Dear Dr. Boli: Every so often I hear people talk about “the mysterious East,” as though everyone knew what that meant. What do they mean when they talk about “the mysterious East”? —Sincerely, A Professional Sinologist.
Dear Sir or Madam: They mean that, in spite of having some of the most delicious cuisines on the face of our planetary conglobation, ordinary people in China and Japan and nearby places have enthusiastically adopted American fast food. This is a mystery no ordinary theory can account for, and experts believe it can only be explained by quantum psychology.
Sir: When ideas have become outmoded and irrelevant, it is time to discard them honestly. Our progress is retarded by clinging to dated habits of thought that have outlived their usefulness. There was a time, for example, when flint-knapping was a vital survival skill, because it was the only way to come by the tools that everyone needed to survive. But now we live in a civilized society, where anyone with an Internet connection can just order a flint knife on Etsy. I have a drawer full of them, and I have no idea how they were made. In fact, I have no idea how they got in the drawer. I think they may have been left by the previous tenant. The point is that flint-knapping is no longer a skill we need, so we can turn our attention to more interesting and important matters.
This example shows us how to recognize when a pursuit is no longer necessary to the general population, and thus should be abandoned except by specialists. Thus we can see, when we consider the matter from an unbiased point of view, free from the shackles of sentimentalism and tradition, that it is time to abandon education.
There was a time, perhaps not so long ago, when education was a desirable and even necessary tool in a civilized society. But civilization has passed beyond that point. Just as we no longer need to knap our own tools, so the skill of thinking for ourselves is irrelevant and unnecessary. We do not need to know facts and dates in history, because our phones will instantly tell us any fact we need to know. We do not need to be able to add and subtract, because we have calculator apps on our phones. We do not need geographical knowledge, because map apps will use GPS to tell us every turn we need to make. We do not need to understand science, because the President of the United States knows enough science for all of us. We do not need to be able to express ourselves in writing, because AI will write for us. We do not need to be able to read, because our phones will narrate any written material to us, and simple pictographs convey whatever information needs to be ignored quickly on the highway.
Yet we continue to spend countless millions of dollars on educating young people, in spite of the obvious fact that no good comes of it. I assume we spend countless millions, anyway: I asked Gemini how much Americans spend on education every year, and it gave me a number, but I couldn’t even count all the digits in the number, let alone interpret how many millions it represented. So I asked it to explain the number to someone of my intellectual level, and it said, “A whole lot.”
Think of the things we could accomplish with all that money! Surely it would be enough to buy every American a new and better phone, for example. I don’t know how many Americans there are, but it has to be at least a few dozen, and yet I’ll bet the money we spend on education would be enough give them all really nice phones. Then they would have everything they needed, without spending countless hours in school surreptitiously scrolling on their phones when they could be proudly scrolling out in the open.
At present, the only thing that keeps us from abandoning education is the huge entrenched education establishment. It may be difficult to overcome so much inertia, but I have an idea. We can make the education professionals the first people to get the new and better phones. Then, when they are all properly distracted, it will be easy to close down and demolish the various schools all across the country, and ten to one the educators with shiny new phones will never even notice. —Sincerely, Brandon Pinchmottle, President, Americans Against Intellectual Activity.
It has become the norm in museums to post explanatory plaques beside works of art, the plaques not only explaining who the artist was and where the work fits among the various artistic trends and fads, but also telling us what we are supposed to think of the art.
While wandering through the splendid “French Moderns” show at the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh the other day, Dr. Boli noticed a particular tendency among the plaques for the various works. The exhibition gathered a number of the Impressionists, the “Fauves,” and a few later modernists, but it also included half a dozen Academic artists as well to show us what the modernists were rebelling against. How, after all, can you understand Renoir without knowing about Bouguereau?
What Dr. Boli noticed was that the plaques for the Academics were likely to explain why the art was evil, whereas the rest—all the works that are usually lumped as “Moderns,” from the Impressionists on—would just explain who the artist was and what the artist was trying to do. The explanations might not be very good, but they were at least about the art.
Once he noticed this tendency, Dr. Boli realized that he had seen it on every recent trip to an art museum. Art from before the Impressionists is likely to come with an explanation of why it is morally wrong, but an artist with “Modernist” credentials seems to be exempt from moral examination.
Thus we can make a trip to the museum into a sort of guessing game, or perhaps an exercise in creative imagination. For every realistic or pre-modern work of art, we try to imagine what a museum curator would think was morally unacceptable about it.
Here are a few examples to get us started.
The Carpet Merchant of Cairo, by Jean-Léon Gérôme. What’s wrong with this picture?
“Although his detailed rendering of two carpets lends this painting a documentary appearance, Gérôme’s stereotypical portrayal of an Egyptian vendor and brightly costumed passerby reveals his desire to appeal to European fantasies of the Arab-Islamic world. In France, such imagined scenes were interpreted as faithful records of an unchanging ‘Orient,’ helping to justify and obscure the harrowing transformations enacted by European imperialism within North Africa and the Middle East.” Now, it is also possible that Gérôme painted a Cairo street scene this way because Cairo streets looked like this. He had been to Cairo and toured Egypt and loved every minute of it. But we know he was a bad man, because he painted in a pre-modern style, so he must have been conniving with perpetrators of atrocities to hide the evidence of their crimes, which as everyone knows is most effectively done by pictures of men selling carpets.
Lady with Servant and Dog, by Jacob Ochtervelt (c. 1671–1673). Here is a charming little domestic scene showing everyday life in a Dutch household. But we know it must have sinister implications, because it was painted before anyone had even heard of Impressionism. What’s wrong with this picture?
The “boastful world map” in the background reminds us that horrible colonialists were perpetrating colonial horrors. It’s true that the canvas is small, so there are no clear details on the world map, but to possess a world map is crime enough in a seventeenth-century Dutch family.
