culturalgeology

Orthodox priest Mark Roosien on Russian cosmism and tech:

“What the transhumanists of Silicon Valley fail to recognize is that biological immortality is not a terribly interesting goal. The paradox of immortality is that biological death is part of it; in fact, it is essential.”

Via art historian Matthew J. Milliner:

“Now that I know AI’s counselling allure experientially, I aim to resist it all the more. It is an act of human defiance to be there for each other anyway, to continue to fill the spaces the machines would all too willingly fill in our absence.

Baring my interiority to AI felt like Pippin looking into the palantír in The Two Towers, after which Gandalf says to the young hobbit:

“You have taken no harm. There is no lie in your eyes, as I feared. But he did not speak long with you. A fool, but an honest fool, you remain, Peregrin Took. Wiser ones might have done worse in such a pass. But mark this! You have been saved, and all your friends too, mainly by good fortune, as it is called. You cannot count on it a second time.””

“The singularity has come for universities, and we must adapt as a result. If you think the main point of university humanities classes was to teach expository essay writing, the season ahead will be a catastrophe.”

Meghan Sullivan of Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good on AI and the purpose of education.

“My Luddism comes from conviction. It also has much to do with temperament, and trace amounts of incompetence and disorganization. But fundamentally the tech world—with its buzzwords, pitch decks, and perennial hype, everything always “amazing” and “awesome” and “unprecedented”—creeps me out. All this talk of changing the world, rendered in the same market-tested fonts and colour schemes, always makes me ask: Is there any there there?

Put another way, I am skeptical of hype, not only in my tech, but in my religion. I enjoy parties and wine and snappy aesthetics as much as the next person. But when it comes to branding campaigns for Jesus, carefully coordinated church Instagrams, hip merchandise, the pastoral pitch from a megachurch mainstage, I worry that it all looks a little too much like any other marketing scheme.”

Do LLMs tempt us into specious reasoning and digital illusion?

“LLMs, since they are designed and trained using behaviourist principles that rely on reinforcement, have an almost invisible instrumental component to their communication. They are aiming at what they have been trained to produce, and they produce it very well: language compiled in a way that is satisfying to the user. The text is completely empty of any attempt to approximate reality, and it certainly is devoid of any motivation to communicate.

All use of text produced by LLMs will necessarily carry with it this instrumental limitation, because the very act of using LLMs recasts language from its uniquely human purpose of discovering the truth about things and instead subordinates it to the purposes underlying LLMs.”

Helpful response to Griffin's piece.

Rabbi Phil Graubart says Marc Andreessen's The Techno-Optimist Manifesto "ignores half of what it means to be human." What are the limits of technology in helping us overcome isolation?