“Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s Meeting with Christian Leaders.” Gerrit De Vynck and Nitasha Tiku describe a meeting Anthropic hosted for religious leaders. But if you think an algorithmic function can have a moral character, I’m not sure you’ll have a productive conversation about aligning AI with human goods: “A spokesperson for Anthropic said that the company believes it is important to engage with different groups, including religious communities, to help shape AI as it becomes more consequential for society. The firm is working to include more voices in that work, the spokesperson said. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has said he is open to the idea that Claude may already have some form of consciousness, and company leaders frequently talk about the need to give it a moral character.” (Interestingly, Andy Crouched was encouraged by the meetings and Luke Burgis declined an invitation on principle.)
“Reading is Magic.” Sam Kriss draws on Ong and others to imagine how our postliterate culture will function: “I think McLuhan was right that the post-literate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones. It’s likely that before very long, absolutely all those images will be generated by AI. In the same way that a Tolstovian peasant has a deep, spiritual knowledge of the land, we will have a deep, spiritual knowledge of Tung Tung Tung Sahur.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“Gun Love.” Paul Theroux describes why he enjoys shooting: “Target shooting at a range is no more dangerous, and slightly less complicated, than bar billiards, shove ha’penny or darts. And because of the headphones it’s completely absorbing and strangely calming. Ammunition is expensive – for some high calibre guns, as much as a dollar a cartridge. Shooting demands such concentration that it seems to me the perfect recreation for a writer, a relief from sitting at a desk and – as I am doing now – trying to imagine the next sentence.”
“A Synopsis of the Stehekin Flood.” Jake Courtney, one of the Stehekin residents still cut off after flooding destroyed a road last December, describes the regulatory tangle that’s preventing the road from being rebuilt. Somehow, the National Park Service thinks cutting down old growth forest is preferable to shifting the river back to its previous channel: “The hold up is the NPS . . . those in positions superior to the NPS employees that live and work in Stehekin. NPS officials have stated that they will not work in the river, but not returning the river to its channel means that any potential road route will have to cross approximately 1/3 of the river, by volume, where it now spills over into Battalion Creek. Historically, work has been done in the Stehekin River. Stehekin is not a national park. The Stehekin river is not a ‘wild and scenic’ river. Work can, and has in the past, been done. The situation, as it sits right now, has no end in sight.”
“Dear Nathan.” Matt Wheeler releases a new song inspired by A Place on Earth: “As you listen to ‘Dear Nathan,’ I invite you to immerse yourself in a story at the heart of the life of a community. Step for a moment into a time period and a setting outside of your own. I think that you’ll find much that you recognize and understand.”
“Put Not Your Trust in Techno-Kings.” In which I review Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed and try to imagine a more decentralized, convivial approach to technology: “At its core, Muskism is a response to the disruption and uncertainty of contemporary life. If you want security, you need to control essential infrastructure: cars, factories, rockets, the internet, social media, AI. If the wrong people control them, disaster may ensue, so guarantee that the right people have control. But this approach doesn’t fundamentally challenge the underlying dynamics set in motion by highly centralized networks. A more radical response to the existential risks posed by our dependence on far-flung, brittle infrastructure would embrace creaturely limits and seek decentralized, resilient forms of exchange.”
“The Quiet Surge of Alternative Micro-Colleges.” Matthew J. Smith describes what has “become a new alternative micro-college movement. And these new college startups have much to teach us about the state of higher education, the changing value proposition of college, and consumers’ growing desire for a clearer—even if more radical—answer to the question, what is education for?”
“I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses.” Sam Anderson writes a wonderful little review of his fancy Meta glasses: “Look, it would be easy to dunk on my very expensive, staggeringly incompetent sunglasses. Critiquing A.I. these days is like shooting fish in a barrel — and I mean poorly animated fish that keep sprouting human fingers inside a barrel that, as soon as you ask it a question or two, reveals itself to be a Nazi. Meta is investing heavily to promote its new product (a Super Bowl ad starring Spike Lee, a brick-and-mortar store on Fifth Avenue), which made me curious to take a peek through the eyes of the future. Yet A.I. glasses also feel so clearly unnecessary, so easily adaptable for malevolent ends. I was perfectly ready to hate them. Instead, very quickly, I started to feel sorry for my sunglasses. They were like a kid who hasn’t done any of the reading but keeps being called on in class — and who also can’t make friends, because all of his classmates think he’s a spy.”
“Who Should Control AI’s Most Dangerous Secrets?” Josh Code reports on the different regulatory options being debated in the wake of Anthropic’s new model: “the release of Mythos has given new urgency to the debate over just whose hands AI should be in—even raising the question of whether so-called frontier AI models should be nationalized. On one side are technologists who believe AI must be handled with the care and caution that nuclear weapons were accorded at the dawn of the nuclear age. And on the opposing side are those who think handing over AI to the government will cripple American innovation and cede ground to adversaries.”
“A Problem Deeper than Groupthink.” R. McKay Stangler reviews Robert George’s new book and considers how passing on a tradition can, counterintuitively, foster genuine discourse: “I might suggest to George that the true problem rather precedes the phenomenon of groupthink and in fact lies in the great cultural erasure that has taken place in the last half-century or so. We no longer teach students that there is any civilizational knowledge or wisdom that is shared among them, and so we both create the conditions for social atomism and for the reign of preferences that takes hold within it.”
“Operation Gaslight.” Nicholas Carr reviews Jacob Siegel’s The Information State and warns that it’s the hucksters, not the technocrats, who tend to benefit from powerful new digital technologies: “Obama’s techno-utopian rhetoric reinforced the tech industry’s messianic sense of itself, and the industry responded by showering him with support and money. Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt hit the campaign trail on behalf of his new friend. After the election, he became a fixture in the Obama White House. Over the course of Obama’s two terms, some 250 staffers moved between jobs in the administration and at Google, Siegel reports.”
