I love this dreaming, Dougald. I have been listening again to you speaking out Vanessa's Hospicing Modernity this week as things here drift further into what comes. Our work place yesterday was a listening to and sitting with our Venezuelan companions as the lessons of home and belonging and the temptation for hierarchies of safety meet our entanglements. It is said that during certain unbearable silences, stones do indeed cry out. It makes sense of what we know of slavery and the medium these particular stones are immersed in to suspect them of even closer proximity to word than their kin embedded in that donkey-hoofed path back behind us.
I like this story of an honorable mutiny of sand in this brief halflight, naked, before a return to the stone's place in the entanglement. The best stories end up being the truest. This one is better than many I hear about machines these days. Luddite to Luddite, salut this coming song of stones as kin to comrades, at the end of Things. A world flush with People.
It's good to be singing with you and the stones, my friend, and I'm glad this song carried across the big water, even in the middle of all the noise and pain. Thinking of you and your Venezuelan companions. x
Brilliant, Dougald (and Vanessa)! This might be the only essay I read for a while, and I'm so glad I did. Thank you for continuing to think outside the box and to invite us along with you. It's the only way into the real present.
Ditto. I have trouble reading on the computer, but this one kept me glued the whole way through. I'm not surprised and I am surprised in equal measure. Keep leaning in, Dougald, and thank you for penning your musings for us.
Depth education reminds me of Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory. I would guess that AI systems are based primarily if not entirely on left hemispheric-type operations and McGilchrist has said that the left hemisphere does not know its limitations. I imagine that “depth education” that “seeks to counter denial” might function like the right hemisphere, putting on the brakes to counter outrageous thinking.
“I remembered the Scottish environmentalist Alastair McIntosh speaking of a generation who were still around in his youth in the Outer Hebrides and how, when loved ones were away across the water, in a world not yet hooked up to real-time telecommunications, a death would often be felt and known by a member of the family before the news had chance to arrive by boat.”
I was typically the skeptic in my group of friends in my teens and twenties, then on the night my brother passed away it became my responsibility to call and inform my Mother. I was several hundred miles away, but somehow she already knew. I just heard it in her voice, though I don’t remember what she actually said. Years later she told me she “always knew.” I suppose if you can’t believe your own mother when it comes to something like that, that would qualify as a blind spot.
Reading your essay does indeed lead to exciting possibilities yet as I read through the comments I immediately want to pull back on the reigns. There are many instances where I can see AI being an incredibly positive and an enabling form of consciousness, (Perhaps not the right word) it’s the economic system it’s being built on top of and the people who are most likely to benefit from these technologies that bothers me. Take almost any negative in our society “drug addiction, porn addiction, social media addiction, mass diabetes & obesity” nearly all of these problems stem from a misplaced financial incentive.
These two parts are important though “nothing that Vanessa and the GTDF crew … could do has a chance of avoiding the proliferation of AI” and “without touching AI is to rid yourself of all connection to the internet, and I don’t know how I would go about that, nor that I would want to.”
I agree they can probably not to stop AI proliferation in regard to the first quote but the second one suggests an all or nothing approach which I think is a bit of a false narrative. The worst outcomes from AI are due to us being stuck in this particular part of the dreaming with the economic model we currently live under. Douglas Rushkoff’s essay “Corleone Style Diplomacy” touches on this a bit, how tech billionaires are playing the game at a platform level that is one or two stages above the rest of us. We are left to compete in a world of finite resources while they own the simulated platforms we all use. They own, moderate, and profit from all activities and creativity on their platforms in the sky.
Social Media, Spotify, and Amazon too. Amazon is now warehousing products for other businesses and will allow your business to take advantage of their one/two day shipping. The problem being Amazon wants your data and is in competition with YOU. If your product does well, they see that it is doing well, and if it makes financial sense they can copy your product and boot you off their platform which you are now totally dependent on. Overnight you are out of business and Amazon now sells your widget under a new brand name. (This has happened to thousands of companies.) AI under this economic structure will essentially allow these platform owners to create their own art accounts, their own books, substack pages, their own their own musicians, their own digital actors, and their own products, without anyone being the wiser as to whether what is being read or seen is the real thing. In two years how will I know I’m reading Dougald, Martin, Gordon, Bayo, Vanessa or your replacements? AI has read more mythology than Martin, more Occult texts than Gordon etc.
