Here we are--more than half past May. And the perennial question is: where the hell has the time gone? The last month has been a stressful fog. But we seem to be getting to some semblance of a "new normal here." All that driving to check in with Mom while she was in the hospital and rehab was draining. I never did like driving and doing the hundred mile round trip daily for a bit more than three weeks left me exhausted. The last week has been a bit of a rest and only two more doctors' appointments over the next two weeks remain. We should be setting an appointment with the family physician she had during her time in the hospital but he is located almost as far away as the hospital was. I think we really need someone closer to home. Unfortunately we live in a car-centric culture which makes things difficult for those of us who aren't that mobile.
We had an ominous "first" a couple of days ago. The weather service issued the first ever "dust storm" warning for our area. Thankfully, we were on the northern edge of the predicted area of impact and didn't get much more than the wind associated with the storm which blew through central and southern Illinois and Indiana. It also spawned tornadoes in southern parts and in Kentucky which caused a lot of damage and took several lives.
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Cool, wet and windy today--no garden work today. Probably for the next couple either. More of the same weather expected tomorrow and a doctor's appointment for Thursday.
Listened to a talk/news interview this morning that rang a couple of bells in my memory. The interviewee was an author that had published a biography of J.D. Vance. He talked about a pronounced shift in Vance's political beliefs toward a much more "conservative" philosophy. I put that word in quotes because it isn't always clear exactly what conservatives want to conserve. What I found interesting about the discussion was the author's inclusion of other recent shifts in attitude by people like George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. All were politically ambitious men and their shifts aided their ambitions. I remembered a lecture in a class in Early 20th Century United States. The professor described a shift in American society around the 1920s when our culture changed its emphasis from "character" to "personality." Earlier personal development involved internalizing values--developing a sense of shame for violations. People obeyed social rules because their own internal values, backed up by the people in their social circle. In a society that emphasizes personality people don't have an internal set of values but instead "follows the crowd." Their social antennae always are scanning the social environment for the dominant "norms" and the person adapts his/her behavior to conform. Violations of such norms don't involve shame but social ostracism. I think the trends over the last 50 years in our politics means that the shift has hit its apex.
A second interview also rang a memory bell. The interviewee wrote an article about how AI, particularly Chat GPT, has fueled an epidemic of cheating in colleges and universities. The company that owns ChatGPT has offered free subscriptions to college students. Evidently some depend on the program to do research, summarize their reading assignments, and write their essays. Nearly forty years ago I was a history student and teaching assistant at a state university. I encountered a student that planned to do all her research for her Master's thesis on line--an early enthusiast. At that time I did my research in the traditional ways--through paper sources and a card catalog. About 30 years ago I was at another college as an adjunct lecturer. I had two students who lifted a large part of their final essay, cut and paste style, from the same internet sources. They might have got away with it if I hadn't read the two papers almost one after the other. I recognized the pasted parts. It only took me half an hour of on-line searching to find the exact source. I failed them on the exam which dropped their As to Cs. I was talked out of failing them in the class because the head of the department thought I might not have told them about plagiarism. I thought them should have known since they were in college. I guess not. I also remember a news segment about college cheating and most of the students interviewed admitted that, if they were sure they could successfully get away with it, they would cheat. No shame there either. About that time I began hearing students talking about "D for diploma." They didn't worry about poor grades in courses that were not in their major areas. No value for a broad liberal arts education.
Vincent Kelly expresses some good thoughts on that same issue. AI is changing how people work and what work they will perform. But what he shows very well that the final work product will be entirely out of the control of the worker. It is also another homogenizing trend as AI is used to scrub personality out of the product and massage it into the perfect shape desired by the final user.
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