AKA Review - 05.03.2024

From The New York Times
Colleges Have Gone Off the Deep End. There Is a Way Out
By David French

Parsing the history and meaning behind “free speech” and “civil disobedience,” NY Times columnist David French diagnoses the profound confusion on campuses today about how they differ. This, he argues, has combined with hypocrisy about “institutional neutrality” to create outright lawlessness and a culture of impunity for the most radical students. Only by recognizing and enforcing distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience, and lawlessness, can we protect students’ rights both to protest and to learn in peace. Read this article

From The New Yorker
Academic Freedom Under Fire
By Louis Menand

Because academic freedom defines the modern university, Harvard’s Louis Menand notes, it was shocking to hear Columbia’s president negotiating with Congress over disciplining members of her faculty for things they had written or said. Exploring what kind of right academic freedom is, a legal or a moral one, Menand concludes that it “is an understanding, not a law” and must be defended, making it “disheartening that leaders of great universities appear reluctant to speak up for…independent inquiry and free expression.” Read this article

From Science
A conversation with Mythbusters' Adam Savage
By Holden Thorp

TV’s Mythbusters—which tested popular myths arising from folklore to pop culture and deemed them “busted” or “confirmed”—inspired a generation of today’s rising scientists. Former host Adam Savage highlights his gonzo show’s prescience about current science issues, from research integrity to politically driven science doubt, noting of the latter: A different result makes people think, “science got it wrong.” But “science is always getting it certain degrees of wrong....We’re just getting less and less wrong as we go.” Read this article

From The Economist
What Will Humans Do If AI Solves Everything?

Deep Utopia by Oxford’s Nick Bostrom explores future tech utopias with an economist’s eye on how we derive value from goods and activities. If AI progresses to the point that it eliminates the cost of economically valuable work and, perhaps, do better at such human tasks as parenting, will individuals lose their sense of purpose? Endless leisure time in such worlds would free us to hop among passions, but is there a limit on our desires beyond which consuming more would leave us fundamentally unhappy? Read this article

From Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
The AI Index Report: Measuring Trends in AI

This comprehensive report on the current state of AI covers technical advancements, public perceptions, and the geopolitics that surround AI’s development. Using unbiased, broadly sourced, and well-vetted data, the report distills 10 top takeaways and explores them with clear prose and visualizations in nine easily digested chapters. It an essential resource for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public wishing a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI. Read this article