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.
Lord Dunsany, from The King of Elfland’s Daughter:
There passed ten years over the fields we know; and Orion grew and learned the art of Oth, and had the cunning of Threl, and knew the woods and the slopes and vales of the downs, as many another boy knows how to multiply figures by other figures or to draw the thoughts from a language not his own and to set them down again in words of his own tongue. And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man’s thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.
My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey:
If there’s anything that could shake the confidence of the conservative warrior, it might be to consider what he’s sacrificing. I would put the question this way: what have you given up in fighting your political battles, in making your shocking and polemical arguments? Have you been calm and open toward your family, receptive toward the people who live alongside you, devoted to your students? Or has your soul changed, such that you no longer speak to old friends or write them off as traitors? Fighting can corrupt the soul. Nobody can be in Ithaka and Troy at the same time. And while you’re in Troy, Ithaka may well be crumbling — especially if nobody is there to tend it.
My disposition is fundamentally conservative, in that I am grateful for the cultural, spiritual, and artistic inheritance I have received and wish to preserve it, contribute to it, and transmit it to later generations. Even my increasing commitment to anarchism arises from my belief that anarchist practices best enable conservation. And like Elizabeth I lament that so many people nowadays call themselves conservatives when they have absolutely zero interest in conserving anything. They’re all fighting like madmen at Troy and have utterly forgotten Ithaka. It’s war for war’s sake.
This timeline of studio gear is awesome.
This house, designed by Richard Neutra, was destroyed by a hurricane just weeks after its completion in 1938.
Faster is obviously better, he says.
Ethan Iverson’s notes from Albert Murray’s memorial service in 2013. I would give a lot to have been there. Murray is a totemic figure for me, as I explained in this essay.