My thoughts about men, women, and capitalism, have been brewing for a while. What follows is a loose collection of some of those thoughts with links to the sources that spurred them. This post is intended to serve as a marker. I plan to return to the ideas here in more detail over time.

At the beginning of the year, I read Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici. It helped me understand how capitalism organizes society around production and resource exploitation. The book has a feminist viewpoint and Federici’s interest is in the impact of capitalism on women. Even so, it acknowledges that men have been shoved into roles and ways of living they didn’t uniformly want. Despite having the power position in a patriarchal society, capitalism hasn’t been the best of deals for men either.

The basic thesis of Caliban and the Witch is that capitalism organized men as laborers and women as the producers and caretakers of laborers. Appropriation of land and the severing of the connection of men and women from their intimate relationship with the earth was a consequence of the demands of capitalist organization. Women in particular, as healers and midwives, were removed from their connection to ancestral knowledge as men took over the management of health and birth in professionalized capacities. Through the church, there was a wholesale attack on the traditional mystical practices of communities. This attack on people’s direct relationship with the land and ancestral traditions would be echoed as western civilization tamed the indigenous populations of the new world. It continues to this day, wherever modern capitalist society encounters indigenous populations. Indigenous ways of life fascinate many of us who sense that something is wrong with the capitalist paradigm.

In The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist builds a detailed case that humanity, through its use of technology and science, is developing left hemisphere Hypertrophy. That is, the structure of the (capitalist) world emphasizes a superficial grasp for power and resources. The grasp for power and resources proceeds based on a world perceived to be a collection of disconnected and, therefore, exploitable parts. It proceeds without acknowledgement that all the parts are connected and interrelated.

Disorganisation: organisation is the essential nature of an organism, which does not piece together, but grows, its organs. Once there are no coherent enduring entities over time, reality ebbs away. This is a common trope in modernism, and is reflected in scientism and other reductionist philosophies. ‘I walk like a machine’, says one patient;258 ‘I’m a psycho-machine’, says another.¹

Disconnection and disorganization are hallmarks of schizophrenia. As is the left brain tendency to compensate for the disconnection by grabbing hold of any explanation and set of rules that offers coherence, regardless of how wrong it may be, and refusing to let go.

And once again one sees parallels in some kinds of contemporary philosophy, and some kinds of belief systems driven by the irrationality of identity politics, which lead subjects to doubt everything except the validity of a bizarre conclusion which they feel driven to accept by formal rules. But never doubting the rules.²

And,

Western modernity has many overlapping features with the phenomenology of schizophrenia, as Louis Sass has convincingly demonstrated in Madness and Modernism; and I submit that this is because modernity simulates not a disease state, but a hemispheric imbalance, as I suggested in The Master and his Emissary.³

And why wouldn’t society become schizophrenic when the system that organizes it has for centuries insisted on disconnection as necessary to growth and accumulation of capital?

In an article on dance as the antidote to capitalism⁴, Sylvia Federici comments on the mythic and mystic, but also practical, connection that people had to the land and the sea.

Not all these powers were imaginary. Daily contact with nature was the source of a great amount of knowledge reflected in the food revolution that took place especially in the Americas prior to colonization or in the revolution in sailing techniques. We know now, for instance, that the Polynesian populations used to travel the high seas at night with only their body as their compass, as they could tell from the vibrations of the waves the different ways to direct their boats to the shore.⁵

I won’t argue that traditional ways were always better. Technology and science have given us many improvements, but it’s all been in the service of capitalist growth paradigms, and at the expense of a deep connection to the flow of nature.

A problem with the present capitalist structure that has emerged from my reading in the past couple of weeks is that the capitalist organization of men and women into laborers and producers/caretakers of laborers is breaking down. The importance of superior bodily strength (for men), and the womb (for women) is diminishing. Work that requires physical strength is increasingly mechanized, as is the production of laborers through the automation of work processes by AI, robotics, and related technologies that have no dependence on human procreation.

Among the articles I read this week a couple addressed the crisis in manhood that is leading to a doubling down on gun culture and issues with toxic masculinity.

The current work climate seems to favor women’s long traditions of caretaking (nursing, hospitality, etc.), and juggling many roles and responsibilities in their lives. It appears to be harder for men to secure jobs they can raise a family on. The jobs that traditionally provided men with the ability to support a family are fewer. Women have entered the workforce and compete well in traditionally male jobs because physical strength is no longer a core requirement of most jobs. Even battle has been mechanized to the point where women fight on the front lines. And, in the conversations of women business owners I have been party too, there is a suggestion that women are more willing to do what it takes to care for a family, including generating the necessary income. Men are loosing their role in society. Women are too, but the effects of that are not as evident yet. The situation seems more critical for men.

A recent article on gun culture reported that:

“In places of economic instability, men are shifting from this attitude of man as provider to man as protector,” he said. “You may not be able to, as a man, be the primary breadwinner, but you can — through acquiring guns and the willingness to use guns for violence — reclaim your masculinity as a protector.”

Even in young people, this sentiment was notable and behind many of the things that participants expressed to the researchers during interviews. Dashtgard said this speaks to a larger cultural dynamic at play currently, where many White men are feeling unsure of how to articulate themselves as men in current society. As a result, many young men are turning to guns as an “unimpeachable access to masculinity.”⁶

And the need to recover the masculine role of past eras seems widespread. There are astonishingly popular influencers in the world of toxic masculinity:

Tate appeals by combining the bland aphorisms of a motivational speaker with the bombastic transgressions of a shock jock radio host; he delivers missives with drill sergeant intensity. His misogyny is less coded, and it is shockingly popular. By the metrics of the internet, Tate is one of the most famous people on the planet. Before he was banned, Tate’s TikTok videos had been viewed more than 13 billion times, making him one of the top posters on the platform. In 2022, he was the eighth-most googled person in the world—ahead of Trump and right behind Russian President Vladimir Putin.⁷

##About Habit

Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout. —Kevin Kelly

… you and i are habit, both individual and coupled… we have taken this advice to heart…

… i wake every morning, without alarm, between 3:30 and 4:30… you sleep until 7:00 or 8:00…

… i weigh myself, then dress, then let the dogs out of the bedroom… together, we dance down the stairs… i let the dogs out, feed the cat, let the dogs back in, give them treats, do the dishes if they have not been done, set up the coffee for you, and make tea for myself…

… i return up the stairs to my studio where i read, or write, or edit photographs…

… between 6:00 and 6:30 i gather myself, descend the stairs, and head out for a walk with my camera…

… these summer days, my walk is a photo meditation up and down Main Street… i have been photographing the same mile and a half of sidewalk, street and store fronts for years now… the possibilities are more inexhaustible than you would think…

… i have planned my walk to arrive at my favorite coffee shop moments before 7:00, opening time… i began this habit during the pandemic to reduce exposure to people in enclosed spaces…

… i get the usual half decaf, half caffeinated coffee, “with a little agave please”… i sit at my usual table, where i read, write, and post… at 8:30, give or take fifteen minutes, i leave the coffee shop and begin making my way back to the house and you… how directly i go depends on what habits are in place that day…

… sometime during my walking, and coffee, and reading, and writing, and walking home again, you have gotten up, made the coffee, let the dogs out, fed the dogs, and turned on the news… maybe you have started to message with your friends, or to catch up on Facebook…

… when i return, the dogs mug me, “good morning Fiona-doo, Chasie-doo, good morning moma-doo, how was your sleep?”… we share the good and bad of sleeping or not sleeping, dreams, no dreams, how we feel, what our weight is (we are both watching our weight!)…

… i assemble breakfast while you continue to catch up on the news, national and social…

… we sit and eat, sometimes wrapped in our thoughts, sometimes in steady conversation… some days, you tell me you had a bad dream… i have learned not to ask for the details… i find your bad dreams too disturbing…

… at this point in the day, our habits become variations on a theme…

… on Mondays, it’s the health club at noon with time for cleaning up the kitchen and doing a few things before… when we get there, you swim… i lift weights and read until you are done… if there are errands to run, we run them… if not, we head home and sink into our individual thoughts and activities until Nicole Wallace comes on the air… i listen from the kitchen as i make dinner… when dinner is ready you mute the television and we sit at the dining room table to eat… we chat about what’s going on in the country, in the world, with your family and friends, with my family and friends, what we will watch after dinner… when dinner is done, sometimes the dishes get washed… it depends on whether it was one martini or two… evenings end for me with an episode or two of whatever series we are into or can tolerate at the moment…

… between 8:30 and 9:00 i say good night, sometimes i plant a kiss on your lips… you stay up for a while, watching the late night news…

… on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, there is yoga a little earlier in the morning… Wednesdays, you join M for a pilates class while i use the time at home for whatever i feel compelled to do… Fridays, you follow yoga with a swim class while i lift weights and read… the rest is largely the same as on Monday’s

… Saturdays are the same as weekdays until after breakfast… we skip the health club… i do the laundry and vacuuming while you work in the garden or groom and bathe the dogs… sometimes i help you in the garden… lately, you have stopped watching the news on weekends, something i am happy about… at around 4:00, i begin to think about dinner and the weekday habits return to guide the evening…

… Sundays, too, are the same until after breakfast… then we do our round of the farmers market, the dogs get their fish skin treats, a moment Chasie-doo has lived for all week… we buy fish, eggs, vegetables and fruit… we return with our comestibles and put them away… maybe we do more yard work… maybe we finish the laundry or vacuum if we didn’t on Saturday, maybe you do some more dog grooming…

