Letter from the principal

Why does so much of our digitized, post-industrial, post-modern world seem so fake, so contrived? A routine stroll through social media takes us on a disconcerting tour through a fragmented landscape of real and fake, authentic and phony. This unbridled artificiality is bleeding into other areas of culture. With sudden and unanticipated speed, AI has already seeped into the fabric of our everyday existence. It’s in our private lives, our health care, our schools, and of course, on our screens. The line between reality and fiction is becoming increasingly blurred: Is this video real or AI? Is ChatGPT reliable? What news online is indisputably true?

We are tempted to distill out the falsehoods and artificialities of our daily life, to discern the real and unreal in our quotidian existence. Often, there seems to be a gulf between our perceptions of the world and the one that we want to fully believe in. Authenticity is what we want from our world, from others and from ourselves. The question is how do we find it?

The problem of what we want – how to know what we want – is more complex than it appears. This is especially true in an algorithm-driven attention economy which directly shapes what we want and transforms the shape of the world we see. We are exposed to more data, but often in the absence of history, context, depth and experience. This excess of data or noise has negative value and diminishes the probability of insight. We confuse data with information, information with knowledge (“Not ideas about the Thing), and knowledge with wisdom (“but the Thing itself”).

On behalf of the CSSW Staff and Board of Directors, we wish you the best in your future endeavors.

F. J. Chu
Principal