Vejas Liulevicius: belief

Transcript context

…It’s a really interesting idea. So let me give a shout-out to Perplexity that I’m using here to summarize and take quick notes and get little snippets of stuff, which is extremely useful. But books are not just about information transfer, just as you said, it’s a journey together with a set of ideas and it’s a conversation, and getting a summary of the book is the cliche thing is it’s really getting to the destination without the journey. The journey is the thing that’s important, thinking through stuff. I’ve been surprised, I’ve learned, I’ve trained my brain to be able to get the same thing from audiobooks. Also, it’s a little bit more difficult because you don’t control the pacing. Sometimes pausing is nice, but you could still get it from audiobooks. So it’s an audio version of books and that allows you to also go on a journey together and sometimes more convenient. You could take it to more places with you, but there is a magical thing. I also trying to train myself mostly to use Kindle, the digital version of books, but there is, unfortunately, still a magical thing about being there with the page. Audiobooks are definitely not to be scorned because as people have pointed out, the original traditions of literature were oral. So that’s actually the 1.0 version, and combining these things is probably the key. I think one of the things I find so wonderful about the best lectures that I’ve heard is it’s a chance to hear someone thinking out loud, not laying down the law, but taking you through a series of logical moves, imaginative leaps, alternative suggestions, and that’s much more than data transfer. The use case of AI as a companion as you read is really exciting to me. I’ve been using it recently to basically, as you read, you can have a conversation with a system that has access to a lot of things about a particular paragraph. I’ve been really surprised how my brain, when given some extra ideas, other recommendations of books, but also just a summary of other ideas from elsewhere in the universe that relates to this paragraph. It sparks your imagination and thought, and you see the actual richness in the thing you’re reading. Now, nobody, to my knowledge, has implemented a really intuitive interaction between AI and the text, unfortunately, partially because the books are protected under DRM, and so there’s a wall where the AI can’t access the thing. So if you want to play with that kind of thing, you have to break the law a little bit, which is not a good thing. But just like with music, Napster came up, people started illegally sharing music, and the answer to that was Spotify, which made the sharing of music revolutionized everything and made the sharing of music much easier. So there is some technological things that can enrich the experience of reading, but the actual painful, long process of reading is really useful. Just like boredom is useful.…

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