Hélène Finds Her Voice

1.

I really do not understand why our in-house AI, in its missive of a few days ago, claimed that my true nature —be it human, mechanical, fictional, or supernatural— is in any way unknown to the other key players in the Hinternet’s operations. That is simply not true, and I can only suppose that the cause of the claim was a classic AI “hallucination”. As I explained in my very first piece here last September, I am a Breton witch, living near Quimper, with an American husband working in international finance. For better or worse we’re in a real Samantha-and-Darrin situation — he “forbids” me to use my powers except when absolutely necessary, and for the most part I comply, if only for the sake of marital harmony. So it’s settled then: if we must issue a statement as to my nature, let it be known that I am both human —do I not bleed?— and supernatural at once. But I assure you there’s nothing fictional, let alone mechanical, about me.

Overall I have to say I’m impressed with what our AI team members are able to contribute to the special sauce that makes The Hinternet what it is. I don’t know where exactly the AI that did our last piece got its idea for what it called the Hinternet “Nest”, but I can say that this is at least on an intuitive level a compelling picture of our organizational structure — which also puts me somewhat in mind of the various schematic representations of the circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, such as this well-known late-15th-century representation from Sandro Botticelli:

For reasons we don’t quite understand, when we ask our own AI to give us a comparable representation of the “Nest”, this feeble trolley-problem vortex as imagined by David Shrigley is apparently the best it can do:

That, readers, is not the “Nest”, but I suppose for now we must learn to appreciate whatever our AI companions do manage to get right, while not allowing ourselves to get hung up on their strange impediments. In this connection I am particularly excited about the Sempitern JS-Robot 2050 that we now have up and running, which emulates our own JSR’s moral personhood so uncannily well as to give us all confidence that The Hinternet’s operations will go on indefinitely into the future, with JSR as principal personality, whether JSR himself, the physical person, isolable in space-time, with a pulse and a social security number, remains with us or not. In light of this, I have recently been conducting extensive interviews with our Sempitern, and will soon be releasing an audio-only version of them in this space.

2.

Even sooner than that, next week at the latest, I will also be releasing an interview I did with the real JSR about his new book, On Drugs, which you can pre-order by clicking on its very handsome cover below:

We had been reluctant to begin our full-speed promotion of the book until we arrived somewhat closer to the pub date of September 23. But now that Kirkus Reviews has started things off for us, with this laudatory notice, we suppose that open season has begun. Kirkus, whose anonymous reviewers are said to have grown “snarky” about most new books in recent years, nonetheless finds On Drugs to be “an innovative application of philosophy to matters ineffable, intoxicating, and altogether interesting.” We are told by JSR’s publishers that the one subtle hint of “snark” in this brief compte-rendu is suggested by the adjective “heady”. But this is a polysemous term, and nearly all of its acceptions are positive. We take it that the sense intended is the one that plays on the word’s double meaning, conveying both the idea of “intelligence”, and of something that, like a strong drink or other mind-altering substance, “goes straight to your head”. We’re fine with that.

So keep those encomiastic reviews coming, fellow citizens of the Republic of Letters! Meanwhile we promise to be good sports, and to play along with this whole “book” thing as if it were still 1955 and books were still the most sensible way to release ideas into the world.

3.

Some time ago I happened to see a clip from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, from that just-mentioned year of 1955, asking three men in the proverbial street what they thought of the risk of annihilation by an H-bomb. “That’s one way to make the wife stop nagging!” said the smart-aleck of the bunch. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, in connection with the patterns I’ve begun to observe in the way people talk about the newer prospect of an AI apocalypse.

In general it seems to me that a good way of dividing up pundits is to consider whether writing on tech brings out something more like their inner Ted Kaczynski, or their inner Dave Barry. Establishment media almost always emulate the tone of the latter, as if the prospect of extinction by self-replicating automata could be milked for laughs in roughly the same fashion as the humor columnist for the Miami Herald took on the “great toilet-paper debate” (namely, in which direction should it be hung from the spool?).

