This weekend I encountered two articles that got me thinking … I know: a potentially dangerous situation … and which, in various ways, tie into the themes we’ve been kicking around in this thread.
Both have their focus in reading, and each takes a very different view of what that means, but they give us pause at the same crossroads. The Psyche article is shorter and more scientific, but offers some insight into why we perhaps reading more yet enjoying it less. The Tablet essay is longer and more humanistic, but ties in a bit more strongly to human-machine interface, to put it in anything but humanistic terms.
One quasi-random thought that occurred to me while reading the second article in particular is: I wonder if there is any kind of correlation between the rise of the digitalization of texts and the, to me at any rate, rather obvious noticeable inclination toward authoritarianism we are experiencing these days?
Ed, thanks for these articles. I found myself racing through the second one, only too aware of a sense of “hurry” and potential distraction all along the margins of the screen. Scrolling caused the header to jitter and a pop-up box now and then to appear, and…how can anyone be in any doubt that what this article asks is true? Yes, every tech nology including print on paper changes our brains and perceptions, experiences and feelings, but …one thing he and most every article on the detrimental effects of screens/AI, et al don’t remind us: we can choose to turn off the screens, we can refuse light boxes in favor of books, we can limit our exposure to almost every part of the machine culture, we don’t have to just accept the mantra “it’s going to happen” so…go along, stop resisting.
Of course, that’s how it works. The more we see it happening, the more we accept, the more LIKE our machines we become…because it sure isn’t toing to work the other way around! We are rewarded for caving in to the latest versions of technification.
I intensely dislike the experience of reading online and avoid it except for a chosen few articles and emails. But that is, I suspect, because I notice how my inner experience shifts toward jittery/fragmented compared to the serenity of a page that shows nothing but the chosen text and does not leap about offering alternatives and interruptions.
Not surprising, anything I’ve written here, I am sure. I guess I am feeling a certain hopelessness around changing anything along the Road to Authoritarianism, given the evidence of how eagerly we swallow inflated promises of glorious ease and convenient safety…as if we could have these without selling ourseves out, distorting the entire meaning of being a human on a living planet!
I heard a promotion spot the other day that was soooo depressing: How do we sell students and young people on attending training-schools to become chip makers?
WHY? Because there is a “dire” economic need for them, to power “our devices”, and our weapons.
There’s no doubt that reading is not just reading … screens have created a different context for a time-tested (but still relatively young) skill set. And yes, for now, and most likely for the remainder of our own lifetimes, we do have the option to simply turn off the screen … but even for us, it is (for better or worse) not without its consequences. (But isn’t that a characteristic of any choice we make?)
Having spent as much time as I did in the Dragon’s Den (Silicon Valley), and especially at the time that I did (the dragon was still very young an impressionable), I have experienced only a partial metamorphosis. I’m pretty much a hybridization of sorts. Like you, I much prefer ink-on-paper: it’s stable, and comforting, and predictable … the sorts of qualities that most people are looking for, I think, but which are increasingly difficult to find these days. Well, difficult unless one is “old school” and still knows of the refuge beyond the screen. But it’s quickly becoming an Elfenland, a place of mere magical memory.
The young around us have practically no chance. For us it was print first and screens intruded; for them it’s the other way around, and print is the intruder. I recall a peak experience when I was a young teacher: one day in class it struck me – the proverbial ton of bricks – that not one of my students had been born before humans had been on the moon: what for me was an awe-inspiring, if nevertheless resource-wasteful, technological achievement was for them a mere given. A big deal for me, but no deal at all for them. The articles reinvigorated that realization.
We know we’re being manipulated by the algorithms; we know what an analog life is like (hell, we know what “analog” truly means). Try to explain any of that to a Gen-Zer. Your feeling of hopelessness is real, but it is the feeling that every transitional generation comes to know. Contrary to what the technotopians may proclaim, their day is coming when they will be overrun and overwhelmed by what they couldn’t imagine in their wildest dreams … if – and it’s a bigger If than even they want to admit – any human is still around to experience it.