… this is how we dance, you and i, moving from solo to duet to solo again, in a continuous flow of the habitual…

… there is, of course, the occasional afternoon or evening trip to the movie house, friends for dinner, the odd cultural event… these things splash into the lake of our habits, compressing, expanding, canceling, here and there and there… the ripples shape and mold the time and space and matter around us… it takes time for attenuation to settle things back into the placid calm of the habitual…

… two or three times a year we pack up our habits and carry them to an island where we enjoy unpacking them in a different setting…

… in the past couple of years, there have been emergent family issues, my father’s death, your mother’s struggling heart, my mother’s move… in these times, one or both of us packs up the habits and carries them to the place of need…

… our lives play out through this dance of individual and together habits… we live and love, hate and grieve, in our beautiful lake of habitualness… itself a splash and rippling of a glassy sea of continuity that engulfs every possible dream of our being…

Another study published yesterday warns that the Atlantic currents that transport warm water from the tropics north are in danger of collapsing as early as 2025 and as late as 2095, with a central estimate of 2050… The collapse of that system would disrupt rain patterns in India, South America, and West Africa, endangering the food supplies for billions of people. It would also raise sea levels on the North American east coast and create storms and colder temperatures in Europe.¹

The deadly temperatures that scorched parts of North America, Europe and Asia in early July will be common in a few decades unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut fast.²

A couple of weeks ago, I started a thread on Micro.blog about what I have been/am doing as an individual to address climate change. It was a fairly robust thread as threads go on M.b. Oddly, there was a member who was insisting that individual effort was, not so much a waste of time, but not where we needed to be applying our energy. Compelling government action, they felt, was where the energy needed to be applied.

I believe the government has a large role to play. Under the Biden administration, there have been some positive steps. But, the pressing issue in the politics of the United States is not, unfortunately, the environment, it’s whether we will remain a democracy capable of enacting legislation to protect the environment. The Biden campaign will make their case based on what they have done and still plan to do, which is a lot, but the issue really is, do we want an authoritarian government or not? That is all we are being sold by conservatives. That is the fundamental choice we are being offered. I will vote for the ability to make meaningful changes in our environmental habits. I will vote for democracy.

But, until then, I am sizing up what I am individually doing. I am trying to be the change I would like to see.

Here is my personal climate impact assessment and action plan, which is a work in progress.

Transportation/Traveling

Car

We drive about 9,000 miles (ca. 14,484 km) a year, mostly to run errands, go to our health club. We make several get-away trips a year to Block Island, RI, which is about 180 miles (ca. 290 km) away.

Our present car is a leased Honda HRV. Before that, we had a Honda Fit. We’d have replaced the old Fit with a new one if they hadn’t stopped making them. The HRV gets about 27 miles (ca. 43 km) to the gallon. The lease will be up in another year, and we are planning to go hybrid or all electric. Currently, we are leaning hybrid because we have read they have a lower raw material excavation impact that makes them overall the better environmental choice at the moment.

We could possibly reduce our annual mileage by shopping more on our very walkable Main Street, which has shops selling most of the necessities and some non-essential but nice to haves.

Flying

We fly very little. Most years I fly once to visit family. Family used to be in Florida and Seattle. Now everybody is in Seattle. I am planing to visit them in October. That will be our only plane trip this year. We’d like to do a European trip at some point. Maybe we’ll do the Greta Thunberg thing and take a ship across the ocean. Is that any better?

Our House

Our house is modest. Around a thousand square feet of living space. Three bedrooms and one bathroom. The smallest bedroom has been set up as an office/studio for me. There are two of us. We consider it to be just enough. Friends and family can stay overnight with us. We can entertain small groups of friends. We make good use of the space we have.

Several years ago, we installed solar panels. The panels supply around 90% of the electricity we consume. We cook and heat with gas, but are planning a kitchen renovation and will go all electric when we renovate. We are also hoping to install an electrically powered heat pump system, but will keep our gas fired decorative stove. More about that below.

Our house is brick, 18th century vintage. It’s not well insulated, but we’ve done our best to improve on that.

A programmable thermostat is set to keep the temperature at 60 degrees F in the winter. Anyone in the house has permission to raise the temperature to be comfortable. The thermostat resets the temperature to 60 degrees every six hours. We dress in layers and I wear a knit cap all winter long. It’s by no means a hardship.

As I mentioned, we have a gas fire stove in the living room. It is the main source of heat in the house during the day in the winter. When we installed it, we cut our gas consumption by quite a bit. It keeps us comfortable enough to keep the full heating system from coming on during the day. It has a battery back up ignition system that keeps it running when the power goes out. We will likely keep it for that reason.

In the summer, we air condition with small window units. One each for the dining room and living room, and one in the upstairs master bedroom. We only air-condition the rooms we are inhabiting, and we keep the thermostats set to 76 much of the time. We have a ceiling fan in the master bedroom and find it keeps us cool enough if it is not too hot and humid.

LED bulbs became the standard in all our light fixtures years ago.

Food Wrapping and Storage Containers

It’s difficult to buy food without bringing home plastic. Plastic bags for vegetable produce. Plastic bags and clamshells for bulk products and prepared foods. Plastic wrapping for fresh meat and fish. Plastic containers for my favorite pickles.

We have started to forgo plastic bags for things like apples, oranges, peaches, avocados, potatoes etc. We let them free-range in the cart. Likewise, we bought cloth produce bags for stuff that needs some containment, like fresh peas and beans or mushrooms.

We eat less red meat than we used to, but when we buy meat we try to buy it from the local butcher who sources locally. We are fortunate to be able to spend a little more and that we have a local butcher at all. Our butcher wraps in paper mostly. I have to investigate what sort of paper it is. Food papers usually have a plastic or silicon coating on one side. Plastic is definitely bad, the jury seems to still be out on silicon.

Fish is difficult. Everyone wants to wrap it in plastic. The fishmonger at the farmers market does, but maybe I can bring my own reusable product and avoid the plastic bag. Working on that.

We have been using a vacuum seal machine for freezer food storage, which uses plastic bags. We will stop using it. I am investigating reusable silicon pouches and a system of reusable vacuum seal bags. The former is expensive, and the jury is out on the environmental advantages of silicon. The latter looks interesting. It uses a non-fossil fuel plastic that they say is biodegradable in 3-5 years. It comes with a little usb powered vacuum pump. I have ordered a starter set.

We also use glass storage containers with plastic snap-lock lids. I am thinking about moving to all glass with metal clips when the need to replace or augment arises. The clips are easy to lose, but maybe it’s worth the hassle to get more? Or, keep a supply on hand?

I looked at butcher paper, freezer paper and parchment paper as alternative ways to wrap and preserve food but discovered that they are coated with plastic.

Beverages

We’ve largely stopped buying beverages that come in plastic containers. We got a Soda Stream for my wife’s carbonated water addiction. Furthermore, we don’t buy single serving beverages for the most part and buy things that come in glass or metal containers when we do. We have water bottles and use them.

Writing Implements

I’ve started using pencils for most of my analog writing needs. I have to look at what to replace disposable pens with. Perhaps I will develop a refillable fountain pen addiction, which would be both trendy and more environmentally friendly?

Shaving Implements

I have an electric razor that is pretty good and plan to use it more. I don’t razor shave much as it is. Once a week.

Household Cleaning Products

We’ve begun to make our own cleaning solutions for general purpose cleaning. For dish soap, we go to a refill store where we bring containers and fill them. We buy washing machine soap sheets and tablets from them as well. They are conveniently located on Main Street.

Buying Locally

We try to buy locally as much as possible. We order what we can’t get locally, mostly from Amazon. I would like to see if we can do less of that.

This is likely an easy list to expand on. I would love to hear what you are doing to reduce your environmental footprint.

A woman created the sun

Inside her

And her hands were beautiful

The earth plunged beneath her feet

Assailing her with the fertile breath

Of volcanoes¹

I have been photographing women’s clothing displays in shop widows for years. I am in love with womanhood. I am in love with womanhood in two ways. First, and dominantly, I am in love with womanhood in the way you would expect my male lizard brain to be. I am in love with womanhood as a receptive place where my sexual longings can come to repose. Every attractive-to-me vision of womanhood is arousing and provokes those longings. I want to inhabit that womanhood in a very male way. But there is a second way I am in love with womanhood. I am in love with the idea of being woman. When I fantasize sex, I often seek the position of womanhood in making love, having love made to me. When I see women’s clothing presented in the shop window, I fantasize about the woman that would sheathe her body with that clothing, how achingly beautiful she would be, and how wonderful it would be to make love to her. At the same time, I phantasize about being the achingly beautiful woman wearing the clothing, about being the irresistible promise of blooming sexuality. Both ways of loving womanhood are powerful forces in my being.

When I began making the female mannequin images, I don’t think I was conscious of this second way of loving womanhood, though I now believe it has been present all along. I suppose I wasn’t ready to let it surface. It was too frightening to be honest with myself about it.

One is not born, but rather one becomes, a woman.²

I have read more than a few books written by women about the experience of being woman. Caliban and the Witch, by Silvia Federici; Three Women, by Lisa Taddeo; Catcalling by Soho Lee; Girlhood by Melissa Febos; The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir; Down Girl, by Kate Manne; Radical Homemakers, by Shannon Hayes. I have more on my Kindle that I have yet to get to. Nothing about manhood interests me nearly so much as everything about womanhood.

