Dear Reader — I’ve been dealing with a case of pneumonia since last Thursday. I’m starting to feel better, but not much to share.
Jaron Lanier on AI
This morning, I listened to Sean Illing interview Jaron Lanier, a tech insider known for his work with Virtual Reality, and also a humanist thinker about things tech. This interview is about AI, and Lanier’s thoughtful humanism was refreshing. His dismissal of the Turing Test as being a distraction that leads to the waste of energy and resources seemed spot on, and his encouragement that we stop thinking about AI as a separate entity was a breath of fresh air, as was his assertion that AI is just another technology that needs continual improvement. I provided a link to the podcast, if you’re interested.
In a follow-up, I wrote Jaron Lanier's "Oy, AI" -- Don't Try to Hide the People.” In this essay, he refuses to follow those who idolize generative AI (he even rejects that moniker--he calls it "mashup AI," which is, frankly, a lot more accurate) as well as those who fear it, seeing both orientations as based humanity's religious impulse to create biblical golden calves and then fear and worship them as if they didn't build them themselves. Marx might have called this reificiation. His solution is to make Mashup AI more like the Talmud. And it is that link that cracks open the AI debate and lets in some light and air.
I’ve been reading a lot of literary critic Edmund Wilson’s essays, as well as a book describing his career. In On Edmund Wilson's Style and Career Path, I summarize his writing style, which I find bracing and invigorating.
Also, in his essay "Thoughts on Being Bibliographed," Wilson described his general approach to his writing career.
"To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity....My own strategy ... has usually been, first to get books for review or reporting assignments to cover on subjects in which I happen to be interested; then, later, to use the scattered artices for writing general studies of these subjects; then, finally, to bring out a book in which groups of these essays are combined. There are usually to be distinguided ... at least two or three stages; and it is of course by the books that I want to stand, since the preliminary sketches quite often show my subjects in a different light and in some cases, perhaps, are contradicted by my final conclusions about them."
Brilliant. I wish I'd had that paragraph much earlier in my writing life--I would have save the drafts of some of the articles I published on websites that no longer exist. Still -- perhaps it's not too late to start.
I deactivated my Threads account…
On Apr 12, 2025 I complained about the weather.
And in Erich Fromm "On Disobedience", I, well, quoted Reich Fromm on disobedience:
“Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see. To do so he does not need to be aggressive or rebellious; he needs to have his eyes open, to be fully awake, and willing to take the responsibility to open the eyes of those who are in danger of perishing because they are half asleep.”
I am not a man of action, but I will say what I see, and I will refuse to say what I don’t see.