The realest of realities, in a sense, is what we (have to) do with the time we (individually, but also communally) have left. For me, the world is unceasingly full of wonder. The older I get, the less I know, the freer I feel. I’m simply unencumbered by most of what is holding other back. Granted, there’s nowhere I feel I need to go either. I don’t have to prove anything, I don’t have to make a name for myself, I don’t have to kiss anyone’s butt or thump my own chest (not that I did much of either during my working life). For me, the pressure is off.
But for my children, and their children, well, the pressure’s still on. And given the uncertainties and vagaries of postmodern life, that pressure is increasing, or so it seems to me. In light of those uncertainties, I’m not surprised that many are seeking the obviously false and deceptive refuge of authoritarianism. Those of us who still have even a slight insight into history know it is going to end badly, but try telling that to someone desperately seeking respite from the pressure of life they are feeling. Do they even have the time, or wherewithal, to listen? Sometimes I wonder. No … I can’t stop wondering, period.
Of course, this does not mean we shouldn’t try. I couldn’t agree with you more: there is much to be gained from recognizing and realizing that we are living creatures on a living planet. But another thing I learned so long ago as a “teacher”: you’ve got to pick up the learners where they are. And that means for me, I’m pretty sure: it’s more than I would like it to be, but it’s online.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
I agree with “depressing”, though it’s way too weak a word. Our situation is complicated significantly by the fact that there is a dire need for them; there are “our devices” and unfortunately “our weapons”, and they are a necessary part of our world, but only because we have made/allowed the world to be that way. Well, in a sense, we’ve allowed it to be reduced to little more than technology, money, matter, and power, even if we all know that Life is more than just that.
Our mission – if we choose to accept it – is to bring that more into the awareness of others. It’s no mean feat, that’s for sure, and I’m not sure I have any idea how we need to go about doing it. But I also can’t shake the feeling that it’ll have to be more online than we’d like it to be.
The crucial in any communicative experience is not the words used but what what is not said, not heard, not included, or in the case of the brain: not attended to. If we didn’t have that filter, our heads would, literally, explode, There is so much “out there” (even if science would have us believe there’s nothing of substance there … precisely “no there there”) we are incapable of handling it all, hence the first survival tactic to evolve was filter!filter!filter! It’s like a voltage converter in the field of electrotechnology: gotta step down the voltage, shift the frequency, recalibrate the amps.
So, the vibe (speaking as a one-time, part-time Californian) of the book title is a good one: the grey mush in our skulls is merely the tip of the iceberg: there’s a lot more where that came from. Hell, the whole body’s involved. It was somehow obvious to me, even if I never overtly expressed it. Kudos to Ms Blake for putting it (almost ironically) “out there” for others to pick up on. (No … no “almost” … the situation is blatantly ironic.) It’s one of those science-as-we’ve-had-it-shoved-down-out-throats is bullshit moments. The factuality of the situation becomes patently obvious. The fact is not “objective”, as the scientists would like to have you believe, but rather doubly “subjective”: the factuality is a shared expierence of both (or even several) participants (e.g., I/you/he, she, it/we/you/they agree on the “out there” and that it’s there, regardless of what it might mean to us at a given point on the timeline of our lives).
BTW, I was deeply moved by your desert-windiness comment: (double entendre intended) the ghost of it has been haunting me since. The ruach/pneuma/spiritus trinity is, as Yogurt proclaimed (in the Mel Brooks classic Spaceballs), “the up-side of the Force” … there’s always the Other side.
In both English and German, the word “wind” has another connotation. To feel bloated and uncomfortable is to “have wind”; the relief therefrom is referred to as being “windy” (or in German Wind haben). The Americans have euphemized it such that it has parted ways, since they “pass gas”, probably because of our innate inclination towards catchy, alliterative marketing-capable phrases.
Of course, unsurprisingly, we also have a four-letter word (in both US and British English … there’s a German word with a similar connotation: used by both Luther and Marx (talk about extremes of “German thought” (but not as antithetical as one first suspects)) for both the act and the result of that act.
What is, or isn’t, divine across the spectrum of the notion? But to be perfectly honest, I would have been surprised had there not been this “other” side of it.
