’Twas the Night before Retirement (A Farewell to Moristotle & Co.)

By Bettina Sperry

’Twas the night before Retirement, when all through the blog

Not a keyboard was stirring, not even a mouse;

The stories and poems were all hung with care,

In hopes that Goines On soon would be there;

The writers were nestled all snug in their beds;

While visions of agents danced in their heads;

And mamma in her ’kerchief, and I in my cap,

Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

AI Will Not Take Over

By Bettina Sperry

[Editor’s Note: In response Maureen Dowd’s “Don’t Kill ‘Frankenstein’ with Real Frankensteins at Large” (NY Times, May 27), Bettina weighed in on the threat of an AI takeover.]

Maureen Dowd is right that a lot of colleges are dropping liberal arts degrees. And Noor Anand Chawla acknowledges it too, in her article “Why Asian Universities Are Embracing US Liberal Arts Programs” (JSTOR Daily, May 21):

…in the early years of this century, it seemed that the United States was shifting focus from promoting liberal arts education. These “worrying signs” of the United States “turning away from the tradition of liberal arts education that has made it a global leader in post-secondary education over the past century,” were noted by Pericles Lewis, the President of Yale-NUS College, Singapore, in a 2013 essay published in the Harvard International Review.
    Lewis points out that while language and literature departments were being cut in the US, as students preferred to pursue technical or pre-professional majors [emphasis mine….]

    See also “The Decline of Liberal Arts and Humanities” (Wall Street Journal, March 28), in which students discuss higher education and their choice of major.
    Of course, student preferences for programs leading to well-paid jobs aren’t the only factor, but many of those jobs are to help develop AI.
    And Dowd’s concern is reflected in a recent CNN article, “Experts are warning AI could lead to human extinction. Are we taking it seriously enough?” (Oliver Darcy, May 31):

On Tuesday, hundreds of top AI scientists, researchers, and others — including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis — again voiced deep concern for the future of humanity, signing a one-sentence open letter to the public that aimed to put the risks the rapidly advancing technology carries with it in unmistakable terms.
    “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” said the letter, signed by many of the industry’s most respected figures.
    It doesn’t get more straightforward and urgent than that. These industry leaders are quite literally warning that the impending AI revolution should be taken as seriously as the threat of nuclear war….

I’m not a believer that AI will take over everything. Rather, given human nature and violence, I think that over time, AI will become self-limiting by default of human interference, destructiveness, and an ability to pull the plug. Humans are too selfish for an AI takeover. The hand of greed is always present.
    The article “Jim Chanos, Bank of America, and others still aren’t jumping on the AI hype train” (by George Glover, Business Insider, June 3) supports my view:

For Chanos and others, the craze that’s currently taking Wall Street by storm has more in common with a fad like the metaverse than revolutionary technologies that genuinely disrupted the stock market.

    Corporate use of AI is already an issue, and arguments are in progress. See, for example, the NY Times article “Microsoft Calls for A.I. Rules to Minimize the Technology’s Risks” (David McCabe, May 25).
    Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak called for ethical regulation (and for the use of AI to detect bad uses of AI) in the May 2^nd CNN broadcast, “‘The Godfather of AI’' quits Google and warns of its dangers. Apple co-founder weighs in.” Watch his short video statement here.
    The issue of human safety is currently being tossed around by those at the leading edge of AI research. See for example, “‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation” (by Josh Taylor and Alex Hern, The Guardian, May 2). And the following, earlier reference to Hinton comes from the April 17 Yahoo News “Elon Musk, who cofounded OpenAI, says he tried to make it ‘the furthest thing from Google’ after disagreeing with Larry Page over AI safety”:

He [Dr Geoffrey Hinton] is not alone in the upper echelons of AI research in fearing that the technology could pose serious harm to humanity. Last month, Elon Musk said he had fallen out with the Google co-founder Larry Page because Page was “not taking AI safety seriously enough.” Musk told Fox News that Page wanted “digital superintelligence, basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible.”

