed as the indignation of swine, then how will anyone holding that position ever be able to tell whether they are just a bad writer?

Hart suggests that they should critique themselves, or rely on the critiques of those who write in the same way as they do. I am a programmer though, not an author. But I know that only accepting reviews from those I consider accomplished enough, and ignoring reviews by others as if they were indignant at their own inability to comprehend my code, is a very dangerous path to walk.

Definitely not written for someone with my starting knowledge, haha.

He knew we were computer nerds so didn't really care about teaching us (we knew more than him anyway). And we didn't mind that he just sat there drinking coffee and reading a book, as it meant we could just play videogames for an hour. Good times.

I have no doubt that AI was used for this, but I am shocked that this is even a thing. Before AI, any rich or connected student (which I assume is essentially all ivy league students) could just get someone to take the test for them?

As someone who would rather send a slack message to a coworker rather than actually walking over and talk to them, the idea of having to talk with my laptop is not appealing at all, haha.

I know this was just a small aside, but man do I hate Bixby and other phone AIs. They are so frustratingly difficult to turn off, and turning them on accidentally is as simply as holding the wrong button for a few seconds, such as when your phone is in your pocket. Very frustrating design.

So, I work in AI research (as a research engineer though, not a scientist). I've also studied philosophy and I'm a vegan. Yes yes, insert "they will tell you" joke here, but I promise it's actually relevant this time.

First, while I studied philosophy one of the things that stuck with me the most, was the discussion of "souls": humans have souls, animals don't. For centuries the specifics of souls were discussed: people would be weighed while they died, in an effort to measure the approximate weight of a soul as it departed the body. Discussions about how many souls (or angels) could dance on the tip of a needle. Many people still believe in souls, but it's very hard to have a real discussion about them because by definition they do not "interact" with this world in a way that can be measured.

When discussing whether it's okay to harm animals for food or sport, one other argument I hear quite often (other than having no souls) is that animals do not experience "qualia": basically the smallest unit of "subjective experience". People know that they themselves experience qualia: the sensation of touching a doorknob, the taste of fresh fruit, the sense of beauty watching a rainbow. Ironically, they would say that animals are like robots: just (biological) machines acting on instinct, and feeling any kind of compassion for them means you are anthropomorphizing.

Subjective experience (or at least qualia) and souls both have one thing in common: they can not be measured externally in a meaningful way. You can simply state that an AI system no matter how advanced, has no soul and has no subjective experience. And that's pretty much that. There's no meaningful discussion to be had about it, because no matter what an AI might tell you: it has no way to prove it to you. In fact, you can't even be certain that anyone other than yourself has subjective experiences: you assume that because they are humans like you, and you experience them, that they probably do as well. They tell you that they do. But a human without subjective experience, someone on "autopilot", would be absolutely indistinguishable from a human who does have them.

But perhaps I am conflating here whether experience can be "measured", with whether a system even allows experience in the first place regardless of whether it can be measured. I think that Dreyfus and others argue that in order to have any "experiences" at all, you simply must have a body in the real world, and you must care about that body. Please correct me if that's the wrong interpretation, I haven't actually read the book. That argument would be harder for me to discuss, because I personally believe that consciousness will "emerge" from a complex interaction of relatively simple systems - but that's also just a theory. I don't believe that experience is literally impossible to engineer, as consciousness has emerged from non-conscious being through evolution, so clearly there must be some kind of mechanism for it -- and if there is, then I believe it can be replicated, we just don't really understand it well enough yet to do so. And with how AI tech is going, I think that we're more likely to accidentally stumble upon it than we are to get these deliberately.

Likewise, there's been a ton of movies since that could in theory have been done purely with SFX instead of VFX, but which is probably must better from having used VFX/CGI, titles like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Inception, Avatar, etc.

Obviously there was also charm in titles like E.T. and Gremlins, and I think there might still be a market for movies like that, such as the 2019 Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (I loved the 1982 version as a child, though this sequel wasn't for me).

I guess the question is: will generative AI allow new movies to be made, the same way that CGI has? Or will it just be an economic shift: the same quality CGI but at a fraction of the price?

There may still be people out there who believe that AI will never be able to create CGI as good as humans can, these might be the same people who used to say that CGI can never look realistic. And if you work in VFX, I bet that you can spot a fake mountain with the slightly incorrect shadows in the distance easily, but as a simple movie watcher, I really don't see it, especially when it's only on screen for like 3 seconds.

But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no evidence to suggest that exposing children to brutality in books will somehow help them function in a brutal world. If anything, I would think that such children especially need something "beautiful" in their lives: the fairy who comes with good advice, the dragon slain in the end, the lost child who finds their way home. A bit of hope.

But I'm not a pedagogue, just a dad.