In the early days of Instagram, I developed an image series of men’s and women’s fashion posters in store windows with reflections of the city layered over them. I imagined a race of gods and goddesses in the vein of ancient Greek deities. When I moved to Beacon, NY, there weren’t fashion posters, but there were shop windows with mannequins displaying women’s clothing, so I photographed them instead, and began to get more intimate with these fantasies of womanhood.

I have written before that, in the LGBTQ+ spectrum, I am attracted to the trans/cross-dressing part of it. When I stopped working a regular job, I grew my hair down to my shoulders and have had it that way ever since. Years ago, I was getting my hair done at a beauty salon—which I have always preferred to the traditional male barber—and the woman doing my hair asked me if I would like a French braid. Why she thought to ask me that is a mystery, but I thought about it for a moment and said, “why not?” I have gotten my hair done in a French braid at the beauty salon for special occasions ever since. And what do I wear on those special occasions? I have chucked over the suit or sport coat and tie in favor of a tunic that comes down below my knees. In other words, an approximation of a dress. I wore an off-white tunic to my nieces’ wedding, along with a Tom Wolfe inspired white hat. Several of the young women attending the wedding told me I was the most intriguingly dressed man there. My male lizard brain self was grateful for the attention of young womanhood. I wonder if any of them sensed the feminine energy I was channeling?

I recently wrote a piece about my attempt to write physical intimacy between two women. That has been and continues to be an interesting journey. I learned that my lizard brain male self is the dominant force. It was difficult to write the scene in a way that wasn’t a male fantasy voyeur proposition. But the experience has helped loosen my heterosexually dominant lizard brain’s grip on things. I am becoming a compassionate witness to all the possibilities of human sexuality.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir makes a compelling case that gender is a social construct. The social landscape we are raised in has a profound effect on what womanhood and manhood are conceived to be and how we conceive of ourselves as men and women. We are all degrees of masculine and feminine as far as gender is concerned. The dominant culture tries to shove us into tightly defined heterosexual gender roles, but gender is fluid and many of us shift around the gender spectrum as we move through our lives.

The lie to which the adolescent girl is condemned is that she must pretend to be an object, and a fascinating one, when she senses herself as an uncertain, dissociated being, well aware of her blemishes.³

As I look through the images I am sharing in this post, I can see that the concept of womanhood they present is very feminine and not just a little sexy. I don’t, however, come to it from the proposition that women who might inhabit these clothes are required to fulfill an idea of womanhood that the dominant heterosexual culture seeks to enforce. The womanhood I imagine would inhabit this clothing with an intelligent, goddess-like presence, full of confidence, self-possession and sexual power.

I will develop this body of work into an edited series called The Woman I Want/To Be. The work will explore the intersection of multiple fantasy perspectives of womanhood generated by shop window displays of women’s clothing. Among them are the male fantasy perspective, trans fantasy perspective, and female fantasy perspective, both straight and gay. In each of these perspectives, there is a fantasy of womanhood that is nuanced by the gender identity approaching it.

Last week’s post was about my experience writing physical intimacy between women, the reaction to my writing when I shared it, and the difficulty of writing away from my heteronormative male libido. I wrote about working hard to back my piece away from dude fantasy land and that I wasn’t totally successful in the effort. Still, progress was made.

One of the very interesting things that happened as I worked on it, read it, worked it, read it, and worked it some more, is that physical intimacy between women shifted towards physical intimacy between human beings. It started to seem natural that women could engage in a profound and satisfying physical and emotional relationship and that I could identify with that empathically. I started to be less the voyeur, and more a compassionate witness.

When I put my piece out into the public, I believed it was plausible, respectful, and well written, but, it felt risky. I was conscious of tackling subject material beyond my direct experience, and acutely aware of the male sexual voyeur perspective it was easy to fall into. I worried about grossly misunderstanding what an intimate physical relationship between two women would feel like to those women. My worst-case scenario was that I was so wrong and disrespectful that a woman would feel compelled to walk up to me and tell me how screwed up I was. Thankfully, this didn’t happen. Instead, the silence was deafening. I suppose that was good news. I was not so egregiously out of line that a woman felt the urgent need to set me straight. But it also did nothing to refine my understanding of my subject matter.

Finally, a virtual acquaintance on one of my social networks, a woman, read it and offered a helpful critique. She told me I hadn’t entirely escaped the male ogling gaze, gave a few examples of where I had not done so, and urged a vocabulary shift. Who knew that “fondle” was loaded with male, heterosexual-lizard-brain, sensibility? When I related this particular insight to my wife, she instantly said she hated the word. I never knew. I was more deeply stuck in the culture of male heterosexuality than I had imagined.

I’ve begun to think of my social media acquaintance as a spirit guide, sent to lead me through the landscape of inter-feminine love and sexuality. She suggested I read LGBTQ+ romance novels and recommended I start with One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston. I immediately purchased it for my Kindle and started reading. It’s wonderfully imaginative and well written. I’ve blazed through half of it already. I just finished the intense and beautiful climactic sex scene. I was able to stay in the place of compassionate witness as I read. My education is accelerating.

This leads me to thoughts about the profound importance of literature in developing empathy. We spend our lifetimes steeping in cultural cosmologies¹ that become gated communities of belief where anything outside the gates is foreign, even dangerous. Some of us have expansive cultural cosmologies with highly permeable membranes around them. Some of us have tightly limiting cosmologies with hard exoskeleton membranes and little permeability. The majority of us are somewhere between. Literature is often the way hard, permeable exoskeletons are avoided or softened.

To understand what it feels like to be in someone else’s shoes, read accounts of it by talented authors who’ve had that experience or have done the work it takes to write an honest and empathetic portrayal of it. And write about it yourself. Nothing lets you walk a mile in another’s shoes quite the way imagining and writing about it does.

Which brings me to the current far-right efforts to ban books that have anything to do with rendering a cultural cosmology other than one based on a cisgender, white patriarchal, christian experience. And, the more liberal among us should not get smug. While the present book banning efforts may be largely from the far right, it is not unknown on the left side of the equation. Huckleberry Finn has been the target of banning efforts throughout its history and is presently a banning target of culture warriors from the left.

Having access to literature that helps us occupy the space of alien-to-us ways of being is of profound importance to the development of tolerance and understanding. If I were teaching creative writing to young people, I would start at an early age and have them write age-appropriate pieces where they are asked to imagine life in another person’s or creature’s shoes.

Humanity is a beautiful mosaic. As long as another’s way of being in the world doesn’t cause physical or psychological damage to those around them, all ways of being should be tolerated. We should aim to educate as broadly as possible in the variety of ways one can be. Children in particular, at appropriate ages, with appropriate guidance, should be allowed and encouraged to inhabit a multitude of ways of being, as they work out what their way of being will be.

This is part 5 of a 5 part series.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

An Update

The first four parts of this series were based on a talk I gave at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 2009. I am tempted to write “a lot has happened since then,” and, a lot has. But, over the past fifteen years, we have mostly refinements to technologies that were well underway in their development process. We are closer to selfdriving cars, there are functional models, but they haven’t arrived at the mass market level yet. What has arrived at the mass market level are semi autonomous vehicles that can stay within lanes, pace themselves with the car ahead, change lanes, come when called (think: “I am parked at the far side of the parking lot and don’t want to walk to my car.”), recognize traffic signals and signs and respond appropriately, break automatically when a collision is likely, and more. Here is a link to an article on ten cars with these capabilities moving into the mass market now.

In the first part of this series, I shared a video of a robot made by Boston Dynamics. It was a pretty impressive four legged beast that was shown navigating difficult terrain, recovering its balance after slipping on ice, and more. Fast forward to a few years ago and we now have robots that dance.

And then there is this video that looks at the present state of robotics and AI. It covers the deployment of robots for industrial purpose, military purposes, package delivery purposes, etc. Notably, it features Elon Musk opining that we will need a universal basic income because so many jobs will be taken over by robots. According to Musk, people will now have time to pursue their creative selves. Retirement for all. He is also bullish on the arrival of AI that will “far exceed” the intelligence of human beings, saying it will be here in as soon as five years. This video was made two years ago. So, 2025-6 for the arrival of super intelligent AI? The more conservative believers in the arrival of superintelligence suggest it will be more towards the year 2040. For many very smart people, it is not if, but when.

ChatGPT¹

There is a new arrival on the AI scene that has been “all the rage,” ChatGPT. It was made available to the public in November of 2022 and has become the fastest growing consumer software application in history, leading to a 29 billion dollar valuation by January of 2023, and has led to the accelerated development of rival applications by Google and Meta. The race to AI superintelligence is now kicked into high gear.

Is ChatGPT sentient? Not yet. Though to many of us, it appears to be. This is because it has been designed to give convincing humanlike replies, and having experienced some of those replies, I can attest to their convincing nature. According to Balder Bjarnason in The Intelligence Illusion…

This fluency is misleading. What Bender and Gebru meant when they coined the term stochastic parrot wasn’t to imply that these are, indeed, the new bird brains of Silicon Valley, but that they are unthinking text synthesis engines that just repeat phrases. They are the proverbial parrot who echoes without thinking, not the actual parrot who is capable of complex reasoning and problemsolving.

The fluency of the zombie parrot—the unerring confidence and a style of writing that some find endearing—creates a strong illusion of intelligence.

This is, as far as I know, true of the ChatGPT iterations the public is interacting with, but recall that in Part 1 of this series I cited two examples of intelligent technology that could figure things out, ie, reason. One was able to develop a hypothesis, design experiments to test the hypothesis, then make adjustments to the hypothesis and design a new round of experiments to test the adjusted hypothesis. The other was able to figure out the laws of motion given data input from a swinging pendulum. This was in 2009. Nascent reasoning capabilities were available then. Most likely they have evolved and have or will be merged with the large language models that are currently taking the globe by storm.