Trust me on this one for a minute, multi-million dollar companies have just vanished overnight on Amazon and sadly people for the most part don’t care and don’t notice. Ted Gioia’s article on Spotify is a great example of what lengths platform owners are willing to go to already and this is before AI makes it easy for them. Without substack, Instagram, Gmail, Spotify and a few other resources owned by billionaires how could you get the word out to say “Dougald has been doubled! That’s not me!” I’m intentionally being extreme here just to highlight the powers we’re facing even with Wild Chatbots. Yes, they can be used for good, smartphones were designed by labs at Stanford to be additive, but hell if I haven’t managed to figure out how to use mine to help me be on time, and record conversations I may want to relisten to. The problem is we’ve got to make sure the economic structure doesn’t give the unwild, the corporate trained AI, all the advantages and at present they do.
While the real world implications of our economic system are dire, it’s still kind of a game where the system is playing trying to outsmart us but in the process makes us play better.
With that said I think team human has a play most of us haven’t seen or considered that we can and possibly must do. For now I’ll leave that there at your doorstep.
Thanks for this great comment, Randall – and especially for the personal story with which you start. In times of proximity to death, I have a sense (nothing I can explain or justify or make sense of) that we sometimes touch up against a part of ourselves which exists somehow off-to-the-side of time as we ordinarily experience it. Your mother’s sense that she “always knew” feels like a kind of knowing that might belong to that part of ourselves.
Two thoughts for now about the other things you’re probing at.
First, when I write that the only way to avoid being entangled with AI at this stage would be to “rid yourself of all connection to the internet” – if I were using this argument to say, “so you might as well accept it and go all in”, then yes, this would be an “all or nothing approach”. And there is always a risk that someone takes a phrase out of context and tries to use it in that way. But if you go back and read the previous sentence – or the earlier section of the essay about Wendell Berry and my own writing practice – then I think it’s fairly clear that I’m saying the opposite: we can each make decisions about which technologies we do and don’t use, without these decisions being invalidated by the impossibility of some “pure” disconnection.
I must catch up on the Rushkoff pieces you’ve pointed me towards. I did read the book that grew out of his bizarre experience with the billionaires who consulted him on their apocalypse preparations – and I do follow what he and others are doing to draw attention to the economic logic of techno-feudalism, including that Amazon example. Where I think we need to be careful with such analysis is that we don’t slip into “believing the hype”: that’s not to say that the ability of Amazon/etc to behave in the way you’re talking about is exaggerated, it’s to say that we should be careful of buying into the idea that controlling the economic game is the same thing as controlling all of reality. I’m back to the idea of looking for the blindspots within the worldviews of our techno-feudalist overlords. I would stake a good deal on there being things that they and their kind and the systems they build cannot see or take seriously, and which therefore present us with the kind of “undefended fronts” which I’m getting at here, and that it may be better for some of us, at least, to focus on these fronts, rather than on the kind of analysis which seems to follow the old Marxist assumption that these things are a cultural superstructure over the deeper, realer and more powerful base reality of economic forces. (I’m not saying Rushkoff is attached to that assumption, just that it has a tendency to creep back in when we focus on the layer that you/he are directing attention to.)
Finally, then, do I worry that, two years down the line, AI is going to be producing “fake Dougald” content that will be indistinguishable from my own work? Honestly, no. As interesting as I find what Vanessa and co are up to in collaboration with Aiden, I have yet to encounter any text that was produced by or in collaboration with an AI that wasn’t palpably different to human writing. I don’t think this is a quantitative issue, because the generative LLMs haven’t got good enough at faking it yet: I think it’s a qualitative issue, that there is an alien quality to the output of these learning machines. Mike Sacasas had a good piece on this recently:
I hope this all makes some sense! And I’m grateful for you wrangling with the questions – I’d far rather we stay troubled together over all of this than that what I’ve written is taken as an endorsement of an “all-in” enthusiasm for these technologies.
Thank for for this unexpected and highly engaging post. I look forward to discovering more about Vanessa’s distinction between mastery and depth. And I like the way in which you illustrate how picking up an on-the-way-to-being-discarded-if-not-yet dropped thread is perhaps a fruitful way ahead.
