New Conversation on AI, Comms, & Learning

Dear readers, I am back in the groove after a significant work trip and then sorting through odds and ends upon my return—some related, some not. Good things are happening that I will share with you soon.

In the meantime, I'd like to share a conversation I had with my friend and colleague Peter Levenstrong (who has a wonderful clergyperson name up there with the likes of Nurya Love Parish) for the thoughtful AI in ministry podcast he cohosts with Mercedes Clements.

Regular readers will spot lots of overlap between the conversation and this newsletter, including my recent post on the embrace of human finitude as a key virtue in the AI age that has replaced the social media age. More coming on that intellectual thread.

Media Recs

• "Podcast as Community" – It's been a long time since I read something that captures really well some of the reasons I felt so compelled to produce my dissertation as a documentary podcast.
• A great church comms/community hack – I'm a sucker for a "tools from my job" feature, and I definitely sat up and paid attention when I saw that this month's edition in the TryTank newsletter was from my seminary classmate Tim Baer. Love this: "one of our most popular features in the past six months has been printing a monthly paper calendar. People grab it from the entryway and stick it on the fridge. Even in a younger parish, folks are so flooded by email and social media that this simple, analog tool has made a big impact."
• Summer vacation compilation – If you read Culture Study, you probably aren't surprised to hear that I do too. Fellow leaders: Summer vacation was clearly formative for these contributors, but take note of these reassuring themes:
  • The Family Summer Vacation Was Not Fancy
  • The Family Vacation Was Not Structured
  • The Family Vacation Was Not Novel
  • The Family Vacation Wasn’t Always Fun
• "Reasons-ing models" – I can't remember if I've raved about author Robin Sloan in this space, but he's a thinker, technologist, and fiction writer worth knowing. I loved this little mini-essay's take on AI: "language models collate and precipitate all the diverse reasons for writing, across a huge swath of human activity and aspiration ... A good question might be, can language models develop and pursue truly new reasons for writing? Probably not."
• "The Reenchanted World" – A Sloan-esque exploration of technology enthusiasm and critique. Long but delightful read. A gem for me, though more powerful in context than excerpted: “The reason we are in the hopeless state we are in is that science doesn’t believe that what is unsayable is real.” But also this:

[Computing is] just about processing information and turning it into something else for a specific purpose. To predict or analyze something. It’s a system for understanding the world. It’s definitely not a mystery! ... It’s been done deliberately by those who trade in it. To make themselves seem powerful, to protect corporate secrets, to be able to charge a lot of money for what they do, and so on. At the same time, the education system doesn’t teach us ways of thinking that help us understand these things. But really, it’s wildly accessible to everyone. It’s a bit like if we were sitting here having a really complicated conversation about how to build this table. It would be easier to just build a table together instead.

Seymour Papert lives!