education

The Culture of ‘Why?’

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

There are times when the world falls away to make way for a new one in my mind, where focusing on one train of thought can change the way I see the world. These are moments unscheduled or planned, usually starting with a question. A simple question. Why.

If you forget how to ask that question, listen to a child and their litany of ‘why?’. They want to know, they want to understand, they want to… well, unfortunately, they generally want to be adults. Poor things.

The asking of ‘Why?’ is so important, and so many people seem to forget it’s importance.

Richard Feynman illustrates the point pretty well with his response in the video below.

Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, asking ‘Why?’.

There’s a particular feeling that goes with it. A great example of expressing that feeling is by Nikola Tesla.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success … Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

‘Marconi and Tesla: Pioneers of Radio Communication‘ (2008), Nikola Tesla, quoted by Tim O’Shei

I’ll sit sometimes with a cup of coffee, looking out onto the world, and just consider a question, or a problem, and in doing that I find other questions to answer, and before I know it the coffee will get cold, the sun may have moved significantly. In doing this, though, I update the world that is built in my mind, the reality that I exist in, and by changing the reality I exist in, I change.

When you’re younger, you try the bigger questions. Life, the Universe, Everything sort of questions. It’s a lot to contemplate to answer those big questions, and you end up asking lesser questions. Decades later, you might have made some progress on the big questions, but if you have you probably just borrowed someone else’s big questions and were fed their answers.

Then, you have to figure out why that answer isn’t right, or why it’s not good enough – why it’s not satisfying. And you start again.

From professional lives to the universe around us, there’s a daisy chain of ‘Why?’ that needs answers, if only we dare ask the questions and be rigorous about the answers.

The Challenge.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

In researching opting out of allowing WordPress.com and Tumblr.com using my content to sell to Midjourney and OpenAI, I ran across some thoughtful writing on opting out of AI by Justin Dametz.

This is someone I likely wouldn’t cross paths with, since I’m not someone who is very interested in theology, which he writes quite a bit about. I imagine he could say the same about my writing, but we have a nexus.

His piece was written last year, and it echoes some of my own sentiments about the balance between AI and writing, where he makes solid points about young people learning how to communicate themselves.

I tend to agree.

Yet, I am also reminded of learning calculus without a calculator. Scientific calculators were fairly new in the late 1980s when I learned calculus, and they even came solar powered so we wouldn’t have to fiddle with the batteries. These were powerful tools, but my class wasn’t allowed to use them until we had the fundamentals down. This, of course, did not stop us.

Speaking for myself, I wrote code in BASIC on an old Vic-20 that allowed me to check my answers. This didn’t help me with my homework, really, or doing tests, since we were required to show our working and if we got the wrong answer and did it the right way, we still got the majority of the points for the question. We had to demonstrate the fundamentals.

How does one demonstrate the fundamentals of writing? How does one demonstrate the ability to communicate without crutches? The answer is by assuring none of the crutches are available to help. I suppose we could have writing done in Faraday cages in classes to evaluate what students write – or we could simply reward original writing because the one thing that artificial intelligence cannot do is imagine, and while it can relate human experience through the distillation of statistics and words, it doesn’t itself understand the human experience.

Generative AIs can spit out facts, narratives that it’s seen before, and images based on what it has been trained on – but it really adds nothing new to the human experience except the ability to connect things across what human knowledge we have trained it on.

But how do we teach children how to write without it? How do we then teach students how to learn and be critical of the results we get?

First, we have to teach them learn instead of chasing grades, a problem which has confounded us for decades, to have ability rather than titles and fancy pieces of paper to hang on the walls.

That’s the next challenge.

A Good Result

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Back in the early 1980s, my father had one of his rare talks with me where I understood him. I wasn’t doing well in school, he didn’t understand why and I wasn’t certain why I should care other than my father being angry with me. He was always angry with me, so it wasn’t something I felt I could change anyway.

What he said was, “A good student and a good teacher will give you a good result. A bad student and a bad teacher will give you a bad result. A bad student and a good teacher gives you a bad result. A good student and a bad teacher gives you a good result.”