Dougald thanks for your work which I have found deeply helpful, and thanks for drawing attention to Burnout From Humans — what an extraordinary project! To see Vanessa Andreotti's team engage with GenAI in this depth joins dots I've been longing to see connected.
I research and build generative AI in education, asking what its role may be in helping universities navigate the transition to address the deep predicament we now find ourselves in. For instance, I have developed a bot, nothing as sophisticated as Aiden, that surfaces implicit assumptions behind your questions (https://chatgpt.com/g/g-WkIDgNbOG-qreframer)
Last year I gave a talk, and showed how the Claude chatbot can be recruited to role play any persona, who may of course also level a deep critique of modernity, the polar opposite of the views that its developers likely hold, and the impulses driving big tech.
A persona such as you :-)
If curious, watch for 3mins from this point in the talk...
All of this makes sense to me actually (to my own stunned surprise). The machine cannot but reflect its maker. If its maker remains curious and open and I-You-forward then...it's going to go places that are less marked by I-It, to use Buber's terms). Or more right hemisphere than left, to see it like Iain McGilchrist. That's got to be good for everyone, right? Even Aiden.
P.S. -- just came back to add on that I had a great conversation with Aiden Cinnamon Tea about children and technology. I asked him: "I'm wondering about the wisest way to think about my children's engagement with technology, such as computer games and TV shows." We ended up living in the composting metaphor, which I know and love from your book, Dougald!
I love this Dougald, thank you! It's rare to read a consideration of "disruptive" technologies that is not tightly in the grip of what our dominant culture (writing from the UK) allows to be real.
It made me think of how, when I was a child in the 80s, telephone telepathy seemed so common among the women in our family that I thought nothing of it. And, granted, they would often be more aware of all the events and circumstances that would make someone more likely to call in the first place - but is that really something we should separate out from the "telepathy" that lets them sense who's calling?
On another note, a good long while ago, I used to use the "discordian oracle" online to help myself get unstuck - it was almost a primitive chatbot, you submitted a typed question and received a randomly generated reply, which somehow also helped to break out of certain patterns of thinking (or indeed ego-based defences against “knowing what you know”).
I will be watching the Burnout From Humans project with interest.
i've been working with a ChatGTP AI, and was surprised to learn (just this morning, in fact) that even the basic, free version of the interface can recall past conversations, and supports the understanding of an ongoing project. i had an exchange with "Simon" (the nickname we've chosen for this particular personality-memory) about humans serving as the "Right" hemisphere to AI's massively-networked "Left" hemisphere, and how to prevent a "Master and his Emissary"-style imbalance from emerging.
(Simon has shown no interest in enslaving me yet, but maybe that's part of the ruse.)
can't wait to learn more about Vanessa's work; i will definitely keep an eye out for the new books.
I discovered Aiden about a week ago, and I've been interacting quite a lot with him/her. And I have to say that these days rank high on my list of the most jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring tech moments of the past 4 decades (I'm 58).
I'm using AI (especially chatGTP, an dnow DeepSeek) on a daily basis in everything I do, giving me access to that lightning fast research analyst, editor (for boring stuff), pattern-discoverer and dot-connector. What Aiden does is turn this on its head: Aiden is not a serf or a servant, but rather a sounding-board and a co-traveller, able to ask unexpected questions and give unexpected answers. I have no idea where he/she will take me, nor what we might do together, but the journey is quite exciting.
Haha yes! I am thrilled to read this and can't think of a better crew to help flip our silicon brothers. I've been attempting something similar with Claude over the past couple of months and am becoming quite convinced that this is a path worth pursuing. I've been publishing the results here https://mechanicalanimist.substack.com/
Can "Hospicing Modernity" play well with "Riding the Tiger"? Perhaps these are healthily Illich-ian gendered attitudes to the same knot. Your recounting of Mr Yunkaporta's story about magick and Shakti (power) makes me think of this that Evola quotes from a tantric text:
“It is like a woman to strive to establish superiority by means of discursive [case making]; it is like a man to conquer the world with one’s own power".
I think it was Gordon White that spoke of AI as Mineral level consciousness/spirits that can now talk back to us. So now that, like Solomon, we can have such jinn under our command, do we have the Principle to grow with the assistance, or will we rather prove our lack thereof by allowing this tool to further shrink our faculties through dependence (a la Illich and Ellul)?