    Clearly, there is a concern that AI has the ability to misinform and mislead humans. One has to wonder what tools are available to continuously fact-check the information AI produces. And if none exists, then the line between truth and fiction becomes ever more blurred, chaotic, problematic, and harmful. From the same Yahoo News report:

Toby Walsh, the chief scientist at the University of New South Wales AI Institute, said people should be questioning any online media they see now:
    “When it comes to any digital data you see – audio or video – you have to entertain the idea that someone has spoofed it.”

    Somewhere, at some point, someone will establish limits to prevent the destruction AI is believed to be able to cause, including destruction of the human race.

A closing thought on the value of humanities education, from the Noor Anand Chawla article quoted at the top:

Ask any educator what sets American higher education apart from the rest of the world, and the response is likely to be its focus and encouragement of a robust liberal arts curriculum. The arts, in general, play a large role in contributing to holistic education that fosters creativity, highlights the importance of collaboration for skill development, and teaches innovative problem-solving. Further, through exposure to the arts, one can learn to appreciate cultural diversity and value freedom of expression while cultivating critical thinking skills, which in the long run, have been known to change lives.

Copyright © 2023 by Bettina Sperry

On Franklin Hill Farm: The Grunt of Death

By Bettina Sperry

The grunt of death. That’s what I once heard it called in relation to horses dying during a race.
    In safety engineering, there are no accidents, just preventable injuries and deaths. Yet the horse racing community cites horse deaths as a natural part of the game – an expected outcome for some horses. Or so the arguments go, some of them claiming that track-related deaths are greatly exaggerated - after all, it used to be worse.

On Franklin Hill Farm: Chicken House Blues

By Bettina Sperry

Slipping out the door, I always seem to walk more quietly when heading to the chicken house. There’s always a gathering of colorful eggs from my assortment of chickens, even here in winter. Some small, some average, and often a really large egg that sometimes contains two yolks. I relish the simple life here on my farm. It is where I gather in the quiet, escaping public chaos to appreciate days paced by Mother Nature for living slowly.

On Franklin Hill Farm: Miss Bossy

By Bettina Sperry

[Editor’s Note: This column marks Bettina Sperry’s return to the staff after a few years’ time-out. Let’s all welcome her back!]

Recently, I spent a few days watching one of my new chickens clearly thinking herself a Queen Bee. She gets herself into everyone’s business. She’s got an attitude. She is bossy. She is sure of herself and tells the other chickens what to do. She is a bully as she huffs and puffs her way around the chicken yard. Best of all, she does not think, nor understand, nor does she look behind her, but most importantly, she doesn’t look ahead of herself either.

On Franklin Hill Farm: Mind your own business

By Bettina Sperry

Early this morning, the last fox cub was lost to some unknown cause. Perhaps entangled with the hoof of a horse, I really don’t know, but I found it in the pasture next to the house – not in the dog run, not in the road, but with the four horses kept close to the house. Its body was still soft.

On Franklin Hill Farm: Under foot (a poem)

By Bettina Sperry

In the fields, the grass, the hills,
I searched and wondered
And looked afar.
A fall, a winter, a quiet spring,

On Franklin Hill Farm: In the land of the great pastures (a poem)

With accompanying video

Posted by Franklin Hill Farm on Saturday, May 18, 2019

By Bettina Sperry

In the land of the great pastures
and fairy tale visions
of field flowers and blades of green
where mice and moles
and birds do play,

On Franklin Hill Farm: A little bit of heaven

By Bettina Sperry

About a week ago, early in the day and in the rain, I got on the tractor and headed over to the machine shed, and though I traversed a relatively flat area, the soil and shale were so saturated with water that it was like freshly cooked pudding pouring through the pasture and horse paddock. Hours later, the sun started setting. I realized I had spent my entire afternoon tending a mudslide. Hours of it. Mud had moved and settled in places it really wasn’t supposed to be. With the tractor, I tried to move it along the banks of the run, to serve later as barriers to flooding, but it lay in formless heaps. Mud was everywhere.

On Franklin Hill Farm: Nearing close

By Bettina Sperry

So, another year comes near to close.
    I spent Christmas day and the day after working on racing books and business, trying to bring complete order to everything as we – my horse racing trainer, Robin Graham, and bookkeeper, Suzanne Trunnell – head into 2019.

