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October 2009
India was amazing. It was just as I had been told, read, seen on TV and so on but quite different to what I expected; a physical experience (noise, reactions of and interactions with people, smells and other sensations) rather than an intellectual appreciation.
I've long been interested in the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). It's a central theme in my fictional writing (The Cloud and The Craft) and is discussed in my essay to my children 'The Meaning of Life' (1997-2017). So, I've recently been exploring the capabilities of ChatGPT.
As today, 26 January 2024, is Australia Day, I asked ChatGPT to: 'write 1000 words about Australia Day date'. In a few minutes (I read each as it arrived) I had four, quite different, versions. Each took around 18 seconds to generate. This is the result:
To celebrate or perhaps just to mark 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his '95 theses' to a church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the Protestant Revolution, the Australian Broadcasting Commission has been running a number of programs discussing the legacy of this complex man featuring leading thinkers and historians in the field.
Much of the ABC debate has centred on Luther's impact on the modern world. Was he responsible for today? Without him, might the world still be stuck in the 'Middle Ages' with each generation doing more or less what the previous one did, largely within the same medieval social structures? In that case could those inhabitants of an alternative 21st century, obviously not us, as we would never have been born, still live in a world of less than a billion people, most of them working the land as their great grandparents had done, protected and governed by an hereditary aristocracy, their mundane lives punctuated only by variations in the weather; holy days; and occasional wars between those princes?