Today we will begin an occasional feature highlighting articles and posts that I’ve come across that I think you would find interesting, enjoyable, or helpful. We won’t do this every week, but we might from time to time. Sometimes I stumble onto things that don’t lend themselves to an extensive blog post or to a miscellany news item, but they just beg to be shared.
I’ll offer my brief takes, but I hope you’ll click on through to read the whole articles. (Sometimes they may be behind a paywall–I’ve upped the number of my subscriptions in my quest to find good material for my blog–so in that case, I’ll give you the gist.)
So here we go: The third wave of dog domestication; why AI is dumber than a cat; and shotgun preaching and rifle preaching.
The Third Wave of Dog Domestication
We seem to be in a golden age of pets. While only 40% of American households have children, 70% have pets! Of those, 44.5% of the households have dogs, and 29% of the households have cats.
In a story for The Atlantic, but available at Microsoft Start, Brian Hare says that Dogs Are Entering a New Wave of Domestication.
He says that originally dogs were domesticated in order to do work: to help with the hunting, herding livestock, guarding property, defending homes. So different breeds got good at those tasks. Labrador retrievers are good swimmers and love to fetch birds. Border collies are great at tending sheep. For the other purposes, though, humans prized dogs that would bark loudly when they saw a stranger and were aggressive and ferocious against an animal or human threat.
With the Industrial Revolution, Bare says, the need for working dogs declined, and, with the rise of middle class households, dogs became valued as pets. With the rise of scientific classification and genetic breeding techniques, dogs were bred mainly for their appearance. That is, the most prized dogs were those that exhibited the ideal characteristics of their breed. This, says Bare, is where we got the 200 breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club, which still judges dogs on that basis at dog shows.
Until about the 1990s, these pedigreed dogs were well adapted to the suburban lifestyle. They spent most of their lives outside, perhaps jumping the fence and roaming the neighborhood. They might chase the occasional car or mailman, or even wander off for a day or two. Veterinary medication was not what it is today, and if your dog slept on your bed, you would likely wake up covered in ticks or fleas. But as more city dwellers adopt pets, and cultural shifts have led dogs and people to spend more time inside, some behaviors that made dogs appealing to our ancestors have become maladaptive. For instance, guarding against strange people and animals might make a dog more difficult to walk around the neighborhood—so it gets stuck in a small yard or a small apartment with tons of pent-up energy. Dogs that are more energetic, excitable, fearful, or anxious than average are more likely to be relinquished to shelters, where they may struggle to find a new home.
Why AI Is Dumber Than a Cat
Speaking of dogs, let’s also speak of cats. The Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist Christopher Mims interviewed Yann LeCun, one of the original developers of today’s artificial intelligence. Unlike some of his co-inventors and technology speculators, LeCun, while having high hopes for the technology, is a skeptic when it comes to the notions that AI will achieve consciousness, become godlike, and take over the world, in the process exterminating the human race like we exterminate insects.
In Mims’ article, “This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat” [behind a paywall], LeCun demystifies AI. “Today’s models are really just predicting the next word in a text, he says. But they’re so good at this that they fool us. And because of their enormous memory capacity, they can seem to be reasoning, when in fact they’re merely regurgitating information they’ve already been trained on.”
And here is where the cat comes in:
“It seems to me that before ‘urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us’ we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,” he replied on X.
He likes the cat metaphor. Felines, after all, have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning ability and a capacity for planning, he says. None of these qualities are present in today’s “frontier” AIs.
Shotgun Preaching and Rifle Preaching
In the course of reviewing a book by Lutheran pastor Matt Popovits entitled Junk Drawer Jesus: Discarding Your Spiritual Clutter and Rediscovering the Supremacy of Grace for Religion & Liberty Online, another Lutheran pastor, Hans Fiene, whom we recently profiled along with his cartoon likeness, offered a quite useful metaphor.
He talks about the difference between a shotgun and a rifle, relating them to two ways of preaching God’s Law. The pastor’s primary duty, he stresses, is to proclaim the forgiveness of sins through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is, to preach the Gospel. “But in order for people to understand and believe that Christ is their savior, they must first understand what He has saved them from.” To awaken them to their need and to stir the repentance that leads to faith, pastors must preach the Law, both as a shotgun and as a rifle:
You need to take out the shotgun and fire wide blasts of condemnation into the crowd. You have to preach broadly about broad sins, things like idolatry and pride, anger, and greed. Make statements like “We have all failed to treat people the way we should have” and everybody in the pews will get a bit torn up from the shotgun pellets. But these rather general statements are often not deadly enough to help people see what transgression they hold most dear, the ones that are hindering them from dying to sin and being reborn in Christ.
That’s when you need rifle preaching, the kind where you name very specific sins so that those who are guilty of them can feel the full force of God’s law. This is how those who view pornography see that God isn’t just generally upset about lust among humans, but that His wrath burns against them for the very specific images they gazed up. This is how those who spend all night cursing politicians while watching cable news learn that God doesn’t just call a blob of people away from a blob of sin called anger, but that He calls them to turn from the very words that have erupted from their own lips. Rifle preaching is necessary, but still has its own challenges. If you preach against pornography specifically, the man who has a pure browser history but ogles women at the gym may think he’s not guilty of sin. If you preach against raging against politicians, those who are more politically irenic but won’t forgive the sins of their neighbors or children won’t feel the sting of God’s condemnation hit them.
That’s why both styles are needed. And over the course of a man’s years in the pulpit, he’ll have plenty of time to take out both weapons.
Illustration: St. Margaret, reading , fragment from the Prague Altarpiece (1520) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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