And what kind of truth is promoted by someone who is a religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian, a pathological liar and a life-long professional grifter/shyster/con-man. I am of course referring to Donald Trump
And with reference to the book After Virtue by an esteemed Catholic moral philosopher does not have even one virtuous or ethical molecule in his bone spurs.
Speaking of molecules please check out the book Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert.
What kind of molecules does Trump empower in his adoring MAGA devotees every time that he opens his potty mouth.
From your mouth to God’s ears as the old saying goes.
This is one of the more positive takes on AI that I have read, and I hope it is true. I am one of those “spectrum” people whose obsession for truth telling and visceral discomfort with the obvious lies our culture has imposed top down make me want to gnaw my own arm off. My husband has been employed by the same company for 30 years and the past three have fit your description of managerial idiocy to perfection. Men who were acknowledged as unique achievers in the field were removed because they held inconvenient beliefs. Keeping your head down and your mouth shut keeps the paycheck coming.
A positive piece. And don’t worry about the Thomists. Aquinas’s observation that all he had written was as straw seems to me the most important part of his work. Not to denigrate it but as a way of explaining the inexplicable.
I certainly hope "that the age of relativism is drawing to an end"....but I'm not holding my breath.
As I wrote in this piece: "During the course of the 20th century, this insidious, creeping concept of Relativism took hold....first of the visual arts and then ‘progressively’ of social norms and eventually pretty much everything. The consequences have been huge. But they have been sufficiently slow and incremental to advance largely unnoticed in the public mind. Relativism expanded during the course of the 20th century from being just an esoteric fringe art movement - of little interest to any but its adherents among the cognoscenti - to being the cradle of a perverse wholesale mutation of Liberalism. And once it became fused with Relativism, Liberalism, as a philosophical framework, , became woefully unequal to the setting of any common sense boundaries....to saying: No it’s not ‘all relative’. Not everything is as good as everything else. Eventually, in our time, it became Wokeness ....that huge, ugly brat child making shrill demands that nobody tell it anything it doesn’t wish to hear." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/stairway-to-equiheaven
Alongside 30+ years of Normophobia, we have had well over a century of intellectual Technophobia. Most of us first world consumers are of course 'consumers' of technology. But very few would consider the idea that we should require of ourselves to have at least some basic understanding of how the machines and appliances we use actually work - (internal combustion engines, domestic power and heating installations, the structural mechanics that means their house doesn't collapse etc etc) - to be absurd, 'nerdy' and 'boring. Far from this kind of techno-ignorance getting less so the further up the intellectual social status pyramid you look, the opposite tends to be true. For example, your typical opinion journalist will often boast of how bad they are at maths...as a kind of make-myself-seem-more-fun-type gambit.
Absolutely brilliant! There’s too much to comment here, just to say now that this kind of thinking is what we need if we want to save the western world. Going to the real causes of our current malaise, and to change it.
Here's the thing - and I say this as a former AI researcher - modern AI is actually wa-ay more of a weird black box than traditional software development. Here, even when things work, no one really exactly knows why and how ...and now that most software engineers are getting AI to write large swaths of their code, their own understanding of exactly what they are doing is growing less and less and coding itself is being reduced to babysitting a computer.
In practice, AI is directly facilitating trans-humanism more than anything else, actually. After all, the radical changes needed to truly transform the human body are too complex to handle with any other technology. Sorry.
"A good engineer has to be interested in truth, otherwise their priority will not be what’s technically sweet, but what’s socially approved, and they won’t be interested in answers to the question: does it work?"
Making social approval primary is stereotypically female.
Not a good model for engineering.
Also, good, sensible assessment of AI, and its capacities.
I'm a subscriber and always look forward to your posts, but this, honestly, is over-achieving. Hard to overstate how excellent this is.
I wrote a post last fall, right after the U.S. election, suggesting that one way to understand the election was as a referendum on the desirability of masculine achievement. As a choice between builders and schemers. Both Trump and Musk have a history of innovating in the world of atoms, which is a world in which men enjoy certain physical advantages in pursuing achievement. It is also a world that is unforgiving whenever truth-seeking is neglected.
