In the last week, I have started to use ChatGPT the recent venture into artificial intelligence. I signed up at the website and started asking it simple questions to get a feel of how it works. Today I started asking hardball question and complicated tasks, including writing a 3-page paper on a certain subject matter, which it did is less than one minute. One thing I learned quickly is that it currently only operates in text, thus my asking it to put together a power point presentation was not accomplished. However, it did provide me with a very detailed outline on the subject that I could easily convert to a power point presentation.
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Today I read an interesting article in The Guardian. Here are excerpts.
Trying to stop friends and relations from making certain life choices such as whether to take a new job or start a family could “violate a crucial moral right”, according to a new paper by a Cambridge philosopher. Dr Farbod Akhlaghi, a moral philosopher at Christ’s College, argues that everyone has a right to “self authorship”, so they must make decisions about transformative experiences for themselves.
In a new paper for the philosophy journal Analysis, he argues that this right to “revelatory autonomy” is violated even by well-meaning advice from friends and family about crucial life decisions. Akhlaghi argues that it is impossible to know if a friend’s life will benefit from a transformative experience – such as new job, the birth of a child, or a university course – until after the event. It is for them to find out, he says. Crucially, he argues, it is only by making these choices independently that we can know ourselves.
In the paper, entitled Transformative experience and the right to revelatory autonomy, Akhlaghi writes: “It is not the value of making a choice as such but, rather, that of autonomously making choices to learn what our core preferences and values will become. For autonomously making transformative choices when facing them, deciding for ourselves to learn who we will become, gives us a degree of self-authorship.” The paper says this right creates a correlative “moral duty in others not to interfere in the autonomous self-making” of their friends. Commenting on the paper he said: “The ability to see that the person we’ve become is the product of decisions that we made for ourselves is very import.
“There are lots of different reasons why we might seek to intervene – some selfish, others well-meaning – but whatever our motivation, we can cause significant harm, including to the people we love most.” Akhlaghi argues it is only justifiable to interfere in someone else’s transformative choice by competing moral considerations, such as if harm is likely to be done others.
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From another article today in The Guardian. Here are excerpts slightly modified by me.
Gun violence is now the leading killer of American children.
What is there to say about a society that sacrifices its babies at the altar of firearms? What kind of “freedom” allows civilians to amass weapons designed to exact maximal damage on the human body, but doesn’t give citizens the basic right to go to the movies, the shops, schools, places of worship and even their living rooms or front porches without facing down the pervasive threat of deadly and random violence? How do you reason with people who continue to claim, in the face of all evidence and the very fact that America is the only nation not at war that experiences this level of death and destruction from guns, that guns are not the problem?
Three days. Three mass shootings. One state. Nineteen dead.
These numbers are stark enough that, in a sane society, they’d engender outrage and then change. But this is the United States, and when it comes to our tolerance of mass gun deaths, we are truly exceptional. The scourge of gun violence in America remains not because Americans are an inherently violent people or because there are too many “bad guys” running around. The scourge of gun violence in America remains because a certain faction of the Republican party works overtime to ensure that deadly weapons proliferate in our country.
Can a society reasonably call itself civilized, let alone great or free or “pro-life”, when it voluntarily allows its children to be slaughtered and calls it liberty? Until the Republican party and its core supporters decide that they’re tired of living in a country where grandmas get gunned down while dancing and kindergartners are murdered in their classrooms, we will all be forced to live in a nation that offers nothing more than thoughts and prayers as the bullets fly and the body count mounts.
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Quote of the Day: “In life, it is important to know when to stop arguing with someone and just let them be wrong.” Anonymous.
Orchid of the Day: Tyrone Wheatley’s 10th coaching stop just might be the most special yet. Wheatley, the former Dearborn Heights Robichaud and University of Michigan standout, was named head football coach of Wayne State on Thursday. Wheatley was most recently running-backs coach for the NFL’s Denver Broncos. This is his second college head-coaching job, after he was head coach of Morgan State of the Football Championship Subdivision from 2019-21.
Onion of the Day: Those who continue to support the proliferation of gun sales capable of committing mass murder in a matter of seconds.
Question of the Day: Why does America allow civilians to amass weapons of war, but not to live free of a constant threat of random violence?
Video of the Day: