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    I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…

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  3. Jonathan Turner's avatar

    I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…

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    My big problem with LLMs at the present time, apart from being potentially the epitome of Foucault’s panopticon & Big…

  6. A in the UK's avatar

    I’m also at a British university (in a law school) and my sentiments largely align with the author’s. I see…

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Philip Roth on Trump

This is all certainly apt (it makes reference to his novel The Plot Against America, in which it is imagined that the pro-Nazi Charles Lindberg was elected President of the U.S.):

“It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville’s last—that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam’ ”….

“I was born in 1933,” Roth continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English”….

“As for how Trump threatens us, I would say that, like the anxious and fear-ridden families in my book, what is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.”

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