Margaret Atwood and John Banville are among the authors who have sold their voices and commentary to an app that aims to bring canonical texts to life with the latest tech.
For the past year, two philosophy professors have been calling around to prominent authors and public intellectuals with an unusual, perhaps heretical, proposal. They have been asking these thinkers if, for a handsome fee, they wouldn't mind turning themselves into A.I. chatbots.
John Kaag, one of the academics, is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is known for writing books, such as "Hiking With Nietzsche" and "American Philosophy: A Love Story," that blend philosophy and memoir... (nyt, continues)
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The backstory:
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Lena Dunham, Roxane Gay: We’ve all agreed to be turned into AI reading companions by a mysterious company called Rebind. I report from the inside.
...He also suspected there were a lot of people who, like him, wanted to read hard books—maybe not Being and Time, but let’s say Moby-Dick. “You read the first 40 pages and you put it on the shelf, right?” By then he was reading William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience and loving it, and thought: Who’s the William James guy? It turned out to be John Kaag, who’d written a book called Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life, a mashup of memoir and philosophy. Which is exactly what Dubuque thinks people want: not scholasticism, but to know how to connect great books to our lives.
WHEN KAAG GOT an email from Dubuque, he almost didn’t answer, but they eventually talked on the phone and hit it off, as Kaag told me over Zoom: “He turned out to be one of the most curious, thoughtful people that I’ve ever encountered.” The two joined forces to develop Rebind. Kaag brought on his friend Clancy Martin. They have similar profiles: untraditional philosophy professors who’ve written eclectic books, including about their struggles with depression. (Clancy’s most recent book is titled How Not to Kill Yourself.)
Kaag’s mother, who raised him on her own, was a substitute English teacher. At age 12 he was a bad reader with a stutter; his mother would sit with him at the kitchen table and they’d read through his assignments together—essentially an Oxford-style tutorial. It’s what he tried to replicate with his own commentary for Rebind on Thoreau’s Walden: relating the book to his own experiences and difficulties, which include a heart attack at age 40 followed by bypass surgery. (Thoreau, who died of tuberculosis at age 44, wrote movingly about fearing that bad health had prevented him from leading a meaningful life.) If a reader journals about their own life difficulties in the chat, AI finds the places where Kaag shares something similar. Now the two are in conversation. Seeing that back-and-forth happen as they tested out the prototype, Kaag and Dubuque got really excited—they were creating, they thought, a new way to read...
WiredThe Rebind backstory: rich plumbing supply wholesaler from St. Louis (former High School classmate of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, btw) sells his company for big bucks, hires an Oxford prof to tutor him on Being and Time, then picks up VRE, discovers AI, and asks “Who’s the William James guy? It turned out to be John Kaag”...
Should we be more worried about the future of AI, or more intrigued and hopeful? Both, maybe? What would WJ say? I think he’d be clear that, at least so far, we have no reason to think there’s anything like a subjective self-aware consciousness lurking in the technology. As a pragmatist he’d be cautiously open to deploying this new tool, but also concerned to remind us (in Jaron Lanier’s phrase): “you are not a gadget.” And gadgets are not really intelligent. Not yet. But Ray Kurzweil says we’re still on track for the Singularity...
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