Playtime

 One of the various sources of the renewed wave of AI panic sweeping the ranks of pundits this week is the fact that the very thing we thought was most human and least likely to ever be automated—namely, artistic creation—is turning out to be one of the first casualties of generative AI. Screenplays, poems, novels, and illustrations turn out to be some of the things that are easiest to replicate with machines. Which is terrifying. 

But before we succumb to the general anxiety, let us ask exactly what it is we find so appalling about this fact. Are we feeling some threat of existential hollowness or erasure at the fact that something else can now do what we thought we alone could do? This hardly seems warranted. At any rate, the fact that AI chatbots can write blogs too is not all that intrinsically different from the fact that other human beings can write them. 

Peak AI Panic is Back

 I was saying just the other day on this blog that there was a weird and growing disconnect between the panic consuming the world of Bay Area AI developers, and the generally blasé attitude toward AI on the part of the rest of us "normies." 

This was definitely a week, though, in which the gap suddenly shrunk. The panic caught up with the rest of us—helped in large part by a single, well-written and algorithmically-optimized X post called "Something Big is Happening." 

Copernican Revolutions

 A friend was saying to me the other day that AI appears destined to create another "Copernican Revolution." 

He wasn't saying this in the sense that it would be a scientific breakthrough. Rather, he had in mind the sense of psychological homelessness and estrangement it would produce. 

Recall that before Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe—our cosmos seemed like a cozy, womb-like environment build to humankind's needs and specifications. 

Our Man in Caracas

 The Wall Street Journal has a story out this morning that reads like a chapter from a Graham Greene novel. One of Trump's personal cronies and golfing buddies has reportedly been lobbying from behind the scenes for years to try to "pry open" the Venezuelan oil market for U.S. business interests. If this meant working with Maduro, that was fine with him. And so, for a while, he concentrated his efforts on trying to persuade Rick Grenell and the rest of the Trump administration to make nice with the ruling regime. Cut a deal with Maduro to accept deportations and get the oil flowing, he told them. 

Let us keep in mind, here, that "accepting deportations" means cajoling Maduro into being willing to collaborate with the U.S. government in its effort to forcibly expel asylum seekers—many of them pro-democracy Venezuelan opposition activists who, in a sane world, would be natural allies for the United States—back to the hands of the regime they fled. And intermittently, of course—though not always—Maduro was willing to do precisely that. And the U.S. government was more than happy to send innocent people into his clutches. 

Fear of Death

 In his book on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe—whom he groups together as "philosophical poets"—George Santayana discusses at one point those famous arguments in Lucretius's On the nature of things devoted to dispelling the fear of death. 

We have nothing to fear from dying, Lucretius assures us. Through a number of arguments, he seeks to persuade us that the soul cannot be immortal. It must, in fact, perish with the body. 

The Muggletonians

 In his capsule biography of the seventeenth century English preacher and self-declared prophet Lodowicke Muggleton, Lytton Strachey remarks toward the close of the essay that "one would be sorry if the time ever came that there were no more Muggletonians." 

E.P. Thompson, it is known, lived to see that sad era. In his book about William Blake, Witness Against the Beast, he describes his meeting with the last Muggletonian, with whose expiration in 1979 the entire prophetic sect sank into oblivion. 

"And that is what I have to put up with from you?"

 The Associated Press ran an appalling and heartbreaking story this morning about a man—an immigrant from Mexico and a father—who is now suffering from multiple severe brain injuries because ICE agents attacked him, reportedly fracturing his skull in eight places with a steel baton. 

When he woke up from the beating, he told reporters, he at first could not recall that he had a daughter. And still to this day—due to brain hemorrhaging and head trauma—he finds himself unable to remember treasured moments of his life, such as teaching his daughter to dance when she was five years old.