Now consider that Google and other search engines, which are millions of people’s portals to the whole information environment — to the news, to history, to basic facts about the world — are actively working to replace traditional search results, which point to external websites, with AI summaries that the tech companies control. The source for your entire worldview, if they get their way, will be bots with access to the most vulnerable parts of your psyche and the capacity to influence your thinking, without you ever noticing, in directions the owners of the bots control. Even allowing for the fact that most of the puffy narcissists pulling the strings in tech haven’t had a functional master plan since about 1997, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at this situation and feel nervous.
All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you’re interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.
I would share McKibben’s excitement except for one thing: It’s in the interests of the most powerful people on the planet to make sure this “paradigm shift” doesn’t happen.
My fifth entry on Sayers and Constantine is up. One more to go. However, I have a problem: I recently re-watched Hail, Caesar! and now whenever I read Constantine’s dialogue I hear it in the voice of Baird Whitlock as Autolycus Antoninus.
I believe this is a situation in which the cost of bad advice outweighs the benefit of quick help by 10X, at least. I can, in fact, figure out how to do X using the real docs. Only the doc bot can make things up.
As Kafka says, “A common experience, leading to a common confusion.”
If you’ve ever wondered whether the debate at the Council of Nicaea really mattered, please read my fourth post on Sayers’s play The Emperor Constantine.
I was down at Laity Lodge last week and it rained the whole time I was there, but the Frio Canyon remained and remains safe, even though it’s no more than 20 miles from the Guadalupe. I drove back to Waco in heavy rain, and near Gatesville my car hydroplaned: I slid across the southbound lane — no cars were coming — and crashed sideways into a tree. I was unhurt and, amazingly, I could drive my battered car home. It was a close call and I am a bit shaken, but what happened to me was one of the least serious things that can happen when too much water falls onto bare limestone. I am so grieved for the lost lives — especially the young lives. I don’t know how the families can be comforted, but I pray they will be.
Finished reading: We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole. A brilliant, fascinating, disturbing book. It’s marred by its relentless Manichaeanism: in O’Toole’s moral world there’s nothing bad to be said about people like him, the “sophisticated” and “cosmopolitan” — words he uses unironically and even uncritically —, and nothing good to be said about Catholicism. But if like O’Toole (who’s my age) I had grown up amidst the spectacular moral corruption of the Irish Church, I would probably feel just as he feels. 📚
Finished reading: Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast by Patrick McGilligan. A fascinating book in many ways but Lang was such a despicable person that I feel I need a palate-cleanser of some kind. 📚