I hope you won’t mind my linking to my own, smaller-scale attempt at “doing the robot” (as I think you put it a few months ago, w/r/t James Brown and writing in the AI era):
Justin, "Consciousness.— Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong. Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, “exceeding destiny,” as Homer puts it. If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity—in short, of its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would long have disappeared." —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
I love this essay you have written, but I just feel compelled to caution you, that in the wake of the AI mushroom cloud of omniscience wafting around us all, we do need to leave space for subliteracy, unconscious instincts, and drives! We might do well to allow ourselves to be stupid for a while until the dust settles and we see whether we can wrangle a new form of literacy from the human deployment of AI.
Nice piece. Chirag’s delivering. You end with the soul. I’ve been noticing that Plato, who has Socrates aggressively force his interlocutors to define their terms, in his many (Socrates-voiced) discussions of the soul never defines it, but skips right over into metaphor (chariots, etc). How do you define it? I ask not as a challenge but because I’m collecting definitions.
I am going to have to have an AI read this aloud to me, as my attention span has become a casualty of overwork and the attention-span-drought through which we are currently living, but I very much appreciate you having written it. My first point of comparison was when someone offered me low-paid Phillipines-based assistants I could hire to run my philosophy/entertainment/vaguely-Sophistry business for me, which, of course, I absolutely was thrilled to never consider. XO
I hope you won’t mind my linking to my own, smaller-scale attempt at “doing the robot” (as I think you put it a few months ago, w/r/t James Brown and writing in the AI era):
https://pulpstack.substack.com/p/our-ai-disclosure
Justin, "Consciousness.— Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong. Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, “exceeding destiny,” as Homer puts it. If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity—in short, of its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would long have disappeared." —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
I love this essay you have written, but I just feel compelled to caution you, that in the wake of the AI mushroom cloud of omniscience wafting around us all, we do need to leave space for subliteracy, unconscious instincts, and drives! We might do well to allow ourselves to be stupid for a while until the dust settles and we see whether we can wrangle a new form of literacy from the human deployment of AI.
Nice piece. Chirag’s delivering. You end with the soul. I’ve been noticing that Plato, who has Socrates aggressively force his interlocutors to define their terms, in his many (Socrates-voiced) discussions of the soul never defines it, but skips right over into metaphor (chariots, etc). How do you define it? I ask not as a challenge but because I’m collecting definitions.
I am going to have to have an AI read this aloud to me, as my attention span has become a casualty of overwork and the attention-span-drought through which we are currently living, but I very much appreciate you having written it. My first point of comparison was when someone offered me low-paid Phillipines-based assistants I could hire to run my philosophy/entertainment/vaguely-Sophistry business for me, which, of course, I absolutely was thrilled to never consider. XO