Yes, again, you’re onto something: it’s between and porous and osmotic and, to quote John: sometimes liminal. We have lots of issues with absolutes these days. Some too much (like MAGAns), some too little (like Postmodernists … even if they are absolutistic per their own mode (quidquid recipitur …) deconstruction is the one and only way?).
Oddly enough, we (well, especially you Americans, that is, those of you who are physically present on that continent) are apparently more inclined thereto these days than most other (so-called) Western countries, Hungary and Bavaria, and it remains to be seen Poland, excepted. Of course the Coloradan decision yesterday opens up myriad possibilities. That one’s coming hard, fast, high, and inside, to express it in baseballese.
The boundaries are blurred, the borders between the partitions are porous. It’s good so. Isn’t new. Ain’t easy, but if it were, would it be any fun? We complain, but we (secretly) enjoy the challenge. What’s the worse that can happen? I mean, after all, as Hank sang, no one gets outta here alive.
There Seems to Be a Gathering of a Coming Together of Roots
and Magical Possibilities ?
Another Sonic piece from the last century into the 21 First,With
some voices we have given our" Listening Ear Too",on Subjects like
Language,Words, Gaia & Change. I am a Geek when it comes to
a Metaphor I like ,without getting too attached
Well, I’ve finally had the time to catch up with some of the links you’ve all shared here, specifically the talk with James Bridle and the articles on reading. For better and worse, it’s helped that I’ve been more or less bedridden with COVID the past few days. I don’t have much to say about that, other than that, well, I haven’t totally minded being ‘excused’ from the big house-cleaning/decluttering project we otherwise had planned for our ‘vacation.’
Regarding Bridle, after some initial resistance similar perhaps to what @achronon expressed, I ended up basically liking the guy and what he had to say. The culture these days tends to think in terms of “human intelligence” and “artificial intelligence,” as if these are only two categories that matter. Bridle invites us to think of many different kinds and scales of intelligence beyond these categories—but also of the manifold, less commonly recognized, possibilities within them. I also felt at home with his notion of a politics of more-than-human solidarity.
As for his book, I happen to have borrowed it via interlibrary loan (and have it until the 17th, with no further renewals); I’ve read the first few pages and scanned the rest; I just don’t feel a sense of urgency or compelling motivation to dedicate a lot more time to it. For whatever reasons or no reason, the fire of urgency just isn’t there for me, despite that fact that he feels like a simpatico thinker, and I’m also interested in the potentials of a non-corporate version of AI that he opens up.
One point I would add to the articles about how the act of reading is being changed by the internet is that… well, there is just SO MUCH of it. I already have run out of bookshelf space for my physical books, many of which remain unread; I could spend the rest of my life reading the thousand of links I’ve bookmarked and PDFs I’ve downloaded over the years. There wouldn’t be much time left over for, well, actually living. This does create a sense of anxiety that I will just never catch up, which is absolutely true and I know one must simply accept.
A large language model could ingest the whole libraries and the entirety of the internet that it could access, but a human can’t. Necessarily, we must pick and choose… and the more I contemplate the nature of time and mortality, the more I feel motivated to choose wisely.
In practice, for me as a reader and writer, that means I feel more and more drawn to what are considered “the classics.” It would almost seem to me a miscarriage of reading to spend a bunch of limited reading time on new material, when there are so many works which for centuries (or at least decades) have been considered essential to culture and civilization, which I haven’t yet absorbed. That said, I also recognize that there are plenty of good reasons to question how some book has come to be regarded as a “classic” in the first place. Also, I would hope that there are some “classics” in the making right now. (Indeed, as a publisher, I consider myself to be in the business of discovering and producing some of those works.)
What is actually worth reading fully, carefully, and deeply? What is worth re-reading. As one of a dying breed of defenders of the ‘canon,’ Harold Bloom, once said (and I paraphrase): “If it’s not worth re-reading, it’s not worth reading in the first place.” Somehow I think that in the long run, we should be contemplating and re-considering, what ought to belong to a ‘canon’—not just “Western” and not just “human,” but planetary and even cosmic—for future generations. With all these mountains of data, what’s actually worth preserving and passing on? Is this really a job we should really leave to the corporate AI?
