Psalms 34:18 NIV — from bible.com

The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

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Psalms 34:8 NIV — from bible.com

Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.

 

Psalms 32:3-5

When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.


From DSC:
I’m very grateful for the LORD’s grace, forgiveness, love/friendship, faithfulness, mercy, wisdom, guidance, and patience. Thank you LORD! And thank you for being *active* in my life. As you know, I need that.

It’s taken me years…no…decades to better understand and connect my mind and my heart with some of these things. For example, I used to see the LORD as a toe-tapping heavenly Being…looking down scornfully at me from above and saying, “Get your *(&^ together Daniel!” For years, I didn’t see Him as being on my team. 

As my spiritual journey continued — and after many years, trials, and failures had passed — I came to see that He actually WAS on my team. I had had an incorrect view of Him. 

Over time, his toe stopped tapping in my mind. I discovered that He did want what was best for me. At times, my trust levels weren’t what I thought they were. By demonstrating His faithfulness, my trust levels have risen. Thanks again LORD.

I realize that I still have a long ways to go yet.


 

Deuteronomy 7:9 — from biblegateway.com

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.

Leviticus 19:35-36 NIV — from bible.com

Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity. Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt.

 

Joshua 1:9 — from biblegateway.com

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

From DSC:
For me, “being with you” isn’t enough — at least in the sense of how I’ve historically thought about that phrase. As the years went by, I needed the LORD to be ACTIVELY with me. Taking action, not just watching. Participating, not just observing. 

The older I’ve gotten, the more I realize that the LORD is very active in my/our lives. In fact, I think that if we knew the extent of His activities, our minds would likely be blown. 

That doesn’t address all of the “but why?” questions I and others have. But I appreciate the LORD being active. I need Him to be active. And I think that He expects me to be active in return — to make use of the talents/gifts that He gave to me. These days, I’m trying to figure out what that next chapter looks like for my family and me.

 

You are not a parrot — from nymag.com by Elizabeth Weil and Emily M. Bender

You Are Not a Parrot. And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.

Excerpts:

A handful of companies control what PricewaterhouseCoopers called a “$15.7 trillion game changer of an industry.” Those companies employ or finance the work of a huge chunk of the academics who understand how to make LLMs. This leaves few people with the expertise and authority to say, “Wait, why are these companies blurring the distinction between what is human and what’s a language model? Is this what we want?”

Bender knows she’s no match for a trillion-dollar game changer slouching to life. But she’s out there trying. Others are trying too. LLMs are tools made by specific people — people who stand to accumulate huge amounts of money and power, people enamored with the idea of the singularity. The project threatens to blow up what is human in a species sense. But it’s not about humility. It’s not about all of us. It’s not about becoming a humble creation among the world’s others. It’s about some of us — let’s be honest — becoming a superspecies. This is the darkness that awaits when we lose a firm boundary around the idea that humans, all of us, are equally worthy as is.

 

How ChatGPT is going to change the future of work and our approach to education — from livemint.com

From DSC: 
I thought that the article made a good point when it asserted:

The pace of technological advancement is booming aggressively and conversations around ChatGPT snatching away jobs are becoming more and more frequent. The future of work is definitely going to change and that makes it clear that the approach toward education is also demanding a big shift.

A report from Dell suggests that 85% of jobs that will be around in 2030 do not exist yet. The fact becomes important as it showcases that the jobs are not going to vanish, they will just change and most of the jobs by 2030 will be new.

The Future of Human Agency — from pewresearch.org by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie

Excerpt:

Thus the question: What is the future of human agency? Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked experts to share their insights on this; 540 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers, academics and activists responded. Specifically, they were asked:

By 2035, will smart machines, bots and systems powered by artificial intelligence be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making that is relevant to their lives?

The results of this nonscientific canvassing:

    • 56% of these experts agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will not be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making.
    • 44% said they agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making.

What are the things humans really want agency over? When will they be comfortable turning to AI to help them make decisions? And under what circumstances will they be willing to outsource decisions altogether to digital systems?

The next big threat to AI might already be lurking on the web — from zdnet.com by Danny Palmer; via Sam DeBrule
Artificial intelligence experts warn attacks against datasets used to train machine-learning tools are worryingly cheap and could have major consequences.

Excerpts:

Data poisoning occurs when attackers tamper with the training data used to create deep-learning models. This action means it’s possible to affect the decisions that the AI makes in a way that is hard to track.

By secretly altering the source information used to train machine-learning algorithms, data-poisoning attacks have the potential to be extremely powerful because the AI will be learning from incorrect data and could make ‘wrong’ decisions that have significant consequences.

