Spinning Towards Singularity: An Entry Point to AI
Hi, I’m Sydney Dauphinais — a Gen-Z/Millennial cusper with a recently obtained journalism degree, an accomplishment I celebrated pandemic-style in my living room. I’m a writer and audio producer.
I’m starting a newsletter called Spinning with Singularity. I know it might sound crazy, because I’ve lived most of my life being technologically incompetent, but I’m now writing about Artificial Intelligence.
I’m usually excited to learn new things. But if it’s any more technologically elaborate than unplugging the Wi-Fi box and plugging it back in, I’m not interested. I stay away from math, too. I haven’t taken a math class since I flunked 12th grade statistics, because that was embarrassing and hard. Instead of seeing my shortcomings as opportunities to improve, I’ve routinely opted for peaceful ignorance.
Up until recently, I maintained this avoidance technique pretty well. I scooted through college with a group of creative liberal arts friends, and we existed largely independent of hard sciences. But now that I’ve graduated, I’m out of that cultural bubble. Through random happenstance in my semi-desperate post-grad job search, I landed a researching gig that was really out of my comfort zone: I was researching Artificial Intelligence.
When I first started researching AI, it felt like I was having flashbacks to tenth grade physics. I was lost and couldn’t find an entry point. If I wasn’t getting paid, I would have quit so much earlier.
Spinning Towards Singularity will hopefully bridge that gap for people like me, people who missed the invitation to join a conversation about AI. AI is developing so fast and it shouldn’t be left solely to people who live and breathe programming. Sometimes it feels like developers are just talking to each other instead of to the public. Spinning Towards Singularity will help you see that there’s already a slew of ways AI can be leveraged in liberal arts fields. It can streamline workflow, help with research, limit biases and minimize writer’s block — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The first step in utilizing AI, though, is understanding what it is and what it might mean for you.
Spinning towards Singularity will keep you in the loop on all things AI without the elitist jargon. I’ll be providing weekly articles and analysis as well as experts to help break it all down. I’ll highlight ethical issues and introduce some of my original ideas. AI is a key part of the information revolution that is underway. It’s important to us that communicators, artists and “people-people” aren’t left in the dust.
If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions on how to start this journey, please send them my way. I want to hear from you and learn together so that we can get involved with AI and make it all a little less intimidating.
Here we go.