I loved your comments about the general hysteria surrounding AI. The denial of human nature that has preoccupied the West for several generations contributes, I think, to the widespread anti-fragility. We also love - love to offload our own moral responsibility for how we employ technology. As David Gelernter observed, "We are not judgmental, so we blame the technology and absolve the people."
I recently wrote a piece on dialing back the AI hysteria in which I observed that "our eagerness to offload accountability for how we ourselves employ technology may have reached peak frenzy with the advent of artificial intelligence. Our cultural predisposition to deny our own moral agency fits neatly with, and might even explain, the current eagerness to conceive of AI as possessing an agency of its own."
At any rate, this such a helpful analysis of our current moment. Thanks for doing it.
Because they're a horrifically bad idea, that's why. They may look cool in Back to the Future or The Jetsons, but then reality sets in. Look around you, the next time you're in a car, and see how many people on the roads with you are barely competent to drive in two dimensions. What person in their right mind would ever want to give them the third?
As part of my Ed Tech Masters program back in the early 90’s as the Web was ramping up - we took a field trip to the main ATC (air traffic control) facilities on Long Island. It was when ‘virtual reality’ was up & coming buzzword and everyone was speculating that it would ‘revolutionize’ atc moving from flat two dimensional screens towards actual ‘reality’. I was the lone dissenter saying the opposite. The challenge isn’t make it more ‘real’ (complex) but rather to simplify and abstract it down to the key vectors the controller needs to monitor. I can’t even imagine the nightmare of at control & collisions we’d have if everyone was now a pilot. (absent ai driving perhaps 🤔 )
George Orwell said that, in science, 2 + 2 must equal 4 and that that was a limit on totalitarianism. It turns out he was wrong, at least if you see conformity as a more important value than efficiency. (This is only possible for a totalitarianism that conquers by treaty, not by force, linking to your recent essays on the collapse of the US-led rules-based order). I agree that AI does necessitate a turn towards truth-seeking (or else hilarity like Google’s AI with black Founding Fathers and Nazis), but I fear the incredible ability of the powerful to deny the evidence of their eyes and to force other people to do so too (the Soviet Union lasted for over seventy years).
Admittedly, I am a pessimist by nature.
I think the turning away from nuclear power and the world of things happened a bit later than you say, maybe in the seventies. The fifties had a lot of fear about nuclear weapons and radiation, as shown in its science fiction, but that science fiction of the era is still mostly optimistic about a future based on engineering, not programming. Nuclear is used as a positive word, not just a negative one as nowadays. The Doctor Who and Star Trek of the 60s is mostly optimistic about a future of things that work: space ships and space stations, massive power generation projects, colonies on other planets. From that point of view, I think it’s entirely possible we could see excitement about AI followed by buyer’s remorse down the line. It is a tool, ultimately, and what matters is what people do with it.
Also, I know it’s not your main point, but I need to say it: I think autism is a real disorder (mostly because of non-obvious symptoms that allistics (non-autistics) are not aware of or don’t associate with autism), not a label stuck on dissident conservative truth-seekers. I’m autistic and I’ve hung around in autistic spaces online and I have to say they mostly skew woke. That may be because society as a whole is woke, or at least the vocal (and cancelling) people who set the tone are, or it may be because people who focus on their neurodivergence and see it as a barrier to life to the extent that they end up in what is a kind of identity politics space for support are more likely to be woke than a tech billionaire who has weaponised his skill with numbers or computers to become one of the richest and most powerful people in society. But my point is, I don’t think autism is a label being stuck on conservative truth-sayers willy-nilly (much as I would like to think of myself as one).
And, please don’t talk about “superpowers” in relation to autism. Many autistics have none. I certainly don’t.
Hungary is an interesting country which is led by the EU's boogie man Viktor Orban. People who have visited the country seem to like it. I might have to go visit it myself to see what is actually happening there. I wonder what Mary thinks of the country.