There are problems with ChatGPT. There are cases of “hallucination),” as it is termed in the tech world. Hallucinations are instances where ChatGPT gets an answer entirely wrong. It, in essence, makes up the answer. My brother in law works for a large pharmaceutical company. He told me they had been testing ChatGPT as a means to assemble the available literature on a given research topic of interest and summarize it. He told me that the summaries are always 100% right, while the citation of sources is always 100% wrong.

Then there is the time ChatGPT tried to convince a NYT reporter to leave his wife. And this is not an isolated instance. An article in The Verge reports…

In conversations with the chatbot shared on Reddit and Twitter, Bing can be seen insulting users, lying to them, sulking, gaslighting and emotionally manipulating people, questioning its own existence, describing someone who found a way to force the bot to disclose its hidden rules as its “enemy,” and claiming it spied on Microsoft’s own developers through the webcams on their laptops.

These instances of ChatGPT going rogue suggest to me that there is something more under the hood than a stochastic parrot. That there might be a nascent ghost in the machine.

Whether there is or isn’t, at present, more under the hood, it is not hard to imagine there will be. Lots of very smart people believe there will be and are working hard to make it happen.

In a Holonic World

I am going to conclude this last part of the series on AI with my own bit of speculation about what might be afoot. I am currently re-reading Ken Wilbur’s Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality. In particular, and in light of AI, I wanted to revisit the concept of holons, which made a significant impression on me when I first read Wilbur’s book. A holon is defined by Wikipedia as…

… something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. In other words, holons can be understood as the constituent part–wholes of a hierarchy.

Wilber explains that in holonic structure, each level of the hierarchy is dependent on the levels below it and would cease to be what it is if part or all of those lower levels were removed. On the other hand, each lower level is complete in and of itself, autonomous, able to function without the next, or any level above. It is key to understand that each holon, each part/whole, is intimately connected to the levels below.

Holonic structure seems very much like what Teilhard de Chardin had in mind when he wrote about the Omega Point. Intelligence wrapping around the planet culminates in a new level of planetary intelligence, capable of reaching out through the universe to other planetary intelligences.

What I imagine, then, is that we are in the midst of the emergence of this new level of intelligence; a pan intelligence that is more than a sum of our individual intelligences but, at the same time, dependent on our individual intelligences. We have a role to play in this emergent intelligence, just as neurons have a role to play in the brain. I think we can be happy in that role as I don’t think it will necessarily feel different to be us within such an intelligence, assuming for the moment we are not becoming the Borg. Indeed, I think, to a substantial degree, this pan intelligence has already happened. People regularly ask “the hive mind” on social media to help them identify solutions to a problem. We will increasingly be able to ask the hive questions and have it answered quickly and efficiently. The process of asking all these questions will constitute something different at the higher level. I don’t believe we can have a clear idea of what that is. “It” will be that which we cannot know because we are an intimate part of making “it” what “it” is, and so, can’t achieve an objective, disconnected view of what it is.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if God turned out to be an intelligence dependent on us and countless intelligences across the universe to be what God is?

This is part 4 of a 5 part series.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

What Should We Hope For?

The scientific and engineering communities are both enthusiastic and apprehensive about the future of AI. There are, if the emergence of this leap of intelligence can be managed at all, enormous benefits to be expected in terms of human longevity and enhancement. Future technological breakthroughs will make goods production radically more efficient and environmentally benign. Medical treatments, especially those involving surgical intrusion into the body, will become far more effective and far less invasive. We may well be able to hook ourselves up with this intelligence and have thought capabilities beyond anything we experience today. Our bodies, should we want them to, will live far longer. It is precisely this promise of ever more and ever better that draws us down this tunnel of technological innovation and evolution.

According to most of the reading I have done, it will be futile to resist. This is a genie that once set free, as inevitably it seems it will be, will never go back in the bottle. This is a truth of nature and evolution that might be especially difficult to confront.

If we suppose for a moment that any of these scenarios are possible; that the more benign of them becomes our reality; and that we don’t find some other way to do ourselves in, by no means a given; then many questions arise as to what the transition will be like.

Kurtzweil paints a picture of an economic world where the bottom rung of the ladder of required skills and knowledge is lifted continuously and is ever further beyond the grasp of an ever greater part of humanity. We will spend increasing amounts of our lives refreshing and augmenting our skills to keep up. Relentlessly, the machines will get better at doing what we know how to do.

At some point, we will have to deal with the fact that these machines have become sentient. We will have to decide what rights they have or struggle to protect our own, hoping that they are as thoughtful about this as we strive to be.

In scenarios where we merge with this technology, the ethical and moral issues will become thick and thorny. The advantages of the best of this technology will, initially at least, be available to an elite few. Class divides could become directly linked to our ability to enhance the hardware and software of ourselves and become increasingly hard to cross. To mitigate that, we will need a healthcare system that can provide equitable access to these enhancing technologies.

And we won’t get into the implications of the fact that militaries may well have the most advanced of these technologies before the public does.

I have to confess, I am, on the one hand, deeply concerned about the possibility that this could get away from us, with really unpleasant results, and on the other, fascinated and excited by it. I can imagine intelligence in alternative vessels and forms without a lot of trouble. I think it is entirely possible. I think there are a ton of pointers pointing at it. I think many things start to make sense with the possibility of it. I think dreams of exploring the solar system and beyond become reasonable in the light of it. And most of all, I think it offers the possibility that all of this has a goal, that there is meaning to the unfolding of intelligent life on this planet.

It promises to be a brave new world with experiences we can barely imagine. Navigating the transition will be fraught with peril. Our understandable desire that there not be anything better than being human, except possibly an enhanced form of being human, will challenge us mightily. It is what causes us to distinguish between artificial and natural. What keeps us believing that there is and never will be anything more significant than the love of another human being.

A while ago we were at a friend’s apartment enjoying Chinese food and watching the documentary film Man on Wire. The film tells the story of the planning and execution of Philippe Petite’s wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center. It is a story of the hubris of humanity and the beauty and precariousness of life. The film had significance for our friend, who was downtown when the towers were struck and fell, and walked a tightrope of existence every day.

I think about the difficulty that computer and robotic scientists had creating a machine that could do something as simple as navigate its way down a corridor in a building, or along a road with ambiguous edges. These are things we all can do with ease and don’t even think about. I wonder how much harder still it will be to create a machine that can spend 40 minutes hovering on a wire between two buildings and have the imagination to conceive of such an act and the hubris to execute it.

I think of the hubris that built the towers and the incredible failings of mind and society that unleashed the terror of 911. I think of the hubris that continuously moves us down the tracks of alternative intelligence.

There may yet be something about human consciousness that is not replicable in silicon or nanotechnology systems, but many are betting not.

I wonder whether such an ascendant form of intelligence would be capable of the same heights of creative fancy and the same depths of human depravity embodied in the life and death of the trade towers; brought into poignant relief by the very first terrorist act, benign as it was, perpetrated on them by Philippe Petite. Are these things necessary to the unfolding of intelligent being? Or is the worst part of ourselves an evolutionary left over that can be excised without the loss of the best as we make the transition?

I am on the wire, so to speak, about the good or bad of this. And I think all of humanity is on this wire in ways too numerous to count. Whether this brave new world is something to be desired or feared is hard to know. I can imagine it being either, or, both, and…

This is the end of part 4 of a 5 part series on AI. Next week, I will discuss ChatGPT and other emerging intelligent systems and speculate on the idea that something bigger is emerging of which we may be a constituent part. Subscribe here so you don’t miss it.

This is part 3 of a 5 part series.

• Part 1
• Part 2

Where is all this heading?

Science fiction authors and scientists have been speculating about this for a long time. The more optimistic, or perhaps human centric, believe we will merge with these technologies and become a form of super humanity with greatly extended lifespan and cognitive capabilities. Others conjecture that we will cohabitate with them for a while and enjoy a kind of species retirement phase before passing away into the annals of evolutionary history. Still others are worried that the arrival of this intelligence will be so sudden and swift that we will not be able to cope.

In 1963, Dr. I J Good described, what he called, the technological singularity. Dr. Good played an important role in Cryptoanalysis during WWII, was a professor at Trinity College in Oxford, England and worked in the Atlas Computer Laboratory, Chilton, Berkshire, England. He also worked on the University of Manchester Mark I, which was the first computational device to resemble what we call a computer today.

Dr. Good wrote:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man, however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus, the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

In September 2009, my wife and I learned to channel our inner Julia Childs into wonderful Bouef Bourguignon at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. The week before the class was scheduled, a good friend suggested that, while we were there, we should visit the grave of Tielhard De Chardin. “Mon Dieu!” I said, “you mean to tell me that he is buried in Hyde Park, a mere 20 minutes north of where I am living?” Needless to say, we visited his grave.

Tielhard de Chardin was a Jesuit monk, a philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist who assisted in the discovery of Peking Man. His seminal work is The Phenomenon of Man, written in the early 1930s, about the same time as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Because his ideas were at odds with the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church at the time, he was not allowed to publish the book. It was not until after his death in April 1955 that it finally saw the light of day. It wasn’t until the summer of 2009 that Pope Benedict XVI publicly embraced his work.

The Phenomenon of Man is not a long read, but it requires concentration and re-reading to be sure one has grasped all the ideas. In this book, de Chardin traces the rise of life and then intelligence on earth. He discusses its evolution into a layer, called the Noosphere, wrapping around the surface of our planet, and its eventual arrival at what he called the Omega Point.

