Justin Kiggins, neuroscientist, artisinal oboe reed maker, and builder at the intersection of AI and biology, joins us to discuss Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We explore the book’s concept of Quality, what it is, where it lives in the scientific method, and whether AI will make it more or less elusive.

Show notes:

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on Wikipedia
• Plato’s Phaedrus and the myth of Theuth and Thamus — Socrates recounts an Egyptian myth: Theuth, inventor of writing, brings it to King Thamus as a gift for memory; Thamus replies it will do the opposite, replacing real memory with the mere appearance of wisdom. Every technology creates new capabilities and changes what it means to be human.
• The Aswan High Dam - Justin’s example of technology erasing local knowledge.The dam ended the Nile’s annual floods, and with them thousands of years of farming knowledge adapted to those floods
• HarassMap - the SMS-based street harassment reporting platform Justin helped launch in Cairo, Egypt
• Open San Diego - the civic tech community where Jed and Justin first met
• Ted Chiang, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” - Chiang’s essay on why AI-generated text lacks real meaning, which rhymes with Pirsig’s argument about Quality: making choices is the act of creation
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander - Alexander’s “quality without a name” is a great corollary to Pirsig’s concept of Quality
• Emergent Standards - the white paper I quote in the podcast where I explain how the World Wide Web functions as an engine that helps us find new ways to share information about many different things