All
The ability to exchange mundane information from afar — even from across the street at a friend’s house — is part of being a whole person in the world today…. Like it or not, becoming a person in the 2020s means becoming a user of computers. It also means figuring out how to express yourself online.
Question: If those who do not regularly use internet-connected devices and do not express themselves online are not persons, what are they?
At this point, AI tools like Gemini should be able to make most digitized handwritten documents searchable and readable in transcription. This is, simply put, a major advance that we’ve been trying to achieve for a very long time, and a great aid to scholarship. It allows human beings to focus their time on the important, profound work of understanding another human being, rather than staring at a curlicue to grasp if it’s an L or an I. Could we also ask Gemini to formulate this broader understanding? Sure we could, but that’s the line that we, and our students, should resist crossing. The richness of life lies in the communion with other humans through speech, the written word, sounds, and images.
This is good news not just for scholars, but also for writers. I do a great deal of writing by hand, and would do more except for the annoyance of getting what I write into publishable form. I have a system, but it’s not good enough. Perhaps I will soon have a better one. ✍️
Psychedelics are remarkably helpful in coming to see what an utter farce human institutions are: academia, celebrity, media, elections, prize committees, social distinction of any sort, nations, wars—vanity of vanities! “It is all ridiculous, when you think of death,” the atheist writer Thomas Bernhard said upon being given some distinction or other. He was right, of course, but he could not detect a certain significant corollary that only becomes clear when you look beyond death: that a life spent working in full knowledge of our true nature, as mortal sinners offered the infinite gift of redemption, can be a pretty wonderful thing, even if, incidentally, some prizes and distinctions happen to come our way in the course of it.
Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong:
What’s undeniable is that we’re all living in a world where the whims and desires of wealthy and powerful men create uncertain, unstable conditions for everyone else. Although no other major chatbot has gone ballistic in the same ways as Grok, any one of them could be subtly tweaked to promote a given viewpoint over another, or to quietly manipulate users toward whatever purpose. Likewise, any major creator of AI models unwittingly [AJ: or wittingly] instills biases in its chatbots that are then difficult to expunge. Every user of mainstream AI or social media is subject to a calculus that they have no control over.
So maybe don’t use mainstream AI or social media?
Six years ago, after watching my circle of friends surrender one too many evenings to insurance wrangling and doctor portals and DMV confusion, I emailed them a proposal: Come over next Tuesday. Grab a six pack. And bring your bills, your credit-card statements, your school forms, the streaming services you need to unsubscribe from, the airline miles you need to manage, the expenses app you need to figure out. I’d be throwing the lamest party ever.
At the heart of this party was a truth that has gone under-acknowledged in recent years: We’re all sinking. We’re sinking into a quicksand of tiny, dumb administrative tasks. It is the most tedious quicksand imaginable.
So true. Too true to be good.
My son pointed me to this, and said that it’s the definitive version of this song — one of the most vital rock ’n’ roll songs. He’s right. And essential to the greatness here is the incomparable Roy Bittan. ♫
I have no evangelical trauma story. While I am genuinely sorry for those who do have trauma stories, I come up short when scanning my own experience in evangelicalism for cults of personality, charismatic grifters, or spiritual abuse. I am keenly aware such things happen, because the algorithms that deliberately amplify such occasions won’t let them escape anyone’s notice. But my lived reality of “evangelicalism” (I’ll explain what I mean by this below) was in practice not flashy unfaithfulness but unflashy faithfulness. This is not the stuff from which bestsellers are wrought.
From an anthropological study by Polly W. Wiessner:
Control of fire and the capacity for cooking led to major anatomical and residential changes for early humans, starting more than a million years ago. However, little is known about what transpired when the day was extended by firelight. Data from the Ju/’hoan hunter-gatherers of southern Africa show major differences between day and night talk. Day talk centered on practicalities and sanctioning gossip; firelit activities centered on conversations that evoked the imagination, helped people remember and understand others in their external networks, healed rifts of the day, and conveyed information about cultural institutions that generate regularity of behavior and corresponding trust. Appetites for firelit settings for intimate conversations and for evening stories remain with us today.
I spend a lot of time reading the arguments of my nonfiction writer friends and admirees — peers in policy, academia, journalism — and I am plenty often convinced by them in the usual way. I am convinced by their logic and by their evidentiary appeals. I desperately need that persuasion as nourishment, and I seek out minds much sharper and more skilled than my own. I need a steady diet of their ideas to think with. I’m acutely aware of my limitations.
But I don’t really long to join these writers in that kind of persuasion, to have that form of something to say…. I want to be convincing about what it feels like to be a human being.
SAME.
The story of Pandora’s box isn’t about closing it. AI music is already a part of the technological landscape we live in; however, it won’t dominate that landscape forever. In fact, I would suggest its dominance may be very brief indeed.
Why? Cause it sucks.
I’m not going to link to the fully generative AI “country” song that supposedly topped a Billboard chart recently, cause I don’t want to give it any more clicks. Let’s just assume it’s as bad as you imagine, cause in fact it’s worse. As is most everything that AI churns out. It’s beyond imagination because it doesn’t come from one.
♫