On Franklin Hill Farm: A Great Blue Heron

And other birds I’ve been blessed to see and sometimes photograph

By Bettina Sperry

For the past several years, I’ve had many opportunities to observe our local population of woodpeckers, bluebirds, kingfishers, various owls, and even eagles that nest several miles down the road from Franklin Hill Farm, by our neighborhood lake. I’ve even had the blessing of finding the most beautiful bird’s nest constructed out of duck feathers.

On Franklin Hill Farm: The rustle of brown leaves

A poem of an afternoon’s experience










By Bettina Sperry

With a keen and cautious eye,
I saw two pups
playing and rustling around
like two brown leaves
atop a rolling mountain.

On Franklin Hill Farm: Frozen in time

And in photographs

By Bettina Sperry

Listening to my cows, I stopped for a second. Continuing on, dried hoof prints and crevices remained in the frozen run.

Winter on Franklin Hill Farm

A prose poem to gratitude and worry

By Bettina Sperry

The bitter cold is here and the local temps approach zero each night. This morning our temps were in the negative. I do love cold weather and tend to stay outside working in it and finding farm things to do, but this prolonged deep freeze is making some things impossible to do, and consequently, rearranging my routine and tasks. As well, everything takes longer to complete. While I’m wrapping up year four on this farm, there are improvements yet to be made, fencing to be updated, paddocks to be completed, and a building or two to be added, God willing.

Second Tuesday on Franklin Hill Farm: Women farmers

I am but one

By Bettina Sperry

As a woman who owns her own thoroughbred racehorse farm and raises a few head of cattle, I am always wondering how I’m doing – individually as a business and comparatively across the board. Not short of a strongly competitive nature, I look for ways to grow the farm business. How are my finances? What are my earnings per acre? How do my statistics stack against other farms? I don’t mind asking the hard questions, which include examining the farm’s efficiency and finding ways to leverage greater growth and income without necessarily creating a lot more work or putting the business at risk.

Second Tuesday on Franklin Hill Farm

Distress signal

By Bettina Sperry

Waking up to the peace of this farm each morning has been one of the blessings of luxury afforded to me. With a gorgeous farmhouse front porch, complete with rocking chairs, it would seem that I’d land there to await the morning sun with coffee in hand. Instead, my usual first hour of the day is spent stepping out the back door, walking the yard behind my house, and taking in the beauty of the farm. On many mornings I’ll take a camera with me, especially when the sun is peering over the mountain from the east.

Second Tuesday on Franklin Hill Farm

Stream waterfall (detail)

A quiet Sunday morning walk

By Bettina Sperry

Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus)

Second Tuesday on Franklin Hill Farm

Looking back (and forward)

By Bettina Sperry

The end of July marks a complete year of my life lived on this heavenly farm. The breathtaking beauty of this land ever captures my heart, a feeling that is renewed daily. It is hard to wake up every day and not appreciate the pastures, streams, and mountains that surround my life. The year has not been without its extreme hard work, and I am just beginning to see the change that my presence here brings forth. This farm is so beautiful it is difficult to not revisit the past so as to envision the lives of those present on this farm long before my arrival. I seem to think equally forward to those who will care for it long after I am gone, as if I am contributing to their dream, as well.

Second Tuesday on Franklin Hill Farm

Detail from bottom photo

Ducks

By
Bettina Sperry

Several months ago I purchased five Pekin ducks and two mallards. I raised them in the kitchen for a short few weeks and then took them outside to finish their rearing. They were handled daily as they matured. As the Pekins turned from yellow to white, and the mallards gained their colors, they graced the creek in the pasture next to the house. Over time, as they grew, they wandered up and down the creek, swimming in the larger holes where they could.

Second Tuesday on Franklin Hill Farm

Tranquility

By
Bettina Sperry

It sets in when foaling and calving season is over. It is arguably one of the most restful and peaceful times of the year for me. Spending time watching the new babies grow consumes much of my attention.