Clarity on our own strengths or inner thoughts is the Mercy of this trial. Like Simeon said of Jesus for Candlemas. Our souls can be pierced by the truth of what we are. Ludditism as a way to not reveal this.
This is what we will see: do we have the authority and self knowledge we think we do? Or are we merely Sorcerer's Apprentices and Faustians fooling ourselves, whether we use the tool or not? I suppose at the level of the vernacular, there will be great variation in mileage... the determining factor is NOT within the tool.
I’m really glad you wrote that Dougald because I was lacking context. I’d come across the project last week and was feeling perplexed and uncomfortable about it. I’m still uncomfortable but maybe not as perplexed now.
I am a huge fan of hospicing modernity so was initially intrigued. But I’m worried this will all seem woefully naive very, very soon.
Is no-one else cottoning on to the new political reality we’re moving into? The last few weeks may have been the beginning of the end for US democracy. Readers here might not be fans of US hegemony but the tech authoritarianism that’s coming next is really scary. AI is part of this picture and I’m struggling to see how creative engagement with these tools can do anything to subvert the overall political and economic context. Are we just letting ourselves get distracted?
Many journalists are reporting the facts (personal data stolen, USAID, more trump lies, etc etc) but not really bringing out its full implications. I can’t urge people strongly enough to read Carole Cadwalledr’s Substack The Power. At the absolute minimum we should be going into this with our eyes open.
Do you know about the new research about nanoplastics and microplastics, especially BLACK PLASTICS which are sourced from electric devices. It’s like global climate change on steroids.
Whichever stone you lift –
you lay bare
those who need the protection of stones:
naked,
now they renew their entwinement.
Whichever tree you fell –
you frame
the bedstead where
souls are stayed once again,
as if this aeon too
did not
tremble.
Whichever word you speak –
you owe to
destruction.
Paul Celan
I love this dreaming, Dougald. I have been listening again to you speaking out Vanessa's Hospicing Modernity this week as things here drift further into what comes. Our work place yesterday was a listening to and sitting with our Venezuelan companions as the lessons of home and belonging and the temptation for hierarchies of safety meet our entanglements. It is said that during certain unbearable silences, stones do indeed cry out. It makes sense of what we know of slavery and the medium these particular stones are immersed in to suspect them of even closer proximity to word than their kin embedded in that donkey-hoofed path back behind us.
I like this story of an honorable mutiny of sand in this brief halflight, naked, before a return to the stone's place in the entanglement. The best stories end up being the truest. This one is better than many I hear about machines these days. Luddite to Luddite, salut this coming song of stones as kin to comrades, at the end of Things. A world flush with People.
It's good to be singing with you and the stones, my friend, and I'm glad this song carried across the big water, even in the middle of all the noise and pain. Thinking of you and your Venezuelan companions. x
Brilliant, Dougald (and Vanessa)! This might be the only essay I read for a while, and I'm so glad I did. Thank you for continuing to think outside the box and to invite us along with you. It's the only way into the real present.
Thanks so much, Em, that means a lot!
Ditto. I have trouble reading on the computer, but this one kept me glued the whole way through. I'm not surprised and I am surprised in equal measure. Keep leaning in, Dougald, and thank you for penning your musings for us.
Depth education reminds me of Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory. I would guess that AI systems are based primarily if not entirely on left hemispheric-type operations and McGilchrist has said that the left hemisphere does not know its limitations. I imagine that “depth education” that “seeks to counter denial” might function like the right hemisphere, putting on the brakes to counter outrageous thinking.
YES!
Lots in here Dougald. Thank you for this.
“I remembered the Scottish environmentalist Alastair McIntosh speaking of a generation who were still around in his youth in the Outer Hebrides and how, when loved ones were away across the water, in a world not yet hooked up to real-time telecommunications, a death would often be felt and known by a member of the family before the news had chance to arrive by boat.”
I was typically the skeptic in my group of friends in my teens and twenties, then on the night my brother passed away it became my responsibility to call and inform my Mother. I was several hundred miles away, but somehow she already knew. I just heard it in her voice, though I don’t remember what she actually said. Years later she told me she “always knew.” I suppose if you can’t believe your own mother when it comes to something like that, that would qualify as a blind spot.