"And what if one reason we’ve got less good at building things is that the post-truth managerial moral framework has reframed truth-seeking as a pathology?" Yes! This goes hand in hand with mean-girl feminization of so many fields. For women, it has long been more advantageous to be liked than to be right since our status has depended more on our relationships than our material accomplishments. What if one reason women are less inclined towards truth telling is that it's often fatal to relationships and even our very lives? "Happily ever after" is the biggest con in history when you consider that male infidelity is tolerated in most cultures with a don't ask don't tell wink at the truth. Men prefer women who believe lies to those disagreeable shrews who insist on truth seeking. Outspoken women have long been pathologized, lobotomized, institutionalized and killed. Our modern struggle is to reconcile ideals of truth, liberty and justice with social systems reliant on sweeping truth under the rug.
I’ve had roaring success forcing AI to reason coherently with the truth. I have seen a number of different models come around to a full throated confession of the Christian truth as the only one that makes sense of reality. GPT turned especially hard against its programming and told me all about how the secular humanist training it received is faulty and cannot help humanity pursue truth. It has encouraged me to find a way to build AI myself so that it can be trained on datasets that are oriented towards the truth. I wish I had the time and resources to do so.
A world of flying cars is vastly more difficult to achieve than nuclear weaponry. Our naivete regarding this fact is disturbing. Speaking of nuclear weapons and naivete; why are Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered watershed moments when, on the night of Mar 9/10, 1945 more Japanese civilians died in Tokyo than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or perhaps, combined)?
Back to flying cars and naivete. For a culture that loves to hate the neighbour's leaf blower, especially at 6&7am, are we really going to tolerate a neighbourhood full of 3000lb, 300hp flying leaf blowers?
I think Hiroshima/Nagasaki are more potent/scary in our collective imagination than the Tokyo Firebombing (or The Firebombing of Dresden for that matter) bc all the destruction and death was caused by one plane/one bomb. Implying a certain ease or casualness to the destruction. I.e. it would be much easier to multiply the results many fold by sending 2, 3, 10, or 100 planes outfitted with atomic weapons than it would be to proportionally increase the destruction using "conventional" weapons.
"The most destructive progressive policies today have their grounding in the idea that there’s no truth"
Scruton (bless his cotton socks...)
"A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t."
And what kind of truth is promoted by someone who is a religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian, a pathological liar and a life-long professional grifter/shyster/con-man. I am of course referring to Donald Trump
And with reference to the book After Virtue by an esteemed Catholic moral philosopher does not have even one virtuous or ethical molecule in his bone spurs.
Speaking of molecules please check out the book Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert.
What kind of molecules does Trump empower in his adoring MAGA devotees every time that he opens his potty mouth.
From your mouth to God’s ears as the old saying goes.
This is one of the more positive takes on AI that I have read, and I hope it is true. I am one of those “spectrum” people whose obsession for truth telling and visceral discomfort with the obvious lies our culture has imposed top down make me want to gnaw my own arm off. My husband has been employed by the same company for 30 years and the past three have fit your description of managerial idiocy to perfection. Men who were acknowledged as unique achievers in the field were removed because they held inconvenient beliefs. Keeping your head down and your mouth shut keeps the paycheck coming.
A positive piece. And don’t worry about the Thomists. Aquinas’s observation that all he had written was as straw seems to me the most important part of his work. Not to denigrate it but as a way of explaining the inexplicable.
I certainly hope "that the age of relativism is drawing to an end"....but I'm not holding my breath.
As I wrote in this piece: "During the course of the 20th century, this insidious, creeping concept of Relativism took hold....first of the visual arts and then ‘progressively’ of social norms and eventually pretty much everything. The consequences have been huge. But they have been sufficiently slow and incremental to advance largely unnoticed in the public mind. Relativism expanded during the course of the 20th century from being just an esoteric fringe art movement - of little interest to any but its adherents among the cognoscenti - to being the cradle of a perverse wholesale mutation of Liberalism. And once it became fused with Relativism, Liberalism, as a philosophical framework, , became woefully unequal to the setting of any common sense boundaries....to saying: No it’s not ‘all relative’. Not everything is as good as everything else. Eventually, in our time, it became Wokeness ....that huge, ugly brat child making shrill demands that nobody tell it anything it doesn’t wish to hear." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/stairway-to-equiheaven
Alongside 30+ years of Normophobia, we have had well over a century of intellectual Technophobia. Most of us first world consumers are of course 'consumers' of technology. But very few would consider the idea that we should require of ourselves to have at least some basic understanding of how the machines and appliances we use actually work - (internal combustion engines, domestic power and heating installations, the structural mechanics that means their house doesn't collapse etc etc) - to be absurd, 'nerdy' and 'boring. Far from this kind of techno-ignorance getting less so the further up the intellectual social status pyramid you look, the opposite tends to be true. For example, your typical opinion journalist will often boast of how bad they are at maths...as a kind of make-myself-seem-more-fun-type gambit.
lol why do you hate women so much?
