The Select Society
At the crossroads of nobler acts and braver deeds, editor in chief DREW GOWING joins the search for meaning in 2023.
By Drew Gowing3 December 2023
Merriam-Webster announces their ‘Word of the Year’ this week, and having given the distinction to 2020’s “pandemic” and 2021’s “vaccine” I speculated what it could be. What is the most important word of 2023?
Is it Climate, perhaps? It was the hottest year on record by chance. Or is it War; the invasion of Ukraine has been hard to ignore. Or maybe Religion; Israel and Palestine both want to win and reclaim the City of David therein.
Or maybe the word is Disaster. An earthquake in Turkey and Syria was beyond the pale; 7.8 in magnitude on the Richter Scale; it consumed 60,000 in a single night; one of the deadliest since the time of Christ.
Freddy came in as the longest-lasting cyclone; Daniel was the deadliest on Mediterranean shores; together they claimed thousands of souls. Interest rates soared; economies cooled; and several US banks they collapsed, too. And yet…
The world’s largest tech companies all seemed to thrive; Microsoft and Google beckoned we imbibe; on Bing, Bard and AI chatbots. And ChatGPT, I quite forgot.
Artificial Intelligence is all the rage; and seems as though it's here to stay; but does mankind have the all clear; Dear Editor, alight on the Word of the Year.
Signed,
Phonetically Challenged
Dear PC: It is the oldest dictionary publisher in America, and since 1964 it has belonged to Encyclopedia Britannica, first published in Edinburgh in 1768 at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Why that matters can be traced to the Select Society. Founded in 1754 by the painter Allan Ramsay with David Hume and Adam Smith, it gathered the intellectual elite of Edinburgh to argue about what is real and how we know it. Hume observed that “a wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.” Thomas Reid answered with Common Sense Realism: that what we perceive is the real world itself, not a contrived picture of it.
As the real world morphs into a virtual performance, recall Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2022: Gaslighting. When we asked Bing “What’s the word of the year for 2023” Bing replied: “Authentic,” according to Merriam-Webster. Then, without any prompts, Bing continued: Cambridge Dictionary has chosen “Hallucinate.” The machine had named its own flaw.
Even Elon Musk, who took away our blue check mark of identity verification this year, was kind enough to sell it back to us for $8 per month. Thus monetizing the difference between what’s real and the very appearance of reality.
The American cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has long argued that generative AI hallucinates, cannot be relied upon, and leaves factuality in question. The European Commission’s AI Act, proposed in April 2021, is the most sweeping attempt to answer for it. Last month, Italy, Germany and France pushed back in favor of regulation by the AI companies themselves.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.” Companies don’t self regulate; commissioners can capitulate; and countries have withdrawn a time or two. Washington has an executive order, signed by President Biden on October 30; Brussels is writing law. Keep your eye on Brussels not the red, white, and blue.
Lift a page from the Scots; who frankly ne’er forgot; that it’s never just enough to sow the seeds. We must legislate and train; continuously campaign; only man (for now, at least) can do the deed.