I teach at a university in Japan, and, for the past two and a half years, I have been struggling with the implications of AI for university education. I found this essay interesting and helpful.

One remark:

> I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF [of the readings for a lecture course titled “Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses”] to Google’s free A.I. tool, NotebookLM, just to see what it would make of a decade’s worth of recondite research. Then I asked it to produce a podcast. ... Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind—an exploration of “attentionalism” by the fifth-century South Asian thinker Buddhaghosa—and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, A-minus.

The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but, in the interest of meta-ness, I had NotebookLM produce a podcast about it:

https://www.gally.net/temp/20250425notebooklm/index.html