In negotiations with the US military, Anthropic is attempting to limit the uses of its technology. Too late. Genies cannot be put back into bottles and yet these tech bros keep rubbing every damn lamp they can get their hands on.
Posts in: Short posts
Kingsnorth: Writers against AI
I love this Robert S. Duncanson painting “Landscape with Cows Watering in a Stream.” It caught my eye as the cover image for Radiance of the Ordinary.
One of our senators is talking about a new national crisis: Americans being killed by illegal immigrant drivers. Dang straight! I’m surrounded by red-blooded American drivers who can do that job just fine, thank you very much.
I was reminded today of Alan Jacobs’ review of the final Harry Potter book. Calling the series “the greatest penny dreadful ever written” was just spot-on; I’ve thought of that several times over the years. It also reminds me that I’ve been reading Jacobs for something over twenty years!
Remember the recent article about young men watching hours of porn per day? We all understand that is deeply disordered. But how different is it from those who bathe themselves in political anger? Both anger and sexual pleasure are good things when channeled appropriately; they are terrible masters.
This second issue of Robin Sloan’s pop-up newsletter on AI offers a series of helpful metaphors around the limts of AI. Essentially, AI is blocked by the air gap between it and the real world. If your work is entirely within the digital “symbols in, symbols out” then your work is in trouble.
Philip K Dick famously said, “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” Equally true: nearly all of the good in the world is happening in small acts, at a local level. If you never attend to the small and local, you will think the world is worse than it is.
A question for Christians: how would you square a belief in the inherent dignity of honest work with the idea that hard work was the curse of God on Adam? This isn’t a gotcha. I’m genuinely interested.
I love this series of three haying videos from Just a Few Acres Farm:
There are a lot of reasons to love the series, but right now, on this cold day, it’s because I can almost feel that warm, bright sun as I watch them.