Monday, 13th February 2023
Browse the BBC In Our Time archive by Dewey decimal code. Matt Webb built Braggoscope, an alternative interface for browsing the 1,000 episodes of the BBC's In Our Time dating back to 1998, organized by Dewey decimal system and with related episodes calculated using OpenAI embeddings and guests and reading lists extracted using GPT-3.
Using GitHub Copilot to write code and calling out to GPT-3 programmatically to dodge days of graft actually brought tears to my eyes.
I've been thinking about generative AI tools as "bicycles for the mind" (to borrow an old Steve Jobs line), but I think "electric bicycles for the mind" might be more appropriate.
They can accelerate your natural abilities, you have to learn how to use them, they can give you a significant boost that some people might feel is a bit of a cheat, and they're also quite dangerous if you're not careful with them!
If you like, there's a more cynical version of this where they are electric scooters for the mind: rushed to market without due diligence, irresponsibly dumped throughout cities around the world, quite impressively dangerous, loved by some and a menace to others.
— Simon Willison, on Mastodon