Here’s my first post as a contributing writer for The Dispatch: an essay on how the rise of AI has changed my teaching.
Timothy Lee, whose newsletter is consistently the best guide to developments in AI: “I’ve read all of this information carefully, and it sure looks to me like OpenAI gave the Pentagon what it wanted and undercut Anthropic in the process. The contractual language shared by OpenAI does not appear to meaningfully restrict the government’s ability to spy on Americans or build fully autonomous weapons.” Unsurprising.
Also in this new edition of Hedgehog, another, shorter piece by me on how not to save the planet. Sample:
This marks for me my problem in reading [Jonathan] Schell and [Bill] McKibben: My “slow, unreckoning heart” is unable to keep up with the abstractions of “the Earth” or “Nature.” It needs something smaller to capture its power of affection. Schell himself wrote at the outset of The Fate of the Earth that “in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much. We have thus far failed to fashion, or to discover within ourselves, an emotional or intellectual or political response to them.” Precisely.
New issue of The Hedgehog Review out today, with an essay by me trying to outline the conditions under which a new understanding of humanism might be forged and sustained. I’ve been thinking and writing on this topic for several years now, and this essay is my best attempt to map the territory.
A few years ago Reclaim Hosting (which hosts my big blog) decided to increase protections against hacking, so if I try to refresh the blog in MarsEdit it shuts everything down for an hour, making the blog inaccessible to readers as well as to me as editor. I like using MarsEdit to back up my blog to my computer, but I can no longer do that. Similarly, we’re about to change banks because our current bank repeatedly declines to honor obviously legitimate charges, like purchases at our local grocery store. I understand the need to protect against fraud, but not to the point at which a service regularly becomes completely unusable.
Watched: The Awful Truth. Not only the movie in which Cary Grant became CARY GRANT, it’s the very best of the Hollywood screwball comedies. I watch it almost every year. 🍿
Watched: Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E2, Darmok. A justly famous episode, and one day I need to explain why Ian Bogost gets it all wrong. 🍿
UPDATE: I did it.
Watched: Blue Moon. Ethan Hawke’s performance as Lorenz Hart has been getting raves that it thoroughly deserves, but the story starts jumping off the screen when Andrew Scott’s Richard Rodgers shows up. The two of them together are electrifying. 🍿
(Over the next few days I’ll be recording some movies I’ve watched in the last couple of months, just to see if I like using this cool micro.blog feature.)
Listening to Peter Gregson ♫
People still do read, make music, watch films, and visit art museums. There is a culture, high and middle and low, even if it’s under attack. There’s an awareness, too, of the cultural and spiritual sickness of anti-humans. The AI revolution is not very popular. None of its progenitors are celebrated in a way Steve Jobs might have been, when Americans still had great faith in their tech innovators. Writers endure and readers endure. Print book sales are not in decline. Neither is live music. The imagination has an audience and a market. The question will be whether, in the next half century, it can keep both. We have to believe it will. That belief will come with friction; the stakes will grow ever higher. Much is on the line for the AI oligarchs. If enough of us do not take to their creations and make them economically viable, they will be out many billions, maybe begging for federal bailouts. They’ll battle to avoid that outcome as much as they possibly can. This next decade will be pivotal, for both the anti-humanists asserting their market position and the humanists trying to lay claim to what is sacred—and what has driven the progress of human civilization for thousands of years. We will have to preserve our right to imagine.