So I bring that sense of wanting to make the best use of our time to the following proposition:
Maybe it would be best to proceed with an “open frame” sort of Café to think through how we might want to move forward in the new year? How can we make sense of everything that is happening—from the ongoing wars, the upcoming US elections, and the rapid development of AI (seen this?), to what is happening in our own backyards or other-than-human realms, not to mention within our own intelligent bodies? How can we choose what’s most worth our attention and time—and what’s worth amplifying in the world?
Would any of you be up for a gathering on Thursday, January 18 at 12p Mountain time to feel into, think through, and open up to whatever that might be—that cosmic intelligence, perhaps?
Contemplating the coming Cafe’ I Listened to this …
It speaks to my sense of a"Visionary Practicality " of Feeling-Thinking
in a Initiatory Way both Individually/ Small Groups/ Moving Into
the Beyond of Mystery!!! Transgression of Some Kind is a way of
Growing Into New Life?
Thank you, Marco … just what I needed to help solidify those ol’ prejudices I schlepp around.
Perhaps we’re shocked only because we’ve bought into the illusion that AI is “thinking”. It’s not, it’s calculating as far as I can tell, and because that’s really all it can do (a) it’s going to take a lot longer to get it to develop an internal coherent semantics (if it can at all), and (b) to use the proponents’ own metaphor, the outputs make perfect sense to the calculator: they are most likely statistically sound.
From a different angle: it is well known in the IT community that 1 bug per 10k lines of code can lead to unpredictable program behavior. It took Microsoft until NT to release a product that had fewer than 1k known bugs. Given the testing budgets and structures at large software companies (used to work in one, in QA, no less), one’s not going to find all the bugs anyway. We need to think about this every time we put our lives in the hands of quasi-autonomous systems.
At bottom though, there has always been an almost unbridgeable gap between marketing hype and real-time performance of any product. Why should generative AI be any different?
Thank you for your kind words, gentlelady, even if I’m not so sure about the “wisdom” part.
Like my ol’ friend Julius used to say (and I love to quote): abusus non tollit usum [the misuse of something does not negate its legitimate uses]. I simply think we need to keep our assessments in context, and I’m not sure generative AI is, as the Germans would say, gesellschaftsfähig [lit. “society suitable”] yet.
As Marco has pointed out, we have (I believe, unfortunately) coupled technology and economics … unavoidably perhaps, given our dominant-materialistic understanding of the world in which we live … and that’s making for the biggest mess at the moment, I think. It would appear that the only value that we (as a society? as a species) are willing to legitimate is financial value. And as long as that is the case, we’ll have to watch ourselves commit collective suicide, regardless of how ugly it’s going to get near the end.
Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of us on this planet who have other, more substantial, values than just money, profit, and wealth, and we may even be in the majority, but as is evident almost everywhere, it’s not the majorities who rule.
The AI horse is anything but dead, so no one should get the impression that I’m merely flogging it. From time to time, I stumble across a piece that relates in some way to our own critique of the topic without being dismissive. We agree that AI is here to stay, even if we don’t agree on what it means (in itself or that it will stay).
The following is one such piece, written by something of an insider and included in a mildly entertaining post, namely Things that don't work, one of which is
9. AI methods that don’t leverage computation."
This caught my eye because it reinforces one of my own biases, I suppose (the fundamental, if not ontological (?) difference between “thinking” and “computing”), because it reinforces my own belief (as in “it’s nothing that can (currently) be ‘proven’”), namely that “AI” and “sentience” are simply incompatible. Yes, I’m aware that the die-hard epiphenomenalists are pushing the idea that they are for all it’s worth, but for my part I simply don’t believe you can get there from here.
What we are left with is, well, illusion: AI produces the illusion of consciousness, of sentience, of, frankly, a lot of things, but at bottom, it isn’t any of them. Let us not forget that our Buddhists friends never tire of reminding us that all of reality is an illusion (at least that’s my take-away from the maya notion), so at best we’re dealing with something like a “2nd-order illusion” here. Whatever …
Here’s the link (with something of a spoiler alert: it ain’t pretty!):
