Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
“I almost never wept for him, I just stopped looking at the sky the way I used to.“ —Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation
In design, AI inspires me no more than elevator music or a business presentation. However, it often shows me what I do not want. When I ask Chat-GPT how I could better phrase something, I almost always get the most uninteresting, boring, often meaningless answer. As an author that writes to say something meaningful, get upset about this, and in resisting the emptiness of the generated response, I uncover what I previously could not articulate. I do not want to demonize AI, but it works well as a devil’s advocate.
That’s one hell of an endorsement!
Not often — a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky — you come upon a work of thought and feeling — a book, a painting, a song — that becomes a fountain to which you return again and again, and which returns you to your life refreshed each time.
For me, The Little Prince has been one, and Leaves of Grass, and I Put a Spell on You, and Spiegel im Spiegel. Wilderness (public library) by the painter, printmaker, and philosopher Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) is another
"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
— C.S. Lewis
I love the idea of being able to speak with animals. I am suspicious of the billionaire motive here.
The Earth Species Project has largely run on donations from billionaires, in part thanks to its cofounders’ roots in Silicon Valley. Raskin met Hoffman when he was working at Mozilla designing Firefox and Hoffman was on the board. He first floated the idea of the Earth Species Project to Hoffman in 2015. Hoffman is “fascinated by the philosophical implications of what happens when it’s not just humans that have culture and have language, and what that means for the shift in the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature,” Raskin says.
I asked Cheryl what she thought was the most effective way to dispel people’s misplaced fears and animosity towards wolves, and replace it with awe and respect for life. She emphasized the importance of telling stories about individual lives like Takaya’s. Our tendency as humans is to glaze over when we are overwhelmed by numbers and statistics; but when we learn about the injustices faced by an individual, or the challenges they’ve overcome, we naturally build an emotional connection. Empathy takes root. That’s where real change can happen.