Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 9, 2025 · Last modified January 31, 2025
Of war and worms.– I have taught a Russian girl whose serious beau, whom she hoped to marry, was a Ukrainian fighting on the front lines to defend his homeland against Vladimir Putin’s — not “Russia’s,” so let us please put that lie away for good, but Putin’s — brutal and unprovoked assault on her boyfriend’s country. He had already been wounded and...
In a recent essay, “The Ultimate Labor-Saving Device,” I recounted my response to a student’s questions about artificial intelligence, related to my previous piece, “The Intellectual Welfare State.” A central theme of that earlier discussion was the likely, or perhaps inevitable, retarding effects of increasing AI dependency on human intellectual development. This time, prodded by the same thoughtful student’s subsequent correspondence, we cut...
Two days ago, I was sitting down to lunch at a restaurant with a student whose parents had flown to Thailand for a short vacation a few days earlier. Before our food arrived, my wife phoned to ask, pointedly, when our young friend’s parents were due to fly home, and to inform me that a Korean passenger jet traveling to Korea from Thailand...
The past century of human civilization has increasingly defined itself as the age of the labor-saving device; that is, of endlessly-developing technological advances aimed at reducing human effort and freeing up our time and energy for “more important things.” But what happens when the labor being saved by our technology is specifically the kind of labor that was previously dedicated to those very...
Artificial intelligence is to the realm of learning and knowledge what the welfare state is to the realm of practical motivation and productivity. Reducing the sense of lack, need, and concern in practical life makes people not only less likely to want to work hard, less willing to devote their lives to some kind of meaningful productive activity, but also, at the highest...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 15, 2024
Here in the land that calls itself The Republic of Korea, daily life carries on as usual. The end of the fall semester is upon us, with its typical stress-inducing round of exams that prove nothing, resulting in grades that serve no rational purpose, followed by days of bureaucratic hoop-jumping from the instructors as we satisfy the artificial requirements of a worldwide educational...
What would it be like to have chosen only the most difficult paths? No safe routes, no comfort zones, no relaxing pastimes, no settling for the familiar, for what is “good enough,” or for “what works.” What would it be like to do, each day, only what seems most compelling, without regard for how it affects one’s daily tasks and practical goals? That...
Private property.– Beware the man who suspects or critiques private property. It is not your material possessions he has in mind, at least primarily. For what is personal property in the ordinary (though artificially limited) sense? It is nothing but the outward manifestation of your life — your time, your thought, and your effort. The tangible results of the time, thought, and effort...
Life must be ordered hierachically. That is to say, every life is in fact ordered in a hierarchical way, whether one intends it or not — whether in a rational order or an irrational one. Most people’s lives, it goes without saying, are almost completely irrational in their hierarchies. But to live well requires that one’s internal ordering have the most essential activities...
Democratic Surrender.– A headline in The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of record for Americans with a milquetoast’s craving for the status quo and a middle class investor’s innate aversion to risk, announces that European leaders, by which the WSJ means the particular leaders they wish to highlight, are showing “growing acceptance” of Donald Trump’s “plan” (what plan?) for a negotiated settlement over...
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