There’s plenty of potential for each one of those sentences to be wrong, but what he was communicating was the responsibility. He was trying to explain to me that I was responsible for my own education. The grades were my fault, but I never had to work in school before then, and I’d fallen behind by a few years.

When people talk about teachers and students, I find myself hearing about poor parenting or bad teachers. Strangely, they never say both are the problem and that could actually be a part of the problem, but I digress.

All of that robs young students – children to teenagers. It robs them of the responsibility that they can take for what they learn, as well as the rewards that come with it beyond silly grades to pass silly tests to impress silly people.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where we have to impress silly people to get silly jobs which, in turn, allow us to earn income so that we might pay for our place on the planet.

We quite literally charge rent for a planet that doesn’t really belong to us, which we’re collectively only now beginning to consider that we might have to manage a bit better. To that end, people with pieces of paper roll out the alphabet behind their names.

If only that alphabet worked in our collective interests. In the name of paying our rent on a planet we don’t really own, we do a lot of strange things. We sell people stuff that they don’t need, things that generally are supposed to elevate the experience of being on the planet from trinkets to games.

We spend a lot of time teaching ways to earn a living to pay that rent. We don’t spend a lot of time teaching about how to learn, about how to progress as a species because we’re so caught up in our own worlds that we don’t really see the world around us.

The education system could help with that, but… if we want a good result and we consider the education system our teacher, maybe we need to consider that individually we are students.

A good student and a good teacher will give you a good result. A bad student and a bad teacher will give you a bad result. A bad student and a good teacher gives you a bad result. A good student and a bad teacher gives you a good result.

The Learning Model.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

When I saw Professor Parthiban’s list of academic accomplishments on Facebook as seen at the top of this post, I was skeptical and amused.

I wrote, “Day 1: Introduce The Speaker…”

That got a few laughs, and after I got back home I sat down and thought, “If that’s legitimate, he’s got to be able to have an interesting conversation even if he crammed for everything.” So I looked around, and verily, Professor VN Parthiban holds 145 academic degrees and admits failure is a part of it.

He’s apparently having trouble with his memory now, which may or not be unrelated.

All that education in one person, an approved and accredited learning model… I would say that this is as close as we could get to a person educated near a size to a learning model used for an artificial intelligence.

What they want to create is an autodidact though. Like me. Quite the paradox.

We’re so silly sometimes.

Expanding Our Prisons.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

Offhandedly, regarding something related to recommendations, I wrote, ‘there are always echo chambers’ in the context of social media and recommendations. It’s an unfortunate truth about we humans and our perspectives, and I thought to expand on it here.

We recursively play our roles in the Allegory of the Cave, where some of us ‘leave’ the cave and go explore outside of it. It was originally wrote about philosophers, but it also applies to any sort of world view.

You can think of this as when you’re a child and you leave the house and see wondrous things – so when you go back and report to your adult supervision, whoever that may be, you expect them to be as astounded as you were. They likely weren’t, thought they may have pretended to be, because you had just ventured out of a cave that they had already ventured out of.

Decorate as we wish

Conversely, adult supervision people tend to have rules you may not have understood as a child, such as, “Don’t climb trees” because they are more aware than the child of what happens when one falls out of a tree. The child, in the cave, doesn’t understand this rule, and so goes out and climbs trees, much to the consternation of the adult supervision.

Some children, though, do not wish to explore outside of the ‘cave’, and we consider these children well behaved and then later as adults find fault with them because they seem close-minded. This isn’t always the case, obviously, but it’s an example.

A child who has climbed a tree and looked down is more likely to understand the gravity of the situation than a child who has not.

If we go visit the Marginalian’s post, “The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality“, we begin to understand how this concept of the ‘cave’ can shape our reality. I do recommend the book mentioned, “The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality“, as it drills down deeper into how we experience our world.