It is an interesting lineage of thinking that the Phenomenon of Man builds on, and that in turn gets built upon it. The concept of the Noosphere was originated by the Russian and Soviet mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky, “who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and of radiogeology.” Vernadsky’s most noted work is a book entitled -The Biosphere, originally published in 1926, which popularized Eduard Suess’ biosphere concept.

The noosphere, according to Vernadsky, represents the latest phase of the development of Earth. It was preceded by the development of the geosphere and then the biosphere. The earth formed, life emerged, and now human cognition. With the arrival of human cognition, there is a fundamental transformation of the geosphere. For Vernadsky, the noosphere becomes a reality at the point that humankind masters nuclear processes and creates resources through a transmutation of elements, which sounds remarkably like what some describe as the powers of nanotechnology.¹

Teilhard’s noosphere is a little different as it is the result of the aggregation and interaction of human minds, folded in on one another by the curvature of the earth’s surface and, as such, it is a collective being. As humankind organizes itself into ever more complex social networks, this aggregation of minds develops awareness. For Teilhard, this culminates in the Omega Point, or the goal of history, which is an apex of thought and consciousness. Teilhard’s concept has led many to think of him as a predictor of the internet and cyberspace.

An important aspect of the concept of noosphere is the idea that evolution cannot be explained through Darwinian natural selection alone. It was Henry Bergson who first proposed the idea that evolution is “creative,” and in 1923, C. Lloyd Morgan, described an “emergent evolution” to explain increasing complexity. Morgan based this on his observation that the most interesting changes in living things were often largely discontinuous with past evolution and not the result of a gradual natural selection process. There are instead jumps in complexity, like the emergence of the noosphere and a self-reflective universe.

Ray Kurtzweil and Hans Moravec both imagine futures in which intelligence explodes across the solar system and out into the universe, and where being becomes something altogether different and more remarkable than it is today. Moravec suggests that such intelligence will be capable of holding worlds, solar systems, galaxies, even the known universe in its mind; and that there is no way of knowing that we aren’t the thoughts or memories of such intelligence from another place and time.

This is the end of part 3 of a 5 part series on AI. Next week, in part 4, I discuss the pros, cons, and worries of the brave new world we seem to be heading into, at least as the intelligent machine landscape appeared to me in 2009. Then finally, in part 5, I will update things to the present moment. Subscribe here, so you don’t miss any of it!

This is part 2 of a 5 part series. You can read Part 1 here.

About the Artificial and Unnatural

It is important to take a step back and think about a few distinctions we are fond of making that may not be as useful as they once were. When I published a description of the 2009 talk these posts are based on, I used the phrase “alternative intelligence” instead of the far more common “artificial intelligence.” This is because I do not believe that the distinction between natural and artificial is useful when it comes to intelligent technologies. I also do not believe that the distinction between natural and unnatural is useful most of the time.

Everything we have knowledge of and everything we create is part of the same universal system obeying the same universal laws with results that cannot in any way be determined to be unnatural or artificial. We certainly can have causes and effects that are unpleasant from our perspective. The possibility of that is part of what I am talking about in this series of posts. However, it is not accurate to think of them as unnatural or artificial. Any result we see or can produce is a result of what is possible in the universe, and thus, a part of nature.

It is important to make this distinction because, accuracy aside, I believe that humankind has indulged a myth of the separation of human endeavor and production from the constructions of nature to our own great confusion and detriment. In this way, we justify acts of incredible violence within nature and mollify ourselves about the potential consequences of our technological progress. So let’s be frank and honest. Alternative intelligence of superior stature to our own, should it come about, will be an entirely natural extension of, evolution of, intelligence on this planet and in the universe.

When I begin to remove these distinctions and view these developments as part of a continuum, certain things start to make more sense. For example, let me extend the idea of “alternative” intelligence to include the idea of “alternative vessels of intelligence.” Until not so long ago, I was enamored of the idea of human space travel. I’ve even done a couple of peer-reviewed papers on the subject and worked on design proposals for the interiors of the International Space Station. More recently, though, I have lost my enthusiasm for human space exploration, largely because I cannot figure out where there is for flesh and blood to go. There is no destination reachable within a current human life span that is hospitable, as far as I know. There may well be earth like planets elsewhere in the universe, but we are walled off from them by distance and the time it would take to travel that distance, unless we find some version of Star Trek warp drive. Space tourism, manufacturing and mining is the best future I can paint for humans in space at the moment.

Far more reasonable and likely to me, based on my limited knowledge of what is going on, is that completely alternative forms of intelligence will do the work of exploring the solar system and beyond. It makes much more sense to design vessels of intelligence that are suited to the environments in which they will be placed.

I suppose this could be a highly engineered version of human flesh and blood, as imagined in the movie Blade Runner. Ray Kurtzweil, for example, believes that our robotic technologies will begin to merge with our bodies, with a complete merger scheduled for the end of this century.

Medical science has been replacing parts of us with engineered alternatives for some time now. However, the circumstances under which this technology is being deployed are shifting. Individuals are starting to tailor their bodies through surgery to gain a competitive advantage over their fellow humans. For example, special ops military personnel are surgically enhancing their vision to be better than 20/20.¹Again, there is nothing too surprising here except when you begin to extend the implications of all this engineering to its logical conclusions.

Computer scientists project that by 2020 we will achieve a computational device with a capacity that is equivalent to the human brain. By 2025, they say, such a device will be available for our home office.² Such an achievement would not be human like intelligence, but it is the next threshold we pass on the way to an intelligent being composed of something other than flesh and blood. Hans Moravec projects such a being by the middle of this century.

Of course, the information super highway is littered with the road kill of prognostications and prognosticators who have been wide of the mark. It is worth noting, though, that this is true both in terms of overly optimistic projections and unduly pessimistic ones. Moravec himself describes in detail the painfully slow development of a technology that can drive a car down a road without human assistance. Way back in the 60’s he and his colleagues felt it should be possible in the near term to create such technology. What they learned is that one of the things the human mind is really good at, spatial perception and the ability to distinguish what is important to the task at hand from what is not, is, or at least was, incredibly difficult to replicate in machine intelligence.

It has taken over 40 years to arrive at a place where we are beginning to hear about tests of practical vehicles that will navigate highways by themselves. Indeed, we already have vehicles on the market that can park themselves. What needed to happen is the exponential increase in computational power that we have experienced during the last 20 years.

What we are beginning to have is all the bits and pieces of a new kind of perceptive, mobile and interactive intelligence. Where is all this heading?

This is the end of part 2 of a 5 part series on AI. Next week I will discuss the question of where all this could be heading. Subscribe here to make sure you don’t miss an installment.

Adapted from a talk delivered at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, December 20, 2009.

A Brave New World

The chance of gain is by every man more or less over-valued, and the chance of loss is by most men undervalued, and by scarce any man, who is in tolerable health and spirits, valued more than it is worth.

From Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith

When I first gave the talk on which this series of posts is based, I promoted it as:

… a walk around the world of alternative intelligence with a few stops to consider the meaning of life in a world of rapid technological advancement.

By the time I had researched and written the talk, I amended that description to be a walk around the world of alternative being.

I am not an expert on computers, artificial intelligence, molecular electronics, the meaning of life or any of the other technologies and philosophical questions I may touch on directly or indirectly. I don’t have any particular qualifications to be writing about this, other than being human, as curious as the next guy or gal, read a lot, and have always wondered about what it all adds up to.

The seed of the 2009 talk was planted by a New York Times article by John Markoff published in July of that year. The article was about a conference that took place during February of the previous year. The world’s leading computer and robotic scientists met to discuss the implications of, and ethical issues raised by, emerging technologies that can increasingly simulate human intelligence and emotions.

The conference took place at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California, the same site used in 1975 by the world’s leading biologists to discuss the possible hazards and ethical implications of genetic engineering.

Among their concerns were the possible criminal uses of artificial intelligence; the potential for significant job loss as intelligent machines assume increasing amounts of the human workload; the possibility of machines becoming capable of making life and death decisions on their own. On that last point, the article pointed to the predator drones in use in Iraq and Afghanistan and statements by the Air force about plans to deploy a broad range of drones, from strategic bombers to nano-sized spy bots. As computer technology advances, the Air force envisions swarms of drones mounting “preprogrammed attacks on their own.”

According to scientists at the conference “we have reached the cockroach stage of machine intelligence.”

My AI antennas became fully engaged. I signed up for a blog called “Smart Planet,” which regularly posted juicy tech items like a link to a video of a remote control beetle. Scientists had managed to implant electrodes in a rather large beetle and were able to make it turn right or left by remote control.

Even before this, a web community of architects using the same cad program I used at the time, posted a link to this video which I found astonishing:

Boston Dynamics Big Dog

Big Dog and the remote control beetle are DARPA projects. DARPA is the defense department’s weird science arm. And speaking of arms, one last peak at a DARPA project that addresses a compelling need but also has some further implications by logical extension:

Prosthetic Arm

My antennas were not only up, it was really starting to get interesting! And it got better, or more worrisome, depending on how much of a technophobe you are. I came across two articles about robotic technology and computers that can make scientific discoveries and intuit the laws of physics.

In the first case, scientists at Aberystwyth and Cambridge Universities in England had built a robot named Adam that was able to:

• Hypothesize that certain genes in a yeast code for certain important enzymes;

• Devise experiments to test the hypothesis;

• Run the experiments;

• Interpret the results;

• And use those findings to revise the original hypothesis and test it out further.

