Not my most sophisticated take, but I keep thinking that the message of the medium of these new AI-generated video platforms is best summed up as lol nothing matters🫠.
03.10.2025 15:18
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Not my most sophisticated take, but I keep thinking that the message of the medium of these new AI-generated video platforms is best summed up as lol nothing matters🫠.
It has become easier to imagine the end of the world (at the hands of AI) than the end of AI.
It seems likely that if Jacques Ellul was alive today, he would be telling us that the reason AI might get out of our control is because technique is already out of our control.
Planning to publish a new essay within the next few days. It’s been a little while.
There are very few theological matters on which I’m willing to pontificate, especially publicly. But I am comfortable saying that, whatever God is, it definitely isn’t this.
chatwithgod.ai
Counting the days until I meet a younger person who has no clue what I mean when I mention “Twitter”
"The dominant worldview seems to be: Why worry about actually learning anything when you can get an A for outsourcing your thinking to a machine?"
Few activities offer the same range of dizzying highs and desperate lows that writing does.
This well describes what I want to help build on Substack
It’s ironic that behaviorism became a major branch of psychology despite explicitly disavowing any reference to the psyche.
"No means is only a means.”
- Günther Anders, The Obsolescence of Man
The idea that AI can help you “unlock your creativity” really bothers me.
Doesn’t it make more sense to say that the human prompt engineer unlocks AI’s creativity, assuming we want to call it that?
“We call our time the age of information, but I think a better name for it would be the age of attention.”
James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy
This year, I resolve to write at least one essay that is less than 3,000 words long.
I’ve been slowly reading Spinoza over the course of this fall. Towards the end, I had to stop and linger over this remarkable proposition:
“The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God.”
Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, Proposition 24
So must the shift in our perceived relationship to nature from that of steward to that of absolute owner, manager, and engineer. So even must our permutation of “holy” to “holistic.””
“By almost any standard, it seems to me, the reclassification of the world from creature to machine must involve at least a perilous reduction of moral complexity. So must the shift in our attitude toward the creation from reverence to understanding.
There are so many memorable moments in this book. Here’s one of my favorite passages:
I'm going in.
I find these developments to be more unnerving than this piece suggests. It mostly holds back its reservations until the very end. Still, a necessary glimpse into the state of the art.
A Revolution in How Robots Learn
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Perhaps the Amish have something to teach us about thoughtful engagement with technology. Even if we end at different places, we would do well to consider their framework for deciding when and how to embrace or reject a particular tool.
“What we experience as beautiful in what we make, or in what we do not make, is cut apart from what we know about things in science. This disjunction of beauty and truth is the very heart of what has made technological civilization.” George Grant, “Faith and the Multiversity”
Great conversation about the philosophy of history
Interesting conversation with Ari Schulman, Editor of The New Atlantis about IVF and effective altruism.
www.cbhd.org/podcast/afte...
"It’s possible the party will stretch on until sunrise, when the more sensible guests will return. But for now, someone just turned up the lights, and it’s probably time to ask ourselves: What exactly have we been doing here for the last decade and a half?"
As I get acquainted with the New Place (as some have taken to calling it), I've found myself returning to this piece from spring of last year:
What Was Twitter, Anyway? www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/m...
“We form identity through curating profiles. Profiles are images of ourselves presented for second-order observation. By looking at them, others can see how we like to be seen as being seen.”
Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio, You and Your Profile, 2021
Hello everyone!
