Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .
AI should be considered intelligence that’s simply learned for a very long time in human years, due to the way training works. So in terms of training time, something like GPT is thousands of years old, and anyone using an AI in an integrated way, like Magnus Carlsen learning his chess skills in a feedback loop with chess AIs, is effectively hundreds of years old.
Oozy Intelligence in Slow Time
Ribbonfarm Studio
Erysichthon’s dominionist hubris may be how we got to this climate juncture, but the path out of our mess is not backwards. It’s some yet-undiscovered third way that rides the dipole between animism and reason. Learning to perceive nature without objectifying it, while at the same time learning to truly live in it.
Rain Lilies and Robots
Field Notes from Christopher Brown
In Indigenous agriculture, the practice is to modify the plants to fit the land. As a result, there are many varieties of corn domesticated by our ancestors, all adapted to grow in many different places. Modern agriculture, with its big engines and fossil fuels, took the opposite approach: modify the land to fit the plants, which are frighteningly similar clones.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise