“Child’s Play.” Sam Kriss visits San Francisco and talks to highly agentic people burning through a lot of cash to do stuff. It’s quite the scene. Among the interesting characters he talks with is Roy Lee, founder of Cluely: “The company is loathed seemingly out of proportion to what its product actually is, which is a janky, glitching interface for ChatGPT and other AI models. It’s not in a particularly glamorous market: Cluely is pitched at ordinary office drones in their thirties, working ordinary bullshit email jobs. It’s there to assist you in Zoom meetings and sales calls. It involves using AI to do your job for you, but this is what pretty much everyone is doing already. The cafés of San Francisco are full of highly paid tech workers clattering away on their keyboards; if you peer at their screens to get a closer look, you’ll generally find them copying and pasting material from a ChatGPT window. A lot of the other complaints about Cluely seem similarly hypocritical. The company is fueled by cheap viral hype, rather than an actual workable product—but this is a strange thing to get upset about when you consider that, back in the era of zero interest rates, Silicon Valley investors sank $120 million into something called the Juicero, a Wi-Fi-enabled smart juicer that made fresh juice from fruit sachets that you could, it turned out, just as easily squeeze between your hands.”
“Laugh It Off.” Elizabeth Stice commends those who, like the angels, have learned to take themselves lightly: “laughter can be a kind of spiritual litmus test, a formative tool that both cuts and illumines. And the most stringent test is not so much being able to make a joke—or resist making one—as it is to be the subject of one. To patiently and humbly endure being laughed at, even derisively, can be a sign of spiritual maturity that points to the wisdom of the cross.”
“No Seed Which Dies Remains Alone.” Sarah Reardon “Pastor’s collection moves through the seasons, beginning with spring. As it does so, it moves, too, through the process of ‘fall[ing] into the ground’ in death and then bringing forth fruit. Along the way, whether through blank verse, sonnets, hymn meter, or a metrically-informed free verse, Pastor presents the wonder of this death and resurrection phenomenon in the natural world and in the world of human relations.”
“The Electronic Rewrite Man.” Jude Russo points out that, among other consequences, turning journalistic writing over to machines will create a world where no one knows how to be a journalist: “The problem is less that it produces a shoddy product (although it often does, at least right now). The problem is it saves users the trouble of thinking. In the case of journalism, where the goal is clarity of observation, thought, and communication, this outsourcing seems risky.”
“Will AI Scribes Fix Medicine’s Attention Problem?” Will Lyon has some concerns about the way that AI transcription will alter medical care and erode the relationship between doctor and patient: “While AI scribes are a starting point for reducing multitasking and making doctors’ attention more available, we need to rekindle our confidence and competence in physical examination and implement systemic changes that put presence and relationship before throughput and productivity, if we are to restore patients to the center of our attention.”
“Between Hype and History: Conversations with the AI Elite.” Sophia Brown-Heidenreich reviews a new book that offers an oral history of AI centered in the tightly networked world of San Francisco: “What comes out in The Scaling Era, just as it does in the podcasts that contributed to it, is uncertainty. The disagreements among Patel’s subjects reflect genuine difficulty in predicting where this technology is headed: some believe artificial general intelligence (AGI) will arrive within five years, others think decades; some believe current safety approaches are adequate, others that we are building systems we cannot reliably control. If this were merely hype, we might expect more uniformity. Patel has captured something messier. His is a snapshot of a cohort of technical elites who do not fully understand what they are building but have reason to believe it might be the most important innovation ever to be built.”
“The Plot to Replace Teachers with Tech.” John Allen Wooden eviscerates a major player in the ed-tech industry: “Partisan tribalists may blame their favorite villains — lazy union teachers and woke-ness for the Right, structural racism and poverty for the Left. But both political parties have been equally guilty of legislating more and more standardized testing over the past 25 years, creating an ideal environment for Big Tech to hawk ‘data-based’ panaceas like i-Ready. Marketed as a high-tech solution to lagging scores on government-mandated tests, i-Ready is used across 30-plus US states and a staggering 70% of the top-100 school districts, covering nearly half of elementary- and middle-school children. This, even though i-Ready has never been proved to successfully teach, immerses already-screen-addled kids in yet more screens, and in all likelihood is making America’s children quantifiably dumber.”
“Michael Pollan Punctures the AI Bubble.” Charles Finch reviews Pollan’s new book A World Appears and ponders the implications of its arguments about consciousness: “A single, unconquerable backstop to this series of scientific conquests remains: consciousness. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously summarized the problem: Why is it ‘like’ something to be alive? Why are we here, aware, rather than nowhere, being nothing? Researchers over the past few centuries have tried obsessively to answer these questions. Somehow, nevertheless, we are not one iota closer to a definitive solution than the cavemen were.”
“Burnham and Grant: American Jeremiahs.” Geoff Russ turns to two twentieth-century thinkers for cultural guidance: “We are living through the breakdown of a world of liberal ends without shared goods, and of managerialism that seeks merely to sustain itself. Through Burnham and Grant, there is at least one way to make sense of the regimes we inhabit and what has been lost because of them. A true sense of civic purpose can be restored only if we take both authors seriously and begin again to judge our institutions not merely by their technical prowess but by the human lives and common cultures they are meant to serve.”
