Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
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...
Phone calls and message alerts at any moment; one learns to stop in the middle of anything — and worse, to expect to have to stop. After all, the social rule in the age of ubiquitous digital communication is determined by our new understanding that not only is everyone immediately accessible at any time, but what is more, everyone knows that everyone is...
Hypocrisy.– Beware all public voices who cite the profit motive as evidence that someone or some organization is acting dishonorably, disingenuously, or without sincere regard for the public good — and who make these claims on a for-profit basis. Treat with extreme skepticism the motives or reasoning of anyone who preaches, with a material vested interest, about the vested interests behind someone else’s...
Recently, a serious student who has embarked with gusto on the path of philosophy mused, in an e-mail, about what it means, definitionally speaking, to “be who she is.” Let’s say this is a note for the future, in case I might lose myself someday. What if I lose myself and forget who I was? Read this: “From myself in the past (2022)...
“I see you are alone, so you are not busy.” False. One is never busier than when alone, for then one is surrounded by the incessant demands of all those complex ideas and secret projects that tend to sit quietly in dark corners and leave you to your own devices when you are in the company of humans. “Are you busy this weekend?”...
The philosopher eschews the crowd, knowing that neither will his lone, strange voice be heard above the crowd’s incessant and familiar din, nor will his pointed questions and logical complexities penetrate minds caked in the mire of the tribe’s roiling certainties. This has been axiomatic among thinkers from the earliest times: The crowd is the enemy of thought, and hence of conversation, and...
A student who is about to move away from home to begin graduate studies in philosophy was ruminating about the value and significance of detaching oneself from relationships and sentimental entanglements which distort or limit independent thought. As a young man deeply interested in both Eastern and Western thought, he mentioned having recently heard a Buddhist monk explaining the spiritual benefits of cutting...
“If I have 80% understanding and 20% ignorance about a topic, then I think it will be easy to form questions about my ignorance, but in this case, I think I have 10% understanding and 90% ignorance, so it is not easy to even form a proper question, because I’m not sure if it is a good question to help my understanding.”
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