It would be foolish to suggest that dead speech will supplant living speech in all cases. Automation has its limits. Just as there are qualities of human labor that remain well beyond the reach of machines, so there are qualities of human speech that chatbots are unlikely to ever replicate. But what exactly are those qualities, and how important are they to us, really? To put it into the coarse terms of business, will those distinctively human qualities survive competition with labor-saving alternatives? Many of us like to believe that self and speech are deeply, inextricably intertwined. The self emerges through acting in the world, but it also emerges through speaking in the world. That proposition is about to be put to the test. We may discover that dead speech is sufficient for our purposes.
Mandy Brown wrote a wonderful post that I responded to, and now she’s back with an even better and deeper post. Even as I grow increasingly persuaded that Substack can become a genuine alternative to legacy journalism, I am also increasingly persuaded that the open web is a genuine and necessary alternative, for some writers, to platforms like Substack.
Brad East asks “What does an idol promise?” — and then answers the question. A useful reminder that the Church needs a stronger idolology. This is a good start. See also my old post explaining that we carry idol-factories in our pockets.
It has never occurred to me that someone meeting a philosopher might ask “What are your sayings?”
There’s no way I’ll be watching Megalopolis, but the broader point Matt Zoller Seitz makes here is a very good one:
Movies like “Megalopolis” used to be released fairly regularly, by major studios, which are increasingly not in the movie business, but the IP regurgitation business. Movies were always a popular art form, but it used to be understood that sometimes you’d deliberately seek out something different, challenging, and perhaps obscure or ‘arty’ just to have a reaction to it and be able to discuss it with others. Movies like this only seem “indulgent” because we’re so deep into the era where everything has to be unmitigated fan service, the cinematic equivalent of cooking the Whopper exactly how the customer dreamed about ordering it, or else it’s considered a waste of time — or worse, a form of acting-out by some bratty person who thinks they’re an artist rather than what they presumably are, an employee of whomever bought a ticket.
There’s a lot of this.
Meaghan Ritchey does a fascinating interview of Nicholas Ma, whose new documentary Leap of Faith looks fantastic — and extremely important.
Baylor is having an A.I. week and I’m not super happy about it.