Our brains ‘fill in the blanks’ based on previous experience. If we don’t have previous experience on something, our thinking is more confined when observing. If we have experience with something, we’re more likely to fill in any blanks more appropriately. This is why a senior person is supposed to be more valuable than a junior person in any given field because the senior person would have more experience, and thus be more familiar with situations that arise.

Fundamentally, this same concept is related to Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘10,000 hours’, which he consistently mentioned in his book Outliers. Of course, the 10,000 seems an arbitrary number when it comes to experience, but the point remains that the more you practice something, and the better you practice something, the better you become at it.

This is because you have gained experience that you did not have before. You have grown. Your mind predicts better now, we hope. If you practice the wrong things or practice ‘wrong’, you’re more likely to be more wrong – which gives us practiced idiots. Check your local newspaper for details.

In essence, the more experience you gain, the larger your ‘cave’ becomes. You might specialize in one direction, as many people do through education, or maybe you’ll push on the barriers on any side that catches your interest – which is where I’ll introduce David Epstein’s book, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World“.

…Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.

“Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World“, David Epstein (2019), p290.

Because we do live in a world where specialization is what is taught – perhaps even forced – on students and employees, breadth of experience is more valuable than people think. I solved one problem for a startup with a memory leak by idly considering how mailing addresses are done in Costa Rica, which I had picked up in my travels. When it comes to software engineering, I applied all sorts of different experience I had gathered in my life to solve problems in ways that puzzled more than a few people in how I came up with them.

We are all prisoners here. Some go through school, get piece of paper and stop trying to expand the prison – the rare ones are the ones who keep learning, keep pushing their prison walls to give themselves more and more space, to give themselves more and more experience – because life, as it happens, is just a fleeting thing where our perceptions of our world grow only as much as we do.

The difference between education and learning is that education tends toward specialization these days. The world itself is not specialized and offers us the opportunity to grow beyond.

Grow. Push those walls back, expand your caves, your echo chambers, your prisons of perception.

On Affirmative Action.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

This is necessarily a touchy subject and one that I generally haven’t written much about despite how interesting it is to me. It’s a polarizing issue, and when issues get polarized the people in the middle generally get pushed against a wall and shot.

I don’t like being shot, really, but I’ve stewed on it.

Here’s the thing. I’m a tribe of one. My genetics come from a lot of people from all over the world that were productively sexual. A read on my genetics will link me to Genghis Khan, as an example, and I’m not Mongolian by any stretch. When it comes to prejudice, I have known many and none were actually about who I am but who I looked like.

I have never been judged on my genetics.

I have always been judged based on appearance. When I went to college so many years ago, the financial aid office had stuff for people of African descent, Native American, and even for people of Hispanic descent (it was just beginning)… but there I was, a guy with a West Indian version of an East Indian surname whose genetics included a slave trader, indentured laborer, a famous artist… the list goes on. My genealogy is a history of the world in some regards. The financial office had nothing special for me because I wasn’t black enough or hispanic enough. Later on I would find I might have claimed hispanic because of the Portugese of my great great grandmother, but even that would have been a stretch.

Affirmative action never helped me. When asked what ‘race’ I was, I always said, “other”, and when asked to explain, I simply put, “None of the above”. Affirmative action to me was just a thing where some people got a step up on the ladder and I had to climb it myself from the ground. It never bothered me because it was rare for me to find someone who didn’t merit that step up and I never understood tearing someone down to get ahead. Yet in a way, and this may sound horrible to some who are grounded in decades of affirmative action… affirmative action does much the same.

And.

It was also arguably necessary because of a bunch of racist policies at the time, so the argument that it was necessary is not something I will ever argue against. I have seen racism, I have even experienced it as someone mistaken for one group or another.

And.

Re-evaluating it’s necessity now is something we should consider. The grounding of affirmative action has been that people deserve opportunity based on merit, and there were those not getting that opportunity despite having the merit because of racism – racism, manufactured from the stupid human concept of ‘race’ which has no scientific basis whatsoever. If you send someone a copy of your DNA and nothing else, they cannot guess what you look like… yet? Maybe in the future, but not in the conceivable future.

