Can’t imagine a better Lenten endeavor than to read and reflect on Matt Milliner’s close encounter of the chatbot kind.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. Very large version here. As Auden reminds us, one of the most noteworthy elements of these crowded Bruegel paintings is the depiction of people going about their own business, completely oblivious to whatever theme or topic the painting is supposed to be depicting.
Currently reading: Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha 📚
Mary Elizabeth Groom’s engravings from the 1937 Golden Cockerel Press edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost:
Last week I announced to my BMAC supporters that I’ll be severely curtailing my Big Blog for the foreseeable future, but I’ve discovered that I have a few drafts of essays — nearly finished or else complete but with no obvious home — that I could post. So one of those went up today: it’s on making movies and making war. I wrote it after reading Dan Wang’s Breakneck.
I’m grateful to Amanda Patchin for this generous review of my Paradise Lost biography.
Thinking of buying this house — I mean, how much could it cost?
I often think of a passage from David Foster Wallace’s famous essay on television, “E Unibus Pluram,” in relation to our current media environment:
TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
I would rather call it Writers for Writing, but sure, sign me up.
As a friend who works in Al told me, Al heightens the contradictions. It is a boon to those with the motivation and background to cultivate knowledge but it spells total destruction for the system of universal education and credentialing. My worry is that we may run out of people with motivation and background to learn, know, and do. In the future, Gen X and millennial knowledge workers will be the human capital equivalent to pre-war steel. Just as particle detectors need steel forged before atmospheric nuclear testing gave all newly forged steel unacceptable background radiation, we will discover that even if your job mostly consists of interacting with LLMs, doing so well will require people who remember what it was like to read and interpret a document or contrast two ideas without asking an LLM to do it for you.
I’m very much enjoying teaching Lud-in-the-Mist again. A few years back I wrote a brief essay about it.
A heart-breaking and heart-healing reflection by Rachel Teubner on birth and death in an endlessly mobile world.
States struggled to work out their role in these rapidly changing systems. Private mail presented different problems: should couriers working for state-funded postal services be allowed to carry post on behalf of paying customers? For the states that underwrote postal systems, this was risky – it increased the risk of robbery since private mail often included money and valuables – yet attractive: an efficient postal service subsidised by private clients would be less of a drain on state resources. Controlling the carriers of private mail also made surveillance simpler. As time went on, the price of sending a private letter fell, so that more ordinary people were involved in the flow of mail and news: ‘What had started as a state privilege had become a preferred public service.’ Crucially, by the second half of the 17th century, the postal stagecoach had become the essential vehicle of European travel, carrying passengers at the same speed as it delivered the mail. The machinery of the post – its itineraries and printed guides, inns as relay stations, couriers with local knowledge – adapted seamlessly to facilitate a new era of tourism and would form the backbone of the Grand Tour. The infrastructure of posts and couriers that served states and merchants laid the foundations for a revolution in communications.
I wonder how many U.S. court cases have already been decided by judges using chatbots to write their opinions in response to lawyers on both sides who used chatbots to write their briefs.
It’s interesting and useful to imagine — really visualize — the chatbots and agents in ten years or twenty … barnacled with gunk … locked in a permanent cat-and-mouse game with their adversaries … just as a platform like Google is today. In 2036, you send your AI agent out into the internet, and it returns battered, bedraggled, inexplicably enthusiastic about a bargain flight to Bermuda.