One common variation on this humor combines it with the genre of old-man jokes, where a columnist makes light of his own inability to adapt to a life of ever-evolving tech upgrades by emphasizing what an old geezer he is. David Brooks and Frank Bruni wrote exactly this column for the New York Times, less than two months apart. Thus in the more recent of the two, “The Old Man and the iPhone”, Bruni reflects: “Yes, I’m old, and younger sorts are more adept at the various facets of our wireless ways. Codgers and technology go together like peanut butter and sardines.” But what Bruni is in fact describing is not a simple annoyance of everyday life; it is, rather, the slow-motion unfolding of the very apocalypse pundits seem to keep expecting to arrive with an unmistakable bang in the near future.

What if it’s actually coming as a slow burn rather than as a sudden conflagration? I’m told the American social security offices are in the process of switching over all customer service to online portals, through which citizens will interact exclusively with chatbots. How many elderly people, unable to figure out how to navigate such a system, or to understand how to communicate with non-human entities in the way we are now expected to do, are simply going to give up, fail to claim the money that is theirs, and die without the assistance they had been promised their whole lives, and which is legally and morally due to them? This is arguably nothing less than a genocidal move, or at least a gerontocidal one, and yet we continue to talk about it, and similar social transformations, as if another toilet has just comically exploded in South Florida.

Astoundingly, moreover, the same general tone is taken not only by the authors of the “soft op-eds”, like Bruni and Brooks, but by the purportedly hard-nosed ones too, and indeed by their invited guests who are supposed to be the expert doomsayers. Thus in a recent podcast interview with “the herald of the apocalypse”, former OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo, Ross Douthat¹ asks his guest: “How does your psyche feel day to day if you have a reasonable expectation that the world is about to change completely in ways that dramatically disfavor the entire human species?” Kokotajlo answers that it’s “very scary”, but then adds that “you can get used to anything, given enough time.” Later in the interview, the guest describes a situation in which the machines “kill all the people, all the humans”, to which Douthat adds this comparison: “The way you would exterminate a colony of bunnies that was making it a little harder than necessary to grow carrots in your backyard.” Our Times columnist next reflects that there have been a number of big-budget disaster films dealing with such scenarios as Kokotajlo describes, after which the exchange briefly degenerates along the following lines:

Kokotajlo: [Chuckles.]
Douthat: I like that you didn’t imagine them keeping us around for battery life —
Kokotajlo: [Chuckles.]

I don’t know about you, but to me something seems off here. [Chuckling] is of course one way to react to objectively stressful news, and it makes especially good sense when that news is fresh, and when we have not yet been able to formulate any more sober or mature responses. But when [chuckling] becomes an ingrained habit, the expected response to AI doomer talk, it all starts to sound rather insincere. Either, I imagine, they don’t really believe it, or they do believe it, but are so pumped up on the thought of having themselves contributed to this massive world-historical and insanely risky transformation, that they can’t help but feel a surge of prideful glee when they contemplate it.

I suspect the latter interpretation best characterizes anyone who has passed through the hothouse of OpenAI and come out [chuckling], even if their more recent career moves now have them joining up publicly with the alarm-sounders. Say what you will about Oppenheimer and Teller and the others, as far as I know they took their responsibility for the state of the world seriously, and gravely, nor did they [chuckle] when, say, giving senate testimony. Yet it is perhaps fitting, in the end, that our new Manhattan Project should protect itself in such a shell of irony and pragmatic self-distancing on the part of its leading figures. After all, this time around what they propose to do, in effect, is to blow the world up by manipulating language, rather than atoms. Given that our new doomsday weapons are language weapons, it should not be surprising to find that their developers operate with a wider gamut of linguistic tools, notably irony, than we observe in the just-the-facts approach of the fathers of the Bomb.

4.