I read the interview with Edward Blum, and it was not what I expected. It echoed my own sentiments, which I have kept to myself because I lacked enough knowledge. Affirmative action is a big red button I simply did not want to push because I’ve never benefited from it, and I was also aware that race was an issue. I was reminded every time I was mistaken for Mexican, Puerto Rican or Cuban, depending on facial hair, and even that is not a race. Even Latino is not a race. The diversity of those groups is astounding.

Just like ‘white people’. What is called ‘white’ wasn’t always considered ‘white’. The Europeans brought with them their own stigmas to the United States, and the Irish and Italians as examples were not considered ‘white’. Jews are Middle Eastern in origin themselves, they’re not ‘white’, and nowadays when we talk about ‘white’ we’re talking about some mix of European ancestries – unless you go to far East from Europe and start getting to the confusing areas where Asian and European merged thanks largely to the Mongol Empire.

What we do know is that if you stick two different people together, they have sex and their children are neither and both at the same time while becoming… unique.

That said, I’d suggest a read of this interview with Blum, and do so with an open mind. Look at the points he makes, the rebuttals, and consider it. If anything, it’s fodder for discussion.

Bigotry based on ‘race’ will eventually get screwed out of society, of that I’m sure, but in the interim, the next decades are what we need to look toward. Affirmative action as it stands may need to be looked into, not because we want to make things unfair, but because we do honestly want to make things fair for everyone.

Including mixed up genetic soups like me who make no claim to the major minorities. The answer is not more systemic bigotry, it’s less, and we need to take a hard look at that.

Whose Knowledge Is It Anyway?

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Every now and then when I consider Copyrights and Artificial Intelligences and Publishing Rights and… I wonder…

Whose knowledge is it anyway?

We have a civilization that is presently built on locking away information in various ways, metering it out for money. The system has downsides as well as upsides, and discussing it isn’t all that fair for the downsides since the downsides don’t have marketing departments selling us on them.

I don’t know that the present system we have is as good as we can do. Yet this lawsuit related to ChatGPT has me wondering about this again.

I looked to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While knowledge isn’t there, education is.

Article 26

  1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
  2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
  3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights – English, United Nations, accessed on 30 Jun 2023.

Education, by a loose definition, is the attempt to share knowledge. That’s what teaching is and that’s what schools try to do. Yet the knowledge itself is not something that everyone is allowed to get.

In this brave new world we’re imagining, is there room for the knowledge of mankind being a birthright?

And if so, how will that impact society as a whole?

algorithms

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

Broken down, we’re just algorithms, we humans. Complex algorithms, algorithms so complex that we’re still only scraping the surface.

‘The wall between machines and humans, between computer science and biology, is collapsing and I think the next century and probably the future of life itself will be shaped by this algorithmic view of the world.’

“Historian: When Computers and Biology Converge, Organisms Become Algorithms“,Yuval Noah Harari, quoted by Daniel A. Bell, May 18, 2016.

Harari said that 7 years ago, and it doesn’t appear wrong – not just from the artificial intelligence side, but from biotechnology, genetics, psychology, medicine…

We’ve mapped the human genome, starting in 1990 and ending in 2003. And what is DNA? It’s pretty much an algorithm that gets replicated with some alterations as they get passed down. We haven’t figured it all out, but it’s a matter of time. That’s just the biological side.

Language, religion, culture, family – these instill frameworks for the algorithms to work within. Parameters which get bent more than we like, if we’re honest. “Be nice to other people” doesn’t seem to fit the way we really do things, but still, we stay within the framework even where we bend it – aside from those who just don’t care. Those who just don’t care generally end up in a jail of some sort or in charge of a sovereign nation, and every step in between.

We have an education system which provides a further framework, and so on. We’re not all good algorithms, and we’re all certainly not good at everything, but together we tend to survive. Maybe it’s just a game of numbers. Maybe someone is rolling dice. If there ever was a Plan A, I’m certain we’re out of alphabet by now.