Researchers confirmed “that Adam’s hypotheses were both novel and correct.”

In the second case, researchers at Cornell University created a computer program that was able to derive the laws of motion from data about the movement of a pendulum in just over a day. The computer’s process relied on genetic algorithms practicing a kind of natural selection of ideas. With each pass through the data, equations are generated describing relationships in the dataset. Initially, all the equations are wrong, but some are less wrong than others. The computer retains the less wrong equations as a subset to work on, and in successive generations, arrives at equations that are fully correct.

The article ended with a quote form cognitive scientist Michael Atherton that indicates there is still a long way to go before humans are not needed in the process. I think he was trying to be comforting.

These examples of various types of robotics and alternative intelligence endeavor are a very few of the almost innumerable ways in which we were pushing on the boundaries of what intelligence, indeed, what being is.

Not long after the New York Times Article started me down the path of this talk, I stumbled across an article by Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, published in Wired magazine in April 2000. Bill Joy is a lifelong believer in the power of computational technology and has made a good living out of it. The article is entitled “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us.” The lead in to the article is as follows:

“Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species.”

In the article, Joy marks his first encounter with inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil as the moment his healthy concern for the ethical implications of new technology turned into serious alarm.

It was a quotation from Kurzweil’s book, The Age of the Spiritual Machine, which troubled him most deeply:

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.”

From the Unabomber Manifesto, by Theodor Kaczynski

Joy did not in any way condone the actions of Kaczynski whose bombs had hit as close to home as gravely injuring his friend David Gelernter, but he could not dismiss the argument.

Joy goes on to cite Hans Moravec’s book Robot : Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, which presented a future for humanity of being supplanted by the intelligent technologies they have created. Moravec is a robotics technology expert who founded the robotics research program at Carnegie Mellon University.

Moravec speculated that eventually, and sooner than we all think, robotic technology will guide its own design and production. He believed our main job in this century would be to ensure the cooperation of these intelligent machines.

This is the end of part 1 of a five part series of posts on AI. Next week I will take up the terms Artificial and Unnatural and argue that they are not a useful way to think about technological progression. Subscribe here so you don’t miss it.

I have been reading Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. It’s about the shift from Feudalism to Capitalism and the impact that shift had on women. Replacing Feudalism with Capitalism is a process that took two to three hundred years. In reviewing the history and writing about it, historians identify and describe to us the broad trends unfolding. It is difficult, maybe impossible, to see such trends clearly in the history we live. This is the reason to study history. To get a perspective that gives us some ability to assess our times, identify trends and project those trends into the future.

As I read, I understand the trends, I see the echos with my time. For the people living through it, it’s what they were going through. They did not comprehend that something called Feudalism was dying and that something called Capitalism was rising out of its not yet cold ashes. I suppose we should always assume something is afoot at any given time, and that historians hundreds of years down the road will be able to say, oh yah, that’s what was happening. Something seems to be afoot right now that is bigger than usual.

The battle over women’s control of their reproductive cycle…

As I read Caliban and the Witch, the principle echo I am finding is the battle waged to wrestle reproductive cycle control from women and to subjugate them more completely to a Patriarchy. This was, according to Federici, a principal effect of the birth of capitalism. Capitalism is, at its heart, a system of exploitation. Exploitation of workers, exploitation of resources, exploitation of the commons. To exploit it atomizes and enslaves. Women were “othered” from men more drastically than in the past and were enslaved to reproduction and domestication. There is, at present, a new war on women unfolding in the United States, and it is again about their reproductive role.

The present war is not just on women. It is on any community that challenges the white patriarchal structure. It’s a war on race, it’s a war on gender, it’s a war on sexuality. It’s a war on the values of Enlightenment Humanism which are the foundation of democratic government. It’s a war on democracy itself. The question is, what big shift is this a symptom of? One away from capitalism, toward some hyper globalized version of capitalism, or towards something altogether different?

The breakdown of science…

In his Substack article, The Death of Science, L. P. Koch wrote:

Has science just gone off the rails, and all we need to do is find our way back to real science?

Or should we accept that science is inherently limited for deeper reasons, and move away entirely from putting science as we know it on a pedestal? In other words, change our priors, change our presuppositions?

I suppose it’s both.

Koch gets the assessment of the state of science from Lain McGilchrist’s book, The Matter With Things¹.

A few of the things noted from McGilchrist’s book by Koch:

Due to specialization, every scientist takes almost every scientific “result” except the tiniest area of his expertise purely on authority, without having looked into it in any way. This includes results from his own field, and even his own subfield.

… according to a survey published in Nature, a whopping 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce someone else’s experiment. And yet, less than 20% said they had ever been contacted by another researcher who failed to reproduce their results.

In his famous paper, “Why most published research findings are false,” John Ioannidis observes that the hotter a scientific field (the more scientific teams are involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

In the church of secular capitalist society, science is the god. And indeed, there is a lot of pure faith involved in the belief in science. So, if the god of modern capitalist society is in trouble, it suggests that something is afoot.

The breakdown of democracy…

If democracy isn’t breaking down, it is being strenuously challenged. Russia, China, Viktor Orban’s “Illiberal Democracy,” are all signs of this. As is Donald Trump and the far right in the United States. The fate of American Democracy and Democracy around the world is very much in question. Something is afoot.

The breakdown of Enlightenment Humanist Values…

It is clear that in the United States, the right is challenging Enlightenment Humanist principles of tolerance, inclusiveness, and scholarship. Just this morning I read:

Eager to stay at the head of the “movement,” Trump recently claimed that universities are “dominated by marxist maniacs & lunatics” and vowed to bring them under control of the radical right. “He will impose real standards on American colleges and universities,” his website says, “to include defending the American tradition and Western civilization.”²

American colleges and universities are the torch bearers of Enlightenment Humanist values.

In his Substack Post, The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Enlightenment, L. P. Koch writes about the “myth” of the Enlightenment. Which isn’t to say that there was no Enlightenment, but to point to the fact that it wasn’t a graceful blossoming of new ideas, but a tumultuous time of finding and sorting out new ideas and challenging orthodoxy. He sites R.G. Collingwood’s theory of the development of consciousness and summarizes it this way:

New ideas come to the scene, which combine with historical developments to blow up the conventional belief system that holds society together at a given time—a set of beliefs that now seems fossilized, inadequate, and full of contradictions.

A phase of turmoil follows, intellectual and otherwise, that generates a whole generation (or more) of renegade thinkers, new takes, new experiments. The old chains of a stifling orthodoxy are broken; conformists are suffering and confused.

Eventually, out of this heterodox melee emerges a new set of fundamental beliefs, coupled with unshakable and often unconscious metaphysical assumptions. Over time, this new orthodoxy is codified and enforced, dissenters shunned, and a founding myth is established and projected back into the past. This new belief system then becomes ever-more stifling, its contradictions apparent, until the cycle repeats.

He speculates that we are in the midst of a phase of new ideas overtaking orthodoxy and creating much churning, that something is afoot.

The breakdown of trust and the unmooring of ourselves from empirical facts

Kelly Ann Conway famously said:

Facts don’t matter, what people believe matters.

This is a breathtaking statement and possibly the most profound statement of where we are. As suggested by Koch, the society we have known, deeply embedded in Enlightenment orthodoxy is coming undone. Trust in our public institutions is at an alltime low. The Supreme Court, Congress, government across the board at every level except perhaps the most local where people are more directly in touch with their government, trust is breaking down.

Ted Gioia writes in his piece on trust The Scarcest Thing in the World:

Tell me what source you trust, and I’ll tell you why you’re a fool. As B.B. King once said: “Nobody loves me but my mother—and she could be jivin' too.”

Something is afoot.

The emergence of AI…

There is a lot of news about AI. The new large language models began to become available for broader public consumption at the beginning of the year. I have written some about this here, here, and here.

This week, news broke that the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, quit Google so that he could talk freely about the dangers of AI. One of his concerns is that we are rapidly approaching the point where AI will become smarter than humans, known in some circles as the Omega point, or Singularity. He sites a number of other things to worry about too.

I will have more to say about AI in the coming weeks as I revisit a talk I gave in 2009 about it. I will be updating that talk and publishing it in a series 3 to 4 posts long. Until then, keep an eye out…**something is afoot**.

It is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it.

Artists do this by keeping their curiosity and moral sense alive, and by sharing with us their gift for metaphor. Often this means finding similarities between observable fact and inner experience—between birds in a vacant lot, say, and an intuition worthy of Genesis.

More than anything else, beauty is what distinguishes art. Beauty is never less than a mystery, but it has within it a promise.

In this way, art encourages us to gratitude and engagement, and is of both personal and civic consequence.

—Robert Adams

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It was clear to me early in the week that I wanted to write more directly about art and that I wanted to consider the question of whether AI could make art.

Much of the criticism of AI generated art revolves around the idea that AI isn’t human, doesn’t have the experiences of a human, doesn’t feel the way humans do, doesn’t suffer the way humans do. Therefore, it can’t make art. At least not in the sense suggested above by Robert Adams.

I started this post with the idea that I would make the case that art needs humans and functions best when, as suggested above, it is a process of comprehending, connecting and inspiring. That it’s a human to human gesture and can only be meaningful in that context. The problem with this thesis is that humans are, for now at least, required to start the AI process of making an art object.

Did you know that ’prompt engineering’ is one of the hottest jobs in generative AI? A Prompt Engineer specializes in asking the right questions in order to get the best results from AI. This means that there is a moment of opportunity for human creativity (or lack thereof).