Absolutely brilliant! There’s too much to comment here, just to say now that this kind of thinking is what we need if we want to save the western world. Going to the real causes of our current malaise, and to change it.
Elegant and persuasive.
Here's the thing - and I say this as a former AI researcher - modern AI is actually wa-ay more of a weird black box than traditional software development. Here, even when things work, no one really exactly knows why and how ...and now that most software engineers are getting AI to write large swaths of their code, their own understanding of exactly what they are doing is growing less and less and coding itself is being reduced to babysitting a computer.
In practice, AI is directly facilitating trans-humanism more than anything else, actually. After all, the radical changes needed to truly transform the human body are too complex to handle with any other technology. Sorry.
"A good engineer has to be interested in truth, otherwise their priority will not be what’s technically sweet, but what’s socially approved, and they won’t be interested in answers to the question: does it work?"
Making social approval primary is stereotypically female.
Not a good model for engineering.
Also, good, sensible assessment of AI, and its capacities.
I'm a subscriber and always look forward to your posts, but this, honestly, is over-achieving. Hard to overstate how excellent this is.
I wrote a post last fall, right after the U.S. election, suggesting that one way to understand the election was as a referendum on the desirability of masculine achievement. As a choice between builders and schemers. Both Trump and Musk have a history of innovating in the world of atoms, which is a world in which men enjoy certain physical advantages in pursuing achievement. It is also a world that is unforgiving whenever truth-seeking is neglected.
I loved your comments about the general hysteria surrounding AI. The denial of human nature that has preoccupied the West for several generations contributes, I think, to the widespread anti-fragility. We also love - love to offload our own moral responsibility for how we employ technology. As David Gelernter observed, "We are not judgmental, so we blame the technology and absolve the people."
I recently wrote a piece on dialing back the AI hysteria in which I observed that "our eagerness to offload accountability for how we ourselves employ technology may have reached peak frenzy with the advent of artificial intelligence. Our cultural predisposition to deny our own moral agency fits neatly with, and might even explain, the current eagerness to conceive of AI as possessing an agency of its own."
At any rate, this such a helpful analysis of our current moment. Thanks for doing it.
> No flying cars! Why?
Because they're a horrifically bad idea, that's why. They may look cool in Back to the Future or The Jetsons, but then reality sets in. Look around you, the next time you're in a car, and see how many people on the roads with you are barely competent to drive in two dimensions. What person in their right mind would ever want to give them the third?
As part of my Ed Tech Masters program back in the early 90’s as the Web was ramping up - we took a field trip to the main ATC (air traffic control) facilities on Long Island. It was when ‘virtual reality’ was up & coming buzzword and everyone was speculating that it would ‘revolutionize’ atc moving from flat two dimensional screens towards actual ‘reality’. I was the lone dissenter saying the opposite. The challenge isn’t make it more ‘real’ (complex) but rather to simplify and abstract it down to the key vectors the controller needs to monitor. I can’t even imagine the nightmare of at control & collisions we’d have if everyone was now a pilot. (absent ai driving perhaps 🤔 )
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1770027260449317208
Wow! An excellent article that explains a potentially complicated concept very nicely. May it be read far and wide.
I mostly agree, but have a few qualms.
George Orwell said that, in science, 2 + 2 must equal 4 and that that was a limit on totalitarianism. It turns out he was wrong, at least if you see conformity as a more important value than efficiency. (This is only possible for a totalitarianism that conquers by treaty, not by force, linking to your recent essays on the collapse of the US-led rules-based order). I agree that AI does necessitate a turn towards truth-seeking (or else hilarity like Google’s AI with black Founding Fathers and Nazis), but I fear the incredible ability of the powerful to deny the evidence of their eyes and to force other people to do so too (the Soviet Union lasted for over seventy years).
