I teach at a university in Japan, and, for the past two and a half years, I have been struggling with the implications of AI for university education. I found this essay interesting and helpful.
One remark:
> I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF [of the readings for a lecture course titled “Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses”] to Google’s free A.I. tool, NotebookLM, just to see what it would make of a decade’s worth of recondite research. Then I asked it to produce a podcast. ... Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind—an exploration of “attentionalism” by the fifth-century South Asian thinker Buddhaghosa—and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, A-minus.
The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but, in the interest of meta-ness, I had NotebookLM produce a podcast about it:
Happy to see Buddhaghosa on HN!
On a semi related tangent, I recently listened to the audio book of Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga!
Ingesting Buddhist commentaries and practice manuals to provide advice and help with meditation is one of the few LLM applications that excite me. I was impressed when I received LLM instructions on how an upāsaka can achieve upacāra-samādhi !