Writing

Index

Here are the titles of my writing thus far, in chronological order:

30-30 project (12/27/2020)
Obsolescence (12/28/2020)
Proxies (1/5/2021)
A person’s capacity for change (pt. 1) (1/15/2021)
A person’s capacity for change (pt. 2) (1/18/2021)
Labeling (and binaries) (1/25/2021)
Myths of inevitability (2/8/2021)
Deluge (2/15/2021)
Taking Stock (2/28/2021)
Limitations to understanding (pt. 1): Senses (3/28/2021)
Limitations to understanding (pt. 2): Mind (6/7/2021)
Limitations to understanding (pt. 3): Culture (3/6/2022)
Essay (4/24/2022)
Are you free? (5/29/2022)
AI sentience is a red herring (for now) (3/26/2023)
“Shark smile”, modes of transport, career paths (4/28/2023)
Do AIs “think”? The challenge of AI anthropomorphization (5/14/2023)

Do AIs “think”? The challenge of AI anthropomorphization

There has been an acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the past year, especially in chatbot AIs. OpenAI’s ChatGPT became the fastest app to reach 100 million monthly active users within a short span of two months. For reference, the runner-up TikTok took nine months — more than four times — to reach those numbers.…
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“Shark smile”, modes of transport, career paths

I’m recently hooked on a song called “Shark Smile” by the band, Big Thief. From time to time, there are songs that get stuck in my head and in my mind’s ear, play on loop — this is one of them. I went to look up its lyrics. Behind its enchanting melody lies a dark…
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AI sentience is a red herring (for now)

The recent release of GPT-4 has sparked many conversations and rightly so. Similarly, the release has reignited some thoughts that I’ve had about AI, which I feel may be pertinent to record and build on as the technology develops. I believe that we are witnessing the beginnings of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where a computer…
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Are you free?

“Are you free?” If someone were to ask you this question, how would you respond? Of course, how one might answer this question depends very much on its context. However, let’s stay within this indeterminate space and consider the various approaches to answering this question. In common use, the question assumes that the asker is…
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Essay

This is the 12th essay in my 30-30 series. Clearly, I have not completed 30 essays within the year that I turned 30. Today, I’m 31 and about 2 months. Not that I’m justifying why I did not manage to achieve that goal – quite a few things happened in 2020. Chief of which is that…
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Limitations to understanding (pt. 3): Culture

Writer’s note: this is part three of a three-part essay. Click here for part two. In the previous two parts of the essay, I’ve discussed how our senses and mind could limit our ability to understand the world. I will be concluding this three-part essay by turning my focus to culture. First, a working definition of…
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Limitations to understanding (pt. 2): Mind

Writer’s note: this is part two of a three-part essay. Click here for part one. For the second part of this essay, I will be looking at the limitations of the mind in facilitating the processes of knowing and understanding. To narrow the scope of this part, I will be limiting the discussion to mental…
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Limitations to understanding (pt. 1): Senses

In 1758, the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus gave the name “Homo Sapiens” to our species. The term means “wise man” in Latin. We mostly stuck with the name, although there have been competing ones offered by various people in the years since. Linnaeus purportedly christened us with “wise” because of our ability to…
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Taking Stock

Last Friday, over 10,000 recent graduates of junior colleges (JC) and Millennia Institute (MI) gathered at their alma maters to receive their A-Level results. For these teenagers (most of whom are 18 or 19 years old), this event marks the end of a 14-year long journey through general education in Singapore, starting from kindergarten and…
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Deluge

We enter the world by gasping for air, almost as if we are being saved from drowning. During gestation, we are flooded by amniotic fluid in our mother’s womb. At birth, the same fluid turns from nourishment to danger, with about 1% of all newborns developing a condition informally known as “wet lung”, which occurs…
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