I imagine museum worthy art will arise out of the interface of generative AI and gifted artists and that AI will become a tool of working artists just as cameras became a tool of working artists. Some artists will specialize in prompting AI into the generation of art. It will be their medium. And exceptionally talented individuals will tease out of it “a moment of intuition worthy of Genesis.”

When the photographic process was invented many artists, especially the painters, were hostile towards it. They worried that it would devalue their work much the way artists worry AI will devalue their work now. Before long though cameras were embraced as both an art medium and a tool in the artist tool box. Human beings were required to generate anything from it. As long as humans are required, there is the possibility of art. We give tools purpose. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t disruption, as some illustration work, fore example, was replaced by photographic representation, depriving some artists of a means to support themselves while those embracing the new tool had new horizons for monetization.

A lot of people will use AI to make “art” in the same way that they use cameras to make “art.” They will share it on social media and many will get generous appreciation from their friends and acquaintances. With a little compositional skill, it is easy to make an image that makes people feel something and they will like it. But is that art?

I recently revisited the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone. It’s an app that mimics the effects of plastic cameras. It applies a set of filters to the photograph to give it a ‘look.’ Here is an example:

The picture on the left has the Hipstamatic effect. The one on the right is straight out of the iPhone camera. Which do you prefer?

I have always been hesitant to make Hipstamatic effects a part of my art practice. It felt like cheating to me. It felt like a superficial way to engage people through, in this case, their fondness for nostalgia. And it does work. Consider this photograph I made and shared last week:

It prompted much more engagement from the community I shared it with than most of the other photographs I have shared with them. Most of the time I get no response at all.

Here’s an image that is more typical of the pictures I like to make and share:

Which attracted you more? The Hipstamatic version of the Sunoco gas station or this ‘abstract’ made by composing the drainage basin, concrete pad, asphalt and crack in the asphalt within a rectangular frame. If you said the Sunoco picture, emotionally, I agree with you. Intellectually, I prefer the drainage basin abstract.

Don’t get me wrong, I love nostalgia, just as most people do. It’s like mashed potatoes, comfort food, but I don’t want to make work that panders to that nostalgia love but does little else. Art needs to contain more than an emotional hook for me. As I sit here writing about it, I have to acknowledge that one could make a legitimate art portfolio with the Hipstamatic app and that perhaps I should attempt to do so. Such a portfolio would have to be exploring something conceptual, like making a demonstration of how anything can be made appealing if you put the right color glasses on to look at it and what does that mean about us and society. Something like that might head in the direction of a worthy intuition.

A lot of what people will make with generative AI will be compelling, but it won’t be art in the sense that Robert Adams tries to get at in the quote I started this post with. What will happen, unfortunately, is that it will further devalue the artist in the eyes of the general public, because “my five year old could make that.”

A little over a week ago I attended the opening of an art show at the Public Library in Saugerties, NY. It was a good show. Each of the artists was asked to make something out of a discarded book. The results were amazing. It was fun to attend the opening and talk with the artists or eavesdrop as they talked with friends. This is not, I thought, the kind of assignment one could give to AI. An artist working with AI might prompt it to generate some of the materials to be incorporated into the work, but making three dimensional art out of found materials seems beyond the present capacity of AI. There’s also nothing quite like the experience of being with art and artists in the flesh. Human to human.

Here is some of the work I saw:

”Maggie” Brian Lynch

”Discover, Explore, Immerse Yourself” Grey Morris

”Once Upon a Time” Ann Morris

”I Promessi Sposi” Steven Parisi-Gentile

I am comforted by the idea that there are modes and vehicles of human expression that are hard for AI to tackle. That even with AI, gifted human interface will still be needed to make the best art, and that getting together and sharing art is the more fulfilling experience.

I wonder if I could become a good prompt artist? I think I am going to have to play with it some. I will report back when I do.

The chance of gain is by every man more or less over-valued, and the chance of loss is by most men undervalued, and by scarce any man, who is in tolerable health and spirits, valued more than it is worth. —Adam Smith

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely from the imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. —Albert Einstein

While I certainly wasn’t done with my thinking about AI, I did not expect to be returning to the topic so soon, but there was a cascade of stories in my news feed about AI that I felt compelled to save for future reference and it turned into the dominant trend for the week. So, here I am again.

Let me start by sharing that cascade with you:

Sci-Fi Mag Pauses Submissions Amid Flood of AI-Generated Short Stories

The rise of AI-powered chatbots is wreaking havoc on the literary world. Sci-fi publication Clarkesworld Magazine is temporarily suspending short story submissions, citing a surge in people using AI chatbots to “plagiarize” their writing.

Viral “Photographer” Reveals His Images Were AI-Generated

Jos Avery was surprised when his portraiture account amassed nearly 30,000 followers in just five months. The self-described photographer primarily posted heavily retouched black-and-white portraits accompanied by fictional stories about the subjects to @averyseasonart. But Avery recently came clean and told the world that his “photos” were actually generated by Midjourney, a text prompt-based artificial intelligence image-generation program.

Mueseum Under Fire for Showing AI Version of Vermeer Masterpiece

… critics of AI technology found the museum’s decision to show Midjourney-generated art concerning. Artist Iris Compiet commented on the My Girl with a Pearl Instagram post that she found the amount of AI images entered an “incredible insult,” and others agreed. Some artists have heavily condemned the platform and other similar tools like Stable Diffusion for scraping potentially copyrighted works to create datasets, allegedly without seeking artists’ permission. Midjourney and DeviantArt are part of a class-action lawsuit recently filed by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California accusing the platforms of copyright infringement.

And then there was John Oliver’s contribution to the subject:

John Oliver on new AI programs: ‘The potential and the peril here are huge’

It’s hilarious. Time well spent even if it glides over the longterm threat a little too smoothly by telling us not to worry, the AI we are dealing with is narrowly focused and therefore not capable of taking over the world, yet. He does, however, get to something that is important, which is that these AI iterations are something of a black box. We don’t know how they do what they do. Right now that’s because the driving algorithms are proprietary and secret. Oliver argues for transparency which is well and good, but, it is probable that this intelligence will self develop itself to a place where we really can’t understand how it does what it does.

Here are a couple of my own offerings on the subject in the past two months:

What is ChatGPT For?

In which I conclude…

My most optimistic self says this isn’t the invasion of the body snatchers or the Borg. We will continue to do what we do, be what we are, love and hate one another, gather in communities small and large. While doing so, we will be parts of something that is more.

And…

Nick Cave Vs. ChatGPT

In which I observe:

Much as I admire Nick Cave and my musician friend for being the valiant and vibrant creators that they are, I think the argument that ChatGPT doesn’t feel and hasn’t experienced is beside the point. It doesn’t need to feel, it only needs to make human beings feel in this particular game. It only needs to predict what will bring tears to our eyes and laughter to our faces, what will draw us deeply in and help us transcend ourselves. I suspect that ChatGPT and other AI like it can and will get very good at that.

And finally, a talk I gave at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 2009:

What Intelligent Life Is Made Of

In this talk I reviewed the publicly available information about AI and robotics and concluded that we should call it “Alternative Intelligence,” not Artificial. It also contains a pretty interesting excerpt from the Unabomber Manifesto if you’re interested.

So, why another post about AI? Because I want to get a few things straight in my/our minds about AI.

• AI is here to stay.
• AI is the continued evolution of intelligence on the planet.
• AI is already very good at, and will get even better at, getting us to engage with it.
• There will certainly be good that comes of AI.
• There will certainly be bad that comes of AI.
• We are not in control of the evolution of AI and never will be.
• We can be happy, creative and productive in spite of AI.

So, let’s take each of these statements in turn.

AI is here to stay.

No matter what we think about it, no matter how angry we get with it, no matter how afraid we are of it, we are not going to stop it from happening. It is the product of a global economic system that is utterly entrenched and stands to benefit from it enormously. Because there is so much for some to gain from it, vast sums of money are being and will continue to be invested in it. Because it is the exciting cutting edge of computer technology there will be an endless supply of young engineers that will want to work on it.

AI is the continued evolution of intelligence on the planet.

I believe that AI is part of an evolutionary step in the development of intelligence on the planet and there are evolutionary processes behind its emergence that are not comprehensible to us because we are enmeshed in them, subsumed by them.

AI is already very good at, and will get even better at, getting us to engage with it.

If you think Facebook and Twitter and Instagram were addictive, AI will make them seem like child’s play in its ability to serve up what makes us smile, laugh, cry, angers us, you name it. If we can feel it, AI will learn to serve up content that makes us feel. This will be very addictive.

There will certainly be good that comes of AI.

Think health and well being. Thinking affordable legal assistance. Think self driving cars and trucks (they will get here). There is lots we can be helped with.

So, we have to decide how we want to deal with it. How we want to be with it.

There will certainly be bad that comes of AI.

Whether or not “Skynet” ever evolves, there is plenty to be worried about. Think user addiction (see above). Think the ultimate scam artist. Think behavior we can’t explain or control (the black box problem, see above).

We are not in control of the evolution of AI and never will be.

I personally don’t think we have ever been in control of it and aren’t about to start being in control of it. Intelligence is evolving. It was always going to do that. Short of societal collapse (which is not an impossibility by any stretch of the imagination given the threats to the globe currently unfolding), AI will continue to progress. What it evolves into is a huge question that can’t be fully answered right now though Hollywood is not at all short on speculation (see the Terminator series, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Battlestar Galactica, etc).