Here is part of the long series of murals in the Grand Staircase of the Carnegie Institute, showing crowds marching toward enlightenment, which they will never reach because John White Alexander, the artist, died before he could paint the symbolic figures of the Noble Quartet (Art, Science, Music, Literature). What’s wrong with this picture?
According to a plaque on the wall, the crowd does not accurately represent the racial or economic makeup of Pittsburgh.
Pourquoi naître esclave ? (“Why Born a Slave?”) by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1868–1870).
Here is a bronze bust made as a deliberate rebuke of the enslavement of Africans. Surely, even in our age, when art is judged only by the quality of its political expression, this work must be above reproach. But no: it was sculpted in a pre-Impressionist style, and therefore it is morally compromised. What’s wrong with this picture?
“Created twenty years after the abolition of slavery in the French colonies (1848), the bust was meant to appeal to the antislavery views of a progressive white audience. Despite its seemingly sensitive portrayal of an individual, the bust nonetheless reinforces the objectification of the Black female body as an exoticized other…”
See? You can do it.
Now it’s your turn:
Innocence, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
You can answer in the comments: What’s wrong with this picture?
On this day in 1905, Mr. Ambrose Caulk of Brooklyn attempted to demonstrate a new airplane of his own invention, with tragic results. In spite of a valiant effort from the engine and propellers, the machine moved only six yards forward before collapsing in a heap, whereupon, according to the coroner’s report, two spectators on the ground died laughing.
Come see the Grant Borough Arts & Quilting Council’s Art Show at the Borough Building at Grant & State. This year we are blessed with over eight artists, of whom seven have painted characteristic Grant Borough scenes, such as the Food Festival at Grant & Lignery, and the Borough Building at Grant & State. The eighth artist is a weirdo and no one understands his paintings, but he seems nice, and maybe you could buy something small from him to show him we’re broadminded. And there’s a guy selling handmade wooden spoons, and we’ve decided to call that art, so we have over eight artists. Also, there will be quilts. The show runs from now until Mrs. Gill the cleaning lady gets tired of it and throws everybody out.
Water weighs as much as it likes. There is no use trying to put water on a diet.
If I gathered together seventy-five discarded phones with working batteries, would I have enough power to build a Bluetooth death ray?
Probably. But it is likely that it would kill only people who are wearing headphones or earbuds, and thus it would be of limited utility.
Is there any way to demagnetize an owl?
Owls are not generally magnetic. If your owl has become magnetized, it may be a symptom of a deeper problem. Consult a veterinarian with a specialty in avian electromagnetism.
What are the health effects of sarcasm?
Sarcasm leads to robust health and well-being, because obviously people who approach every human contact with an inflexible sneer are both living happy lives themselves and spreading happiness to the people around them, so that no one could possibly ever want to beat them to death.
If an anaconda swallows itself, does it get any fatter?
No. It remains exactly the same size. Anacondas are in fact entirely self-sustaining, and predation is nothing but a hobby for them.
It is always good fun to make predictions about our friends who are artificially intelligent and then watch the predictions not come true, and that is all the excuse we need for offering another one.
An email correspondent mentioned that she had been a bit put out when AI invaded her email. She had been ready to write a reply to a message from Dr. Boli when she saw that Google’s pet bot had already drafted a complete reply for her, plausibly human-sounding, and the bot offered to send the message off with one click and zero actual input from the putative author of the response. Is this the future? she asked. Will it soon be impossible to tell whether our correspondents have actually read and replied to our messages, or whether they have just let the bot do all their thinking and pressed the button without even reading their own replies?
Dr. Boli thought for a little while, and then gave opposite answers to the two questions. Yes, he wrote back, this is the future. More and more people will simply push the button and allow the bot to do all their thinking for them, because most people find thinking an unrewarding slog and will be glad to be relieved of that responsibility. But for that very reason it will be easy to tell which messages have been written by bots. They will all sound alike.
Right now, the purveyors of botty services emphasize how well the bots can imitate you. They learn your style, we are told; they write in your voice.
And that is true now to a certain extent. Large language models work by predicting what word is likely to come next. Give one access to all your accumulated emails and other writings, and by simple statistics it will start to sound like you.
But that depends on your having an archive of writings that come out of your own brain. Suppose you are one of the large majority who will be happy to accept whatever the bot writes and declare it good enough. From this point on, almost all your communications will be written by the bot. As time goes on, these botty effusions will form the majority of the communications that have gone out under your name. Older messages will fall victim to the various forces that cause old data to crumble away, and eventually your own unbotted writing will have vanished from the universe. The bot’s only models for “your voice” will be the things the bot itself has written.
This is a feedback loop, and a feedback loop always ends in a high-pitched squeal.
More and more of the world’s writing will consist of bots replying to bots. They will learn from themselves and each other, and they will all sound alike.
In the field of software documentation, this has already happened. Look at the descriptions of new projects on GitHub; look at the changelogs; look at the user manuals. They are all written by bots, with few exceptions, and they all speak in the same voice. And it is a distinctive voice. You quickly learn to recognize it.
That is the future of communication. It will separate the human writers from the bots very neatly, but—as we have already seen in the world of technical writing—the human writers will be hobbyists. Bots will be considered necessary for professional communication.
That is not necessarily a dismal future. Think how much you treasure a handmade sweater or quilt that no machine could ever duplicate. Messages you receive from people who care enough to write their own words will be messages you treasure the same way. Likewise, if you are one of the small number of people who still prefer to communicate in their own words, you will be regarded as a kind of prodigy. It will not increase you chances of remunerative employment any more than the ability to crochet an exquisite shawl will increase them. But it will earn you a kind of social awe, and that is worth more than employment in the long run.
