Marking the AI Moment in Saratoga
By Dan Forbush
I started my career a half-century ago on this manual typewriter.
Now I’m writing with Artificial Intelligence.
It’s fair to say we are no longer merely approaching what tech entrepreneur and futurist Byron Reese calls the "Fourth Age”; we’re now deeply in it.
In the Fourth Age, machines serve not only as extensions of our bodies, as they did in the Industrial Revolution, or our memories, as they did with the arrival of writing and printing, but our minds. We already can sense ways in which AI is changing our sense of what it means to be human. We're wondering how we'll compete with a mysterious force as ubiquitous as electricity that some compare to an invasive species.
In my own experience with AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, I've acquired a sense of joint authorship with the suite of tools we call the Smartacus Neural Net. I now start every project by creating a "bot" in NotebookLM that encompasses all of the sources from which I might want to draw. Then I initiate back-and-forth prompts between Gemini, Google's AI agent, and ChatGPT, OpenAI's agent.
In the end, I’m delivered a draft that mimics almost perfectly what I would have wanted to write unaided. In fact, it's generally better than whatever I might have written a few years ago after hours of research and painstaking word-craft.
My colleague Bill Walker and I have developed a "recipe" for high-quality AI writing that we're giving to Skidmore students with assignments that serve the public interest. For starters, they’re producing Civic Conversations, Stories from Open Space, and reports for AI at Work.
For each of these web sites, we’re now offering free Substacks to which we invite everyone to subscribe.
We’re also inviting everyone to join us in a series of conversations we’re collaboratively hosting with the Saratoga Torch Club, the Academy for Lifelong Learning, and the Saratoga Book Festival: The AI Moment in Saratoga.
Here's what's in store:
Our AI series starts Monday night. Join us for a free presentation that starts at 7 p.m.
This Monday, September 22, I’ll be joined by Torch Club President Gerald Stulc and Saratoga Book Festival Co-Chair Ellen Beal in announcing The AI Moment at the Torch Club dinner that starts at 6 p.m. at the Saratoga Springs Holiday Inn. Five Towers Media President Michael Nelson also will join us for a discussion of AI’s Transformation of Journalism. That will start at 7 p.m. with free admission.
On Sunday, October 5, the Saratoga Book Festival will host three back-to-back conversations exploring the promise and perils of Artificial Intelligence. Beginning at 11:00 a.m. at Universal Preservation Hall, authors, scholars, and innovators will examine how AI is transforming the way we create, work, and live — and what it means for our shared future.
On Thursday, October 9, my Smartacus colleagues and I will host the first of six classes in Fun with AI, a course we're developing in Zoom with the Academy for Lifelong Learning. We'll demonstrate how to put the new AI tools to work while hosting compelling conversations with experts about AI’s social, ethical, and creative implications.
The AI Moment will give us an opportunity to think together about how to keep human values at the center of technological change. We’ll explore questions of trust, creativity, privacy, and equity, and ask what kind of future we want to build here in Saratoga and in the wider world.
We aim to establish a network of experts and citizens who can collaborate in the deployment of AI applications that serve the public interest. We’ll build a body of knowledge and collective understanding on which to draw in confronting the myriad challenges posed by the world’s transformation in the Fourth Age.
A half-century ago, my manual typewriter seemed to do the job just fine. Today, I'm gratified to have Smartacus as my astonishingly more capable writing partner. Going forward, let’s strive for a sense of collaborative discovery and co-authorship in the sci-fi future that's unfolding.
