Speaker & Worship Leader:- Ted Zorn

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Ted Zorn © 14 July 2024

I’ve entitled my talk today, “A More Beautiful Question”.

I borrowed the title from a book by the same name, written by former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court Warren Berger. More about him later.

Remember the scene from Alice in Wonderland where Alice asks the Cheshire Cat: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

The Cheshire Cat answers: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

Alice: “I don’t much care where—”.

And Cheshire Cat replies: “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

You could argue that Alice’s was an imperfect question, not a beautiful one. She asked a question without knowing what sort of answer she wanted, or what would in fact be a useful answer. It was a question lacking purpose.

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Speaker & Worship Leader:- Ted Zorn

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Ted Zorn © 27 August 2023

I’ve always had a thing for language. I think I inherited this from my dad. Dad wasn’t highly educated, nor widely read – the only magazines he ever subscribed to were Reader’s Digest and TV Guide, and I never knew him to read a novel — but he loved to play with language.

He often used words that were either made up or some version of a word he’d learned while serving overseas in the military. He would latch on to words and phrases that were new to him.

When he came to New Zealand for the first time, the term flatmate caught his eye – it’s not a term used in the USA — so for his remaining years, he referred to my daughter, his granddaughter, as “my little Kiwi American flatmate”.

In fact, he had nicknames for just about everyone – or at least everyone he liked. They were not all flattering.

Continue reading A rose by any other name is not a rose, part 2 →

Speaker and Worship Leader:- Ted Zorn

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Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Ted Zorn © 8th January 2023

Today, I want to talk about finding our humanity in a technologized world and the dangers of relying too heavily on technology to do tasks that we expect to be done by humans. Specifically, I want to delve into the questions raised by the fact that a machine like ChatGPT can write a speech, a personal letter, or your child’s essay assignment.

For those who may not be familiar, ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It has been trained on a vast amount of data and is able to generate human-like text on a variety of topics. It is a relatively new technology and its capabilities are still being explored and refined.

Continue reading Finding our humanity in a technologized world →