Author: Justin DaMetz

Father of Julian and Evelyn, Husband of Tabitha, Christian theologian, writer, 5th grade teacher, book addict, displaced Middle-Earth resident

the AI bubble

Alan Jacobs highlights this quote from Charlie Stross:

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications is that it is almost exactly six months since the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble.

“Place Your Bets”

See my recent writing about AI and it’s link to capitalism. At base, the AI craze, no matter the intentions of the engineers and thinkers and programmers behind it, will become another tool of techno-capitalism, just like social media and cell phones before it: a way for them to monetize our attention. And the by-product of this latest capitalist enterprise will be the same as the one’s before it: lonely, disconnected and discarded human beings, a social fabric further shredded, and any concept of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. In our new technocracy, profit and power are the end (same as they ever were), human consciousness and well-being is the means. And in the end, the bubble will burst, the rich and powerful will consolidate their gains, and the rest of us will be left holding the bag, as we look around and wonder what happened to our culture.

a different order

It was the best course I ever had at college. And it did me the most good, in many different ways. It was the only place where I ever heard anything really sensible said about any of the things that were really fundamental – life, death, time, love, sorrow, fear, wisdom, suffering, eternity. A course in literature should never be a course in economics or philosophy or sociology or psychology: and I have explained how it was one of Mark’s1 great virtues that he did not make it so. Nevertheless, the material of literature and especially of drama is chiefly human acts – that is, free acts, moral acts. And, as a matter of fact, literature, drama, poetry, make certain statements about these acts that can be made in no other way. That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and all the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

withdrawing from the content

Freddie deBoer:

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies, albums, and art, stuff that was created for a deeper purpose than mining fleeting bits of attention for fractions of a penny. 

“The Bitter End of Content”

Amen to that. Here’s to more books, longer listens, slower plots, and less clicks.