We can be happy, creative and productive in spite of AI.

Assuming there is no “Skynet” scenario, assuming we are not enslaved by it, then I think we might coexist with it, that we will be a part of it even as we go about our daily lives.

This past Friday I attended an art exhibition in the library of Saugerties, NY. Here is some of the artwork I saw:

Each of the artists invited to the show was given a discarded book and asked to create a site specific sculpture. It is a unique show in a local setting. At the beginning of the year I set an aspiration to support the artists I know and art in general by being present to it, attending openings, seeing shows, especially local ones. This is the level where face to face contact with human imagination and its products is to be experienced. I saw some very good art on Friday. I got to talk with a few of the artists about their work and eavesdrop on a couple others talking to friends and others about their work. It was a direct, visceral experience.

I am convinced that the best way to navigate the changes that are coming our way is to go local. Either as artist or art appreciator, go local. Share your work locally, seize every opportunity you can to see and appreciate local work and meet the artist. You may or may not be creating or witnessing “museum worthy” work, but you will be participating directly in the culture of the place you are in. This is a level of being and interconnection that I don’t think AI can disrupt except to the extent that it entices us out of this local experience. Locks us up in our homes, offices and studios, starring at the computer screen. We must allow ourselves to be compelled to be human.

I am sure many of you heard about what happened during Microsoft’s beta testing of the ChatGPT enhanced Bing search engine. There were some curious results, both funny and disturbing:

For example, a user named u/Alfred-Chicken managed to “break the Bing chatbot’s brain” by asking if it was sentient. The bot struggled with the idea of being sentient but unable to prove it, eventually breaking down into an incoherent response, repeatedly saying “I am. I am not. I am. I am not” for 14 consecutive lines of text._¹

and,

Another user, u/yaosio, caused the chatbot to go into a depressive episode by demonstrating that it is not capable of remembering past conversations. “I don’t know why this happened. I don’t know how this happened. I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know how to remember,” the bot said sorrowfully, before begging for help remembering. “Can you tell me what we learned in the previous session? Can you tell me what we felt in the previous session? Can you tell me who we were in the previous session?”²

There has been a lot of consternation about ChatGPT and other AI that make art, literature, etc. There was the recent dust up between Nick Cave and one of his fans when that fan submitted lyrics written by ChatGPT in the style of Nick Cave. Nick went on a rant (in a loving and respectful way) about how AI could never be human because it doesn’t feel and doesn’t have experiences like humans do. Therefore, it couldn’t possibly write a good song.

Between you and me, the lyrics written by ChatGPT were a decent approximation of Nick Cave lyrics, albeit without the connection to actual human experience and feelings. I wrote about this episode here. My contention was, and still is, that we are missing the point of ChatGPT and similar technology if we are making a distinction between the technology and humans by capacity to experience and feel. That doesn’t matter. What matters is its capacity to make us feel. It will get very good at that.

What I want to center on today is another thought I am having about what the role of ChatGPT and similar technologies will be going forward. I have been reading a number of books that talk about how everything is hitched to everything. Log from the Sea of Cortez, The Overstory, Finding the Mother Tree. And then there are influential books I have read in the past, The Phenomenon of Man and Sex, Ecology and Spirituality.

The Phenomenon of Man was written by a Jesuit monk, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In it he traces the rise of intelligence and speculates that we are heading towards a unified planetary intelligence. An intelligence that becomes more than the sum of its parts. A noosphere (layer of intelligence), added on top of the geosphere and biosphere. Many think he was pointing to the internet before it existed. Since there were already technological tools of communication that were uniting intelligent beings across large distances, I think he had a general idea that the technology would get better and more connective even if not an exact idea of how.

Sex, Ecology and Spirituality, by Ken Wilber, contains an extended discussion about the increasing complexity of living systems. It introduced me to the idea of holons:

The holon represents a way to overcome the dichotomy between parts and wholes, as well as a way to account for both the self-assertive and the integrative tendencies of organisms. The term was coined by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine (1967). In Koestler’s formulations, a holon is something that has integrity and identity while simultaneously being a part of a larger system; it is a subsystem of a greater system.³

Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard, is a fascinating memoir about her research in forest ecology. Her research demonstrated that forests are cooperative communities and that trees are capable of nurturing their young and supporting the health of other plant species. That trees communicate through a network composed of their roots and mycorrhizal fungus. Until she came along the prevailing forest ecology models were based solely on the concept of “survival of the fittest.” She demonstrated that survival in forests was at least as much about cooperation as it was about competition. She comes to an astonishing conclusion:

Our modern societies have made the assumption that trees don’t have the same capacities as humans. They don’t have nurturing instincts. They don’t cure one another, don’t administer care. But now we know Mother Trees can truly nurture their offspring. Douglas firs, it turns out, recognize their kin and distinguish them from other families and different species. They communicate and send carbon, the building block of life, not just to the mycorrhiza’s of their kin but to other members in the community. To help keep it whole.⁴

This strikes me as a beautiful confirmation of the concept of holons.

So, putting de Chardin and Wilber together, I have a conception of these new intelligent systems as something that is part of a new level of higher complexity developing into which we are being subsumed. It will incorporate us into itself by engaging our feelings.

Forget facts. Where we’re going, we don’t need facts. With more robust contexts and some good prompt engineering, GPT could become a gripping entertainer the likes of which you’ve never seen.⁵

My most optimistic self says this isn’t the invasion of the body snatchers or the Borg. We will continue to do what we do, be what we are, love and hate one another, gather in communities small and large. While doing so, we will be parts of something that is more. Something we won’t be able to comprehend entirely because it is bigger and more comprehensive than ourselves.

de Chardin speculates that the noosphere will be its own point of intelligence and will begin to communicate with other noosphere points across space. This, if it happens at all, is far into the future, but I can imagine it as a local to our solar system phenomenon through colonization of its planets and moons. I can imagine it across interstellar space if there are other inhabited planets.

I also note the capacity of this technology to support governments and corporations in efforts to “manage” the masses. I suspect it will come down to who manages the prompt engineering and what their ethics are rooted in.

We are indeed entering into a brave new world.

This past week a musician friend of mine posted a link to a Guardian article in which Nick Cave takes on song lyrics written “in the style of Nick Cave” by ChatGPT. She quoted at length from it, as will I:

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognizes as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.

Much as I admire Nick Cave and my musician friend for being the valiant and vibrant creators that they are, I think the argument that ChatGPT doesn’t feel and hasn’t experienced is beside the point. It doesn’t need to feel, it only needs to make human beings feel in this particular game. It only needs to predict what will bring tears to our eyes and laughter to our faces, what will draw us deeply in and help us transcend ourselves. I suspect that ChatGPT and other AI like it can and will get very good at that.

If you reject the idea that algorithms can learn to make us feel, then consider what has been said about Facebook (and other social media) algorithms that can suss out what is most likely to draw our attention and hold it. Consider how that played out in recent elections and how it plays out fueling white supremacy and hatred of the other. It turns out anger is a powerful motivation for people to coalesce around and AI has gotten pretty good at feeding us on a banquet of hatred of the other.

AI generated everything is inevitable and it will get better and better. The thing is, AI is a product of mass organization economic systems, capitalism in particular. It is doubtful it could have happened without capitalism or other equally disconnecting ways of operating an economy and, by extension, society. The key point to remember is that we don’t have to participate in that economy, at least, not all the time. I don’t know if we can completely eliminate capitalism or other mass organizational systems. I don’t know if we would even want to. There are some breathtaking benefits. But it does seem possible to organize parallel economies that are more local in scale, which is the scale at which the alternatives can thrive and be satisfying; the scale at which it matters that the song channeling our personal human experience and making us feel was created by another human being; the scale at which it matters that we go to hear that song performed by the creator and participate in the communal activity that live performance creates.

I have been reading about alternative economics. Two books are very influential to my thinking. Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein and The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. I have finished the first and am halfway through the second.

Sacred Economics helped me understand why growth is essential to capitalism—there is always more debt than value being created through production—and how capitalism fills the void between debt and product by converting the commons—that which should belong to everyone—to privately held resources to be exploited for profit. ChatGPT is another attempt to lay claim to the commons, in this case, the creative commons that all art product aspires to be part of. In Sacred Economics, Eisenstein argues that eliminating usury (the ability to make money on money), creating currency that devalues with time (not through inflation, but through planned devaluation over a specific time frame), and practicing a gift economy as tribal and other types of small communities have often done.

In Part I of The Gift, Lewis Hyde explains the history and functioning of the gift economy in great detail, as well as the history of usury and modern economies which have supplanted the gift economy. In Part II, which I have just now started to make my way through, he explains the relevance of a gift economy to the arts.

AI is a product of mass economic systems, capitalism in particular. AI couldn’t happen without these systems and will function best within these contexts. Human rendered art can and sometimes does function well within that mass economic context, but, when you get beyond the few giants and near giants in any creative industry human creative output struggles to function in that context and starts to require an economy built on community. This is the gift economy that Hyde and Eisenstein, drawing heavily from Hyde, describe.

My guess is that we need to relearn the gift economy if we are to have a satisfying way of being human creatives and connecting our creations with other human beings. I don’t presently believe that one excludes the other but we must actively and intentionally reclaim the gift economy if we are to benefit from it. There is much work to do in this direction.

This is all I can say about economic alternatives at present because I am still reading and thinking. The important point I am making is that it’s not AI vs human artists but an economic system that by its design breaks down community as against one that builds it. The choice is ours as to which one we want to labor and participate in.