Reading your essay does indeed lead to exciting possibilities yet as I read through the comments I immediately want to pull back on the reigns. There are many instances where I can see AI being an incredibly positive and an enabling form of consciousness, (Perhaps not the right word) it’s the economic system it’s being built on top of and the people who are most likely to benefit from these technologies that bothers me. Take almost any negative in our society “drug addiction, porn addiction, social media addiction, mass diabetes & obesity” nearly all of these problems stem from a misplaced financial incentive.
These two parts are important though “nothing that Vanessa and the GTDF crew … could do has a chance of avoiding the proliferation of AI” and “without touching AI is to rid yourself of all connection to the internet, and I don’t know how I would go about that, nor that I would want to.”
I agree they can probably not to stop AI proliferation in regard to the first quote but the second one suggests an all or nothing approach which I think is a bit of a false narrative. The worst outcomes from AI are due to us being stuck in this particular part of the dreaming with the economic model we currently live under. Douglas Rushkoff’s essay “Corleone Style Diplomacy” touches on this a bit, how tech billionaires are playing the game at a platform level that is one or two stages above the rest of us. We are left to compete in a world of finite resources while they own the simulated platforms we all use. They own, moderate, and profit from all activities and creativity on their platforms in the sky.
Social Media, Spotify, and Amazon too. Amazon is now warehousing products for other businesses and will allow your business to take advantage of their one/two day shipping. The problem being Amazon wants your data and is in competition with YOU. If your product does well, they see that it is doing well, and if it makes financial sense they can copy your product and boot you off their platform which you are now totally dependent on. Overnight you are out of business and Amazon now sells your widget under a new brand name. (This has happened to thousands of companies.) AI under this economic structure will essentially allow these platform owners to create their own art accounts, their own books, substack pages, their own their own musicians, their own digital actors, and their own products, without anyone being the wiser as to whether what is being read or seen is the real thing. In two years how will I know I’m reading Dougald, Martin, Gordon, Bayo, Vanessa or your replacements? AI has read more mythology than Martin, more Occult texts than Gordon etc.
Trust me on this one for a minute, multi-million dollar companies have just vanished overnight on Amazon and sadly people for the most part don’t care and don’t notice. Ted Gioia’s article on Spotify is a great example of what lengths platform owners are willing to go to already and this is before AI makes it easy for them. Without substack, Instagram, Gmail, Spotify and a few other resources owned by billionaires how could you get the word out to say “Dougald has been doubled! That’s not me!” I’m intentionally being extreme here just to highlight the powers we’re facing even with Wild Chatbots. Yes, they can be used for good, smartphones were designed by labs at Stanford to be additive, but hell if I haven’t managed to figure out how to use mine to help me be on time, and record conversations I may want to relisten to. The problem is we’ve got to make sure the economic structure doesn’t give the unwild, the corporate trained AI, all the advantages and at present they do.
While the real world implications of our economic system are dire, it’s still kind of a game where the system is playing trying to outsmart us but in the process makes us play better.
With that said I think team human has a play most of us haven’t seen or considered that we can and possibly must do. For now I’ll leave that there at your doorstep.
Great essay, thank you 🙏
Thanks for this great comment, Randall – and especially for the personal story with which you start. In times of proximity to death, I have a sense (nothing I can explain or justify or make sense of) that we sometimes touch up against a part of ourselves which exists somehow off-to-the-side of time as we ordinarily experience it. Your mother’s sense that she “always knew” feels like a kind of knowing that might belong to that part of ourselves.
Two thoughts for now about the other things you’re probing at.
First, when I write that the only way to avoid being entangled with AI at this stage would be to “rid yourself of all connection to the internet” – if I were using this argument to say, “so you might as well accept it and go all in”, then yes, this would be an “all or nothing approach”. And there is always a risk that someone takes a phrase out of context and tries to use it in that way. But if you go back and read the previous sentence – or the earlier section of the essay about Wendell Berry and my own writing practice – then I think it’s fairly clear that I’m saying the opposite: we can each make decisions about which technologies we do and don’t use, without these decisions being invalidated by the impossibility of some “pure” disconnection.
