Si Nae Park came to Penn last Thursday (4/18/24) to talk about kugyŏl / gugyeol / kwukyel 구결 口訣 ("oral glossing"). Gugyeol, or kwukyel, is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was used chiefly during the Joseon dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus, in gugyeol, the original text in Classical Chinese was not modified, and the additional markers were simply inserted between phrases. The parts of the Chinese sentence would then be read in Korean out of sequence to approximate Korean (SOV) rather ..read more

Daron Acemoglu, "The Simple Macroeconomics of AI": ABSTRACT: This paper evaluates claims about the large macroeconomic implications of new advances in AI. It starts from a task-based model of AI’s effects, working through automation and task complementarities. It establishes that, so long as AI’s microeconomic effects are driven by cost savings/productivity improvements at the task level, its macroeconomic consequences will be given by a version of Hulten’s theorem: GDP and aggregate productivity gains can be estimated by what fraction of tasks are impacted and average task-level cost savings ..read more

Samuel Bray, "Cruel AND Unusual?", Reason 4/21/2024: On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear argument in an Eighth Amendment case, City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson. One thing I will be watching for is whether the justices in their questions treat "cruel and unusual" as two separate requirements, or as one. The Eighth Amendment (to the U.S. Consitution) says that "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." And the issue in the cited Supreme Court case is "Whether the enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating ca ..read more

I got an echo of Saturday's post about chatbot pals, from an article yesterday in Intelligencer — John Herrman, "Meta’s AI Needs to Speak With You" ("The company is putting chatbots everywhere so you don’t go anywhere"): Meta has an idea: Instead of ever leaving its apps, why not stay and chat with a bot? This past week, Mark Zuckerberg announced an update to Meta’s AI models, claiming that, in some respects, they were now among the most capable in the industry. He outlined his company’s plans to pursue AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, and made some more specific predictions: “By the e ..read more

Is monolingualism a normal, natural, necessary state of affairs for human beings? Can you imagine a world in which there were only one language?  How is that even possible? These are questions that come to mind after reading Gina Anne Tam's deeply thought provoking "Mandarin Hegemony: The Past and Future of Linguistic Hierarchies in China", pulse (4/18/24). Tam begins with a gripping, hard-hitting scene that we at Language Log were already well aware of last fall:  "Speak Mandarin, not Cantonese, even in Macau" (10/31/23).  Here are the opening paragraphs of her article: At a co ..read more

David Deutsch wrote: I had to read this headline a couple of times. "The pandemic cost 7 million lives, but talks to prevent a repeat stall" Is the pandemic talking? Is it trying to prevent a repeat stall? That garden path failed to tempt me, perhaps because of the fact that the word "talks" in headlinese is almost always a noun rather than a verb. But once you take that first step, it can be hard to get back… The obligatory screenshot ..read more

A new feature at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg FL: According to an NPR story (Chloe Veltman, "An AI Salvador Dalí will answer any question when called on his famous 'lobster phone'"), The underlying model is OpenAI's GPT-4. Because GPT-4 is trained on almost all publicly available text, this model includes extensive information about Dalí — an artist with a vast presence on the internet. The Dalí Museum also selected English translations of Dalí's writings in other languages, including his Mystical Manifesto, Diary of a Genius and The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. The article offers this ..read more

This is one of the most novel theories on the Voynich manuscript (Beinecke MS408; early 15th c.) that I've ever encountered, and there are many. The Voynich Manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb and the Encipherment of Women’s Secrets, by Keagan Brewer and Michelle L Lewis, Social History of Medicine, hkad099 (22 March 2024) https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkad099 Keywords:  Voynich manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb, women’s secrets, sex, gynaecology A floral illustration on page 32 Summary The Voynich manuscript is a famous European enciphered manuscript of the early fifteenth century featuring h ..read more

Worries about future applications of AI technology focus on many things, including new forms of automation replacing human workers, realistic deepfake media spreading disinformation, and mass killing by autonomous military machines. But there's something happening already that hasn't gotten as much commentary: chatbots designed to be pals or romantic connections. In fact, 70 years ago, ELIZA showed that very simple-minded chat implementations can lead people to engage enthusiastically in very personal conversations. And this video documents a much more sophisticated system that's been in ..read more

Most Americans probably know a few Japanese loanwords, especially those who were alive in the two or three decades after WWII, when so many terms from Japan entered the English language — kamikaze, banzai, bonsai, origami, and so forth — with soldiers returning from the war in the Far East. In the recent two or three decades, Japanese words, continued to enter English but from different avenues — anime, manga, sudoku, karaoke, etc. The rate and routes of current borrowings are more dilatory and diverse. "The unexpected ways in which Japanese words 'make it' into English", Thu-huong Ha, The Jap ..read more