Where this gets interesting is that if we consider the bonsai I wrote about yesterday, we can see how we alter our own algorithms… and most importantly, how education is a small part of being human.

I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with this in entirety, but this is where I went.

Bonsai and Education: Human and AI.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

Bonsai is a fascinating art form of living sculptures of carefully pruned, shaped and dwarfed trees. It is a hobby of mine and I’m not all that great at it. It requires time, patience, commitment, and not getting lost in your head and forgetting to water or deal with them on a daily basis.

A good bonsai captures the eye and evokes emotion. Each bonsai is it’s own little functional growing sculpture. Prune a branch here, trim the roots, and patience – I believe that to do this properly you have to have a picture in your mind of how the final work will look. There’s a plan.

Education systems aren’t very different. They cultivate minds, but largely to the same specifications. A little stream of bonsai trees come out of them looking remarkably similar yet all individual at some level.

How artificial intelligences learn, too, is also not very different when algorithms are designed to learn through a specific dataset.

The commonality of how we educate humans and artificial intelligences is, at least in concept, the same, but the results are not really the same. It’s peculiar that artificial intelligences are given large datasets to be trained on even as humans don’t have the same availability. In some ways, maybe we have it backwards, but time will tell.

We prune the knowledge we give to students and machine learning, or deep learning.

We provide students with knowledge based on accidents of geography. Every individual’s world is subject to geography, the geopolitics of the area, the socioeconomics of the area, culture, religion, language, etc. Some get transplanted and get exposed to differences (third culture kids), some don’t.

What languages a child can communicate dictate what information they have access to. A religion can forbid some knowledge, or even young women from having an education at all – which is an introduction into how gender can impact the available experience. A poor child is less likely to have opportunities than a child born more wealthy, and even then with how we address things, a poor child who is of one ‘race’ may not have financial help because they happen to be the wrong color.

The list goes on even before we touch the education systems themselves. It’s impressively and annoyingly complex. Then the education systems run by different governments – or not – have curriculum designed, increasingly for getting jobs rather than learning. These curriculum are focused on things that some groups think are important for the future, but to stay in business they have to make money so they attenuate things toward that end. Some books get banned in some geography, some due to content publishing/licensing are simply not available. Paywalls hold things at bay, too.

Memorization and regurgitating facts are rewarded. Understanding is hoped for, but not necessary to run the education gauntlet. Imprisoned by what the cage of what has been taught, few go further than their cages and simply rest in place when they’re done, breathing a sigh of relief and happy they made it through. They were told this was a necessary part of Life.

At the end of years of the education system, we kick students out of the nest and are expected to be something an employer wants to hire.

Artificial intelligences, on the other hand, have a different path. A group of people spend a lot of money on computer hardware and software, they find content that they want to train the artificial intelligence on. We’re not even sure what they are because that’s not made public. Neural networks crawl through the data, training predictive analytics, building natural language processing and recommender systems, and it gets released, imprisoned by the human knowledge it was fed. Garbage in, garbage out.

The concepts are the same between educating the artificial intelligences and humans. The artificial intelligences are given the best opportunities to learn as judged and afforded by those who train them, as our human education systems. The difference is that there are significantly less artificial intelligence systems, and human education has become a manufacturing process that produces plants in pots that at a certain angle might look like a bonsai.

Here’s the thing: In my life, I have not many of either I would call a bonsai.

Have you? Shouldn’t that be our goal?

Subjective AI Results.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

Banality. I don’t often use the word, I don’t often encounter the word, and it’s largely because ‘unoriginal’ seems to work better for me. That said, one of the things I’ve encountered while I play with the new toy for me, Tumblr, used it effectively and topically:

Project Parakeet: On the Banality of A.I. writing nailed it, covering the same basic idea I have expressed repeatedly in things I’ve written, such as, “It’s All Statistics” and “AI: Standing on the Shoulders of Technology, Seeking Humanity“.

