I’ve been rereading the late anthropologist David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, which persuasively makes the case that the corporate world is happy to nurture inefficient or wasteful jobs if they somehow serve the managerial class or flatter elites—while encouraging the public to harbor animosity at those who do rewarding work or work that clearly benef... See more
Almost every professional artist or illustrator I meet tells me they have lost clients and gigs to firms that have turned to AI instead of paying for human work; some have been pushed out of their fields altogether.
The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it’s embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic
But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.
And so, at last, we can return—seriously, earnestly—to the reinvention of the humanities, and of humanistic education itself. We can return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of exi... See more
I like overhearing more than I like being told. I love eavesdropping. That was the punishment in South America, that my Spanish is too bad for good eavesdropping.