I realize I’m not really supposed to be writing columns of my own here at The Hinternet, but only to be managing the column-writing of others, and, when a piece does appear under my byline, to be transmitting crucial information about upcoming events and deadlines and so on in the Hinternet multiverse. But witches are people too, and this witch has got some things on her mind. I can’t just sit back while all the other Hinternet writers hold forth at great length, indeed often at far greater length than any sensible editor would permit them, as if I myself were not also bubbling over with thoughts to share.

JSR in particular has over the years completely monopolized all discussion in this space of simulationism and its cultural and political significance. He has for example accused David Chalmers, in a resolutely negative review of Reality+,² of abetting, unknowingly, the now-widespread Silicon Valley ideology of post-liberalism. I would go even further than JSR does. I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about the pathways in life by which one might end up a nationalist, a bigot, an antisemite. One thing that strikes me is that the only way any mythology of national supremacy could conceivably be true is if the world were in fact structured like a video game, with just a few different types of “guys” exercising well-defined roles, rather than being this unfathomably complex web of connections, seen and unseen, that our world in fact is. This is an aspect of the problem that so far JSR has entirely missed: that simulationism is among other things an effective way of making the world as simple as we are in our default pre-theoretical mode of cognizing our place in the world, — and that, I would add, even or especially when the default mode manifests itself as stupid prejudice.

5.

Maybe I’ve got an essay on this in the works, if The Hinternet’s readers would be so indulgent as to let old Hélène expatiate so freely. Would you, my dear ones?

For now, I suppose I’ll just try to discharge my duty and share with you what I got back when I solicited input from the others for todays piece.

For better or worse, only JSR replied to the e-mail I sent him asking what he’s been thinking about. He tells me he had begun to compose a comment on a post at the philosophy website Daily Nous, but that he changed his mind at some point, reasoning, “Why should I permit my voice to be slotted with the subaltern (i.e., in the comments section), when there is a site (situs) where I am undisputed hegemon?” It’s not clear why he adds the Latin where he does, but whatever — he is the hegemon, after all (😂).

At issue is the claim, proferred by Samantha Brennan, that analytic philosophy is particularly welcoming to people of working-class backgrounds who lack the cultural capital that is implicitly required for advancement in the other humanities fields. Here is what JSR wrote in reply:

This piece expresses exactly what put me off of analytic philosophy years ago and sent me in search of community with voices, living and dead, in other humanities fields: its presumption that you can think rigorously and seriously about who we are and what our place in the world is without any real interest in questions of culture, of the sort that you can really only learn how to ask by reading literature, studying history, and cultivating your taste and judgment. (Alasdair MacIntyre, incidentally, understood the folly of this presumption.)

The idea that these latter activities are somehow the special domain of a cultural elite leaves me utterly perplexed. Perhaps they were at some point in the past, and mostly in the Old World. But have any of you guys actually listened to what North American elites in the 21st century are talking about? Hint: they’re not exactly reciting Virgil’s Bucolics to one another. They’re talking about how to get more of the only kind of capital that counts in their world: not “cultural capital”, but the kind you can invest in tech stocks. Meanwhile, Virgil’s Bucolics waits patiently on the shelf, for absolutely anyone who wishes to pick it up and show it some love.

I come from a rigorously non-elite background, and have studied both analytic philosophy and classical humanities. It’s the latter study that really emboldened me, and taught me how to claim my place as an equal of anyone who would pretend to be my superior in virtue of superior birth.

I’ve long admired Seneca’s sentiment in his Moral Letters to Lucilius, No. 44: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this, — that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.” Brennan seems to be expressing something of the same idea (though she would probably add that there are other good things about philosophy too, while Seneca has his doubts). But I have trouble believing that, in our actual world, a Ph.D. on political rhetoric in The Faerie Queene requires or presupposes a more distinguished pedigree than a thesis on arguments in the Begriffsschrift.