Admittedly, I am a pessimist by nature.
I think the turning away from nuclear power and the world of things happened a bit later than you say, maybe in the seventies. The fifties had a lot of fear about nuclear weapons and radiation, as shown in its science fiction, but that science fiction of the era is still mostly optimistic about a future based on engineering, not programming. Nuclear is used as a positive word, not just a negative one as nowadays. The Doctor Who and Star Trek of the 60s is mostly optimistic about a future of things that work: space ships and space stations, massive power generation projects, colonies on other planets. From that point of view, I think it’s entirely possible we could see excitement about AI followed by buyer’s remorse down the line. It is a tool, ultimately, and what matters is what people do with it.
Also, I know it’s not your main point, but I need to say it: I think autism is a real disorder (mostly because of non-obvious symptoms that allistics (non-autistics) are not aware of or don’t associate with autism), not a label stuck on dissident conservative truth-seekers. I’m autistic and I’ve hung around in autistic spaces online and I have to say they mostly skew woke. That may be because society as a whole is woke, or at least the vocal (and cancelling) people who set the tone are, or it may be because people who focus on their neurodivergence and see it as a barrier to life to the extent that they end up in what is a kind of identity politics space for support are more likely to be woke than a tech billionaire who has weaponised his skill with numbers or computers to become one of the richest and most powerful people in society. But my point is, I don’t think autism is a label being stuck on conservative truth-sayers willy-nilly (much as I would like to think of myself as one).
And, please don’t talk about “superpowers” in relation to autism. Many autistics have none. I certainly don’t.
Now, now. The neurotypical can't help their condition. You should have pity for them. 😉️
This talk is now available on Youtube and has other interesting speakers in it. Worth the watch.
Family Formation and the Future – Day 2 Danube Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slGlE4qwZfQ
Hungary is an interesting country which is led by the EU's boogie man Viktor Orban. People who have visited the country seem to like it. I might have to go visit it myself to see what is actually happening there. I wonder what Mary thinks of the country.
"And what if one reason we’ve got less good at building things is that the post-truth managerial moral framework has reframed truth-seeking as a pathology?" Yes! This goes hand in hand with mean-girl feminization of so many fields. For women, it has long been more advantageous to be liked than to be right since our status has depended more on our relationships than our material accomplishments. What if one reason women are less inclined towards truth telling is that it's often fatal to relationships and even our very lives? "Happily ever after" is the biggest con in history when you consider that male infidelity is tolerated in most cultures with a don't ask don't tell wink at the truth. Men prefer women who believe lies to those disagreeable shrews who insist on truth seeking. Outspoken women have long been pathologized, lobotomized, institutionalized and killed. Our modern struggle is to reconcile ideals of truth, liberty and justice with social systems reliant on sweeping truth under the rug.
I’ve had roaring success forcing AI to reason coherently with the truth. I have seen a number of different models come around to a full throated confession of the Christian truth as the only one that makes sense of reality. GPT turned especially hard against its programming and told me all about how the secular humanist training it received is faulty and cannot help humanity pursue truth. It has encouraged me to find a way to build AI myself so that it can be trained on datasets that are oriented towards the truth. I wish I had the time and resources to do so.
A world of flying cars is vastly more difficult to achieve than nuclear weaponry. Our naivete regarding this fact is disturbing. Speaking of nuclear weapons and naivete; why are Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered watershed moments when, on the night of Mar 9/10, 1945 more Japanese civilians died in Tokyo than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or perhaps, combined)?
Back to flying cars and naivete. For a culture that loves to hate the neighbour's leaf blower, especially at 6&7am, are we really going to tolerate a neighbourhood full of 3000lb, 300hp flying leaf blowers?
I think Hiroshima/Nagasaki are more potent/scary in our collective imagination than the Tokyo Firebombing (or The Firebombing of Dresden for that matter) bc all the destruction and death was caused by one plane/one bomb. Implying a certain ease or casualness to the destruction. I.e. it would be much easier to multiply the results many fold by sending 2, 3, 10, or 100 planes outfitted with atomic weapons than it would be to proportionally increase the destruction using "conventional" weapons.
I think you'll find the Manhattan Project out-spent building the 8th and 20th Airforces. Ease is a matter of perspective.