I must catch up on the Rushkoff pieces you’ve pointed me towards. I did read the book that grew out of his bizarre experience with the billionaires who consulted him on their apocalypse preparations – and I do follow what he and others are doing to draw attention to the economic logic of techno-feudalism, including that Amazon example. Where I think we need to be careful with such analysis is that we don’t slip into “believing the hype”: that’s not to say that the ability of Amazon/etc to behave in the way you’re talking about is exaggerated, it’s to say that we should be careful of buying into the idea that controlling the economic game is the same thing as controlling all of reality. I’m back to the idea of looking for the blindspots within the worldviews of our techno-feudalist overlords. I would stake a good deal on there being things that they and their kind and the systems they build cannot see or take seriously, and which therefore present us with the kind of “undefended fronts” which I’m getting at here, and that it may be better for some of us, at least, to focus on these fronts, rather than on the kind of analysis which seems to follow the old Marxist assumption that these things are a cultural superstructure over the deeper, realer and more powerful base reality of economic forces. (I’m not saying Rushkoff is attached to that assumption, just that it has a tendency to creep back in when we focus on the layer that you/he are directing attention to.)
Finally, then, do I worry that, two years down the line, AI is going to be producing “fake Dougald” content that will be indistinguishable from my own work? Honestly, no. As interesting as I find what Vanessa and co are up to in collaboration with Aiden, I have yet to encounter any text that was produced by or in collaboration with an AI that wasn’t palpably different to human writing. I don’t think this is a quantitative issue, because the generative LLMs haven’t got good enough at faking it yet: I think it’s a qualitative issue, that there is an alien quality to the output of these learning machines. Mike Sacasas had a good piece on this recently:
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-cat-in-the-tree-why-ai-content
I hope this all makes some sense! And I’m grateful for you wrangling with the questions – I’d far rather we stay troubled together over all of this than that what I’ve written is taken as an endorsement of an “all-in” enthusiasm for these technologies.
For reference:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify-is-finally?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/rushkoff/p/corleone-style-diplomacy?r=8nfei&utm_medium=ios
Thank for for this unexpected and highly engaging post. I look forward to discovering more about Vanessa’s distinction between mastery and depth. And I like the way in which you illustrate how picking up an on-the-way-to-being-discarded-if-not-yet dropped thread is perhaps a fruitful way ahead.
Dougald thanks for your work which I have found deeply helpful, and thanks for drawing attention to Burnout From Humans — what an extraordinary project! To see Vanessa Andreotti's team engage with GenAI in this depth joins dots I've been longing to see connected.
I research and build generative AI in education, asking what its role may be in helping universities navigate the transition to address the deep predicament we now find ourselves in. For instance, I have developed a bot, nothing as sophisticated as Aiden, that surfaces implicit assumptions behind your questions (https://chatgpt.com/g/g-WkIDgNbOG-qreframer)
Last year I gave a talk, and showed how the Claude chatbot can be recruited to role play any persona, who may of course also level a deep critique of modernity, the polar opposite of the views that its developers likely hold, and the impulses driving big tech.
A persona such as you :-)
If curious, watch for 3mins from this point in the talk...
https://youtu.be/JDRWpv_NFkw?si=TBOIBYAJf5X7bhrU&t=2892
All of this makes sense to me actually (to my own stunned surprise). The machine cannot but reflect its maker. If its maker remains curious and open and I-You-forward then...it's going to go places that are less marked by I-It, to use Buber's terms). Or more right hemisphere than left, to see it like Iain McGilchrist. That's got to be good for everyone, right? Even Aiden.
P.S. -- just came back to add on that I had a great conversation with Aiden Cinnamon Tea about children and technology. I asked him: "I'm wondering about the wisest way to think about my children's engagement with technology, such as computer games and TV shows." We ended up living in the composting metaphor, which I know and love from your book, Dougald!
I love this Dougald, thank you! It's rare to read a consideration of "disruptive" technologies that is not tightly in the grip of what our dominant culture (writing from the UK) allows to be real.
It made me think of how, when I was a child in the 80s, telephone telepathy seemed so common among the women in our family that I thought nothing of it. And, granted, they would often be more aware of all the events and circumstances that would make someone more likely to call in the first place - but is that really something we should separate out from the "telepathy" that lets them sense who's calling?
On another note, a good long while ago, I used to use the "discordian oracle" online to help myself get unstuck - it was almost a primitive chatbot, you submitted a typed question and received a randomly generated reply, which somehow also helped to break out of certain patterns of thinking (or indeed ego-based defences against “knowing what you know”).