Why AI Won’t Cause Unemployment — from pmarca.substack.com by Marc Andreessen

Excerpt:

Normally I would make the standard arguments against technologically-driven unemployment — see good summaries by Henry Hazlitt (chapter 7) and Frédéric Bastiat (his metaphor directly relevant to AI). And I will come back and make those arguments soon. But I don’t even think the standand arguments are needed, since another problem will block the progress of AI across most of the economy first.

Which is: AI is already illegal for most of the economy, and will be for virtually all of the economy.

How do I know that? Because technology is already illegal in most of the economy, and that is becoming steadily more true over time.

How do I know that? Because:


From DSC:
And for me, it boils down to an inconvenient truth: What’s the state of our hearts and minds?

AI, ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs), and the like are tools. How we use such tools varies upon what’s going on in our hearts and minds. A fork can be used to eat food. It can also be used as a weapon. I don’t mean to be so blunt, but I can’t think of another way to say it right now.

  • Do we care about one another…really?
  • Has capitalism gone astray?
  • Have our hearts, our thinking, and/or our mindsets gone astray?
  • Do the products we create help or hurt others? It seems like too many times our perspective is, “We will sell whatever they will buy, regardless of its impact on others — as long as it makes us money and gives us the standard of living that we want.” Perhaps we could poll some former executives from Philip Morris on this topic.
  • Or we will develop this new technology because we can develop this new technology. Who gives a rat’s tail about the ramifications of it?

 

10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

 

Competition Can Motivate, Encourage and Inspire Students. But It Can Also Harm Them. — from edsurge.com by Patrick Harris II

Excerpt:

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines competition as “any performance situation structured in such a way that success depends on performing better than others.” Naturally, this could create challenges in a school setting, but in my experience, whether innate or as a product of a structure, competition itself isn’t always problematic. In fact, some studies confirm that competition has benefits, though they vary based on the individual and the competition.

Competition can be thrilling and motivating to those who choose to engage. But it’s important to remember that competition is not a golden key to unlock student engagement. Depending on how we use it, competition can also cause harm, such as anxiety, low self-esteem or negative feelings of self-worth.

For every student who was celebrated, there was another student who, by design, was shamed.

Looking back, these competitions weren’t used to teach students sportsmanship or resilience. They were used as gimmicks and antics to “motivate” students. I now recognize that I played a part in reinforcing a system of inequity by awarding those students who were already privileged.

From DSC:
I appreciate Patrick’s balanced article here — mentioning both the potential advantages and disadvantages of using competitive activities in the classroom.

I’m also going to comment on the topic of competition but from a different perspective. One that involves my faith journey and relationships.

I used to play a lot of sports and I played one sport at the university level. I mention this to establish that I’ve had my share of competition. In my experience, competition was anti-relational. That could have been just my perspective, but perhaps others share this perspective as well.

That is, I viewed people as to be competed against…not to be in relationships with. When my identity was tied up with my sport, that was ok. But as my identity changed in my senior year, it was not ok. When I became a Christian (in faith), my identity shifted big time. And the LORD wanted me to be in relationships with other people. Competition didn’t help that part of my journey.

As an aside, competition was also encouraged in terms of grades and performance in school — including at the university level. Several professors put our results up on the walls outside their offices — clearly showing everyone where they stood in the class. And I saw competition in the corporate world all the time as well. So while it’s something we here in the United States practice big time, it does seem to have its plusses and minuses. 

 
 
 

1 Corinthians 2:9

However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the things God has prepared for those who love him—
 

Psalms 16:1-2 — from bible.com

Keep me safe, my God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing.”

 

Why, LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

From DSC:
I get this piece of scripture…big time.

In the early fall of my senior year in college, I wanted to be sure that the LORD wasn’t a hoax. I didn’t want to commit the rest of my life to Him if He wasn’t real. From that point on, until a Maundy Thursday service at the Alice Millar Chapel on NU’s campus the next spring, I felt that the LORD was 10,000 miles away from me. I couldn’t hear Him or sense Him. I won’t go into details, but it turned out that the LORD was definitely at work. He was changing my identity (though it felt more like a ripping away of my identity) from an athlete to one of His adopted children. I’m glad He was at work, but I wouldn’t want to relive that year ever again.

 

1 Peter 3:8 NIV — from my.bible.com

Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.

 

Discovering Autism and Community Later in Life — from aane.org by Brenda Dater, Executive Director

Excerpt:

This month we are discussing autism and aging. Many older adults in AANE’s community were children in the 1950s, 60s and 70s when the diagnosis of autism as we understand it today didn’t exist. Some were misdiagnosed with conditions like childhood schizophrenia, but many were just harmfully labeled as odd or having behavior problems. Because of the lack of awareness and understanding about autism, many have come to their diagnosis, or self-understanding, in their fifties, sixties, seventies and beyond, often after many years of being misunderstood or not fitting in at school, work, or socially. The stories they tell about feeling relief to have an explanation for their experience and finally…finally feeling like they belong warms my heart.

 
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