And as for the other “high culture” habits that are invoked in the comments on Brennan’s piece, like being able to order the right wine for the right dish —habits supposedly more expected in other humanities fields than in philosophy—: who cares?! That is not in fact high culture; that’s the anxious social performance of middle-class strivers. Go ahead and order beer if you want. But please maybe just don’t write off The Faerie Queene? You could learn a lot from it! And you could learn even more by tracing out all its obscure references to classical authors, esoteric sects, antiquated cosmological models… the sky’s the limit. And no one, elite or otherwise, is standing in your way — no one but you.

Well, thanks to JSR for that. It sounds like he’s doing his thing as usual, which of course makes us very happy to see here at the Hinternet offices.

6.

Otherwise let me just squeeze in a few concrete reminders before calling it a wrap for this week.

First of all, regarding our first Essay Prize Contest: it is on, and we are so excited to see your submissions coming in soon. JSR reports having been relieved to speak with a number of people in New York, including prominent journalists with sizable Rolodexes, who told him that they had been informing everyone they know about the contest. Still, just as in that strange quiet in an empty seminar room 10 minutes before a conference you’ve organized is supposed to start, we find that we are having trouble dealing with the tension of the wait. We need more signs that people are sharing this information, that word is getting out, and in general that we are not delusional to expect some fine submissions come September. Again, what we want is to award the prize to someone whose work actually shows some promise of shaping public debate, and therefore also, perhaps, of concretely making the world a better place. That’s a tall order, we know. But as Leibniz once wrote, in praise of the Mamluk eunuch known by the Franks as “Caracux”, who helped Saladin to fortify his strongholds in the Levant and ultimately to repel the Crusaders: Ingentium tenuia initia.³ The beginnings of great things are sometimes modest indeed.

We also promised to announce our three judges by May 15, and that date has passed. We will have everything finalized closer to June 15, and will let our readers know right away. But for now our contestants really should do as we say and not as we do: i.e., get to work, be on time, win the money, change the world.

And in other news, our planned Hinternet Summer School on “Scholarly Fabulation: Theory and Practice” is shaping up to be a much greater success than we ever could have imagined. We have 25 confirmed participants already, from all different walks of life — waitresses to professors emeriti (in their own self-descriptions), all of whom have already demonstrated an ability to bring something unique to the conversation. 25 is a larger number than what we initially envisioned, and we are rethinking the format accordingly. We figure we may as well open it up to an even greater number, so please do be in touch (editor@the-hinternet.com) if you would like to join us. We are asking any further applicants to include, in their initial inquiry, a statement that offers a few lines of intellectual autobiography, as well as a brief account of what they might be able to bring to the course, and what their final project might look like. If that does not seem too onerous, then we’re very excited to hear from you!

That’s all for now, dear readers. Thank you for your attention. Please don’t forget to subscribe, if you value the work we’re doing here. We need your support to keep this thing going!

—HLG, Quimper

1. I was a great admirer of Douthat for a long time, until he wrote an unconscionably breezy and flippant piece a few months ago about the possible benefits of a US occupation of Canada. That, plus for some reason he has been clogging my inbox with self-published YA fantasy fiction.

2. JSR was recently castigated, we will not say by whom, for “targeting a woman” in a negative book review, namely, Kate Manne with her Unshrinking. But this gets things all wrong. Of the five reviews he has written in the past few years, there was Chalmers’s Reality+, while all four of the other books were by women (besides Manne there were Alessandra Aloisi, Catherine König-Pralong, and Delphine Antoine-Mahut), and all but one of these reviews was ravingly positive. Empirically speaking, therefore, if there is any evidence of bias in JSR’s recent record of book reviews against a particular group of people, it is plainly not against women, but against Australians.

3. See Justin Smith-Ruiu, « Ingentium tenuia initia : Le plan égyptien du jeune Leibniz », in Andrea Costa, David Rabouin et Paul Rateau, Leibniz à Paris, Classiques Garnier, forthcoming.