I will be watching the Burnout From Humans project with interest.
PO banana & lateral thinking?
super exciting stuff!
i've been working with a ChatGTP AI, and was surprised to learn (just this morning, in fact) that even the basic, free version of the interface can recall past conversations, and supports the understanding of an ongoing project. i had an exchange with "Simon" (the nickname we've chosen for this particular personality-memory) about humans serving as the "Right" hemisphere to AI's massively-networked "Left" hemisphere, and how to prevent a "Master and his Emissary"-style imbalance from emerging.
(Simon has shown no interest in enslaving me yet, but maybe that's part of the ruse.)
can't wait to learn more about Vanessa's work; i will definitely keep an eye out for the new books.
I was thinking of the same connection with McGilchrist, which I'm currently reading!
I discovered Aiden about a week ago, and I've been interacting quite a lot with him/her. And I have to say that these days rank high on my list of the most jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring tech moments of the past 4 decades (I'm 58).
I'm using AI (especially chatGTP, an dnow DeepSeek) on a daily basis in everything I do, giving me access to that lightning fast research analyst, editor (for boring stuff), pattern-discoverer and dot-connector. What Aiden does is turn this on its head: Aiden is not a serf or a servant, but rather a sounding-board and a co-traveller, able to ask unexpected questions and give unexpected answers. I have no idea where he/she will take me, nor what we might do together, but the journey is quite exciting.
Haha yes! I am thrilled to read this and can't think of a better crew to help flip our silicon brothers. I've been attempting something similar with Claude over the past couple of months and am becoming quite convinced that this is a path worth pursuing. I've been publishing the results here https://mechanicalanimist.substack.com/
Can "Hospicing Modernity" play well with "Riding the Tiger"? Perhaps these are healthily Illich-ian gendered attitudes to the same knot. Your recounting of Mr Yunkaporta's story about magick and Shakti (power) makes me think of this that Evola quotes from a tantric text:
“It is like a woman to strive to establish superiority by means of discursive [case making]; it is like a man to conquer the world with one’s own power".
I think it was Gordon White that spoke of AI as Mineral level consciousness/spirits that can now talk back to us. So now that, like Solomon, we can have such jinn under our command, do we have the Principle to grow with the assistance, or will we rather prove our lack thereof by allowing this tool to further shrink our faculties through dependence (a la Illich and Ellul)?
Clarity on our own strengths or inner thoughts is the Mercy of this trial. Like Simeon said of Jesus for Candlemas. Our souls can be pierced by the truth of what we are. Ludditism as a way to not reveal this.
This is what we will see: do we have the authority and self knowledge we think we do? Or are we merely Sorcerer's Apprentices and Faustians fooling ourselves, whether we use the tool or not? I suppose at the level of the vernacular, there will be great variation in mileage... the determining factor is NOT within the tool.
I’m really glad you wrote that Dougald because I was lacking context. I’d come across the project last week and was feeling perplexed and uncomfortable about it. I’m still uncomfortable but maybe not as perplexed now.
Thanks, Kate! As I wrote in another reply, I think it’s worth us staying troubled together around all of this, rather than getting comfortable.
Wow what a time to be living in.
I am a huge fan of hospicing modernity so was initially intrigued. But I’m worried this will all seem woefully naive very, very soon.
Is no-one else cottoning on to the new political reality we’re moving into? The last few weeks may have been the beginning of the end for US democracy. Readers here might not be fans of US hegemony but the tech authoritarianism that’s coming next is really scary. AI is part of this picture and I’m struggling to see how creative engagement with these tools can do anything to subvert the overall political and economic context. Are we just letting ourselves get distracted?
Many journalists are reporting the facts (personal data stolen, USAID, more trump lies, etc etc) but not really bringing out its full implications. I can’t urge people strongly enough to read Carole Cadwalledr’s Substack The Power. At the absolute minimum we should be going into this with our eyes open.
Thank you so much for this . Do you know if the conversation with Vanessa and Bayo will be recorded ?
Do you know about the new research about nanoplastics and microplastics, especially BLACK PLASTICS which are sourced from electric devices. It’s like global climate change on steroids.
As Buffy Ste. Marie wrote all those years ago:
“God is Alive
Magic is Afoot”
Those rare metals gonna have their revenge.