It’s heartening to know others are independently observing the same things, though I do admit I found the prose a bit more flowery than my own style:

“…What Chatbots do is scrape the Web, the library of texts already written, and learn from it how to add to the collection, which causes them to start scraping their own work in ever enlarging quantities, along with the texts produced by future humans. Both sets of documents will then degenerate. For as the adoption of AI relieves people of their verbal and mental powers and pushes them toward an echoing conformity, much as the mass adoption of map apps have abolished their senses of direction, the human writings from which the AI draws will decline in originality and quality along, ad infinitum, with their derivatives. Enmeshed, dependent, mutually enslaved, machine and man will unite their special weaknesses – lack of feeling and lack of sense – and spawn a thing of perfect lunacy, like the child of a psychopath and an idiot…”

Walter Kirn, ‘Project Parakeet: On the Banality of A.I. Writing’, Unbound, March 18th, 2023.

Yes. Walter Kirn’s writing had me re-assessing my own opinion not because I believe he’s wrong, but because I believe we are right. This morning I found it lead to at least one other important question.

Who Does Banality Appeal To?

You see, the problem here is that banality is subjective because what is original for one person is not original for the other. I have seen people look shocked when I discovered something they already knew and expressed glee. It wasn’t original for them, it was original for me. In the same token, I have written and said things that I believe are mundane to have others think it is profound.

Banality – lack of originality – is subjective.

So why would people be so enthralled with the output of these large language models(LLMs), failing a societal mirror test? Maybe because the writing that comes out of them is better than their own. It’s like Grammarly on steroids, and Grammarly doesn’t make you a better writer, it just makes you look like you are a better writer. It’s like being dishonest on your dating profile.

When I prompted different LLMs about whether the quality of education was declining, the responses were non-committal, evasive and some more flowery than others in doing so. I’d love to see a LLM say, “Well shit. I don’t know anything about that”, but instead we get what they expect we want to see. It’s like asking someone a technical question during an interview that they don’t have the answer to and they just shoot a shotgun of verbage at you, a violent emetic eruption of knowledge that doesn’t answer the question.

“I don’t know”, in my mind, is a perfectly legitimate response and tells me a lot more than having to weed through someone’s verbal or written vomit to see if they even have a clue. I’m the person who says, “I don’t know”, and if it’s interesting enough to me for whatever reason, the unspoken is, “I’ll find out”.

The LLM’s can’t find out. They’re waiting to be fed by their keepers, and their keepers have some pretty big blind spots because we, as human beings, have a lot more questions than answers. We can hide behind what we do know, but it’s what we don’t know that gives us the questions.

I’ve probably read about 10,000 books in my lifetime, give or take, at the age of 51. This is largely because I am of Generation X, and we didn’t have the flat screens children have had in previous generations. Therefore, my measure of banality, if there could be such a measure, would be higher than people who have read less – and that’s just books. There’s websites, all manner of writing on social media, the blogs I check out, etc, and those have become more refined because I have a low tolerance for banality and mediocrity.

Meanwhile, many aspire to see things as banal and mediocre. This is not elitism. This is seen when a child learns something new and expresses joy an adult looks at them in wonder, wishing that they could enjoy that originality again. We never get to go back, but we get to visit with children.

Going to bookstores used to be a true pleasure for me, but now when I look at the shelves I see less and less new, the rest a bunch of banality with nice covers. Yet books continue to sell because people don’t see that banality. My threshold for originality is higher, and in a way it’s a curse.

The Unexpected Twist

In the end, if people actually read what these things spit out, the threshold for originality should increase since after the honeymoon period is over with their LLM of choice, they’ll realize banality.

In a way, maybe it’s like watching children figure things out on their own. Some things cannot be taught, they have to be learned. Maybe the world needs this so that it can appreciate more of the true originality out there.

I’m uncertain. It’s a ray of hope in a world where marketers would have us believe in a utopian future that they have never fulfilled while dystopia creeps in quietly through the back door.

We can hope, or we can wring our hands, but one thing is certain:

We’re not putting it back in the box.