A Dark Room on the Other Side of the World

As the false output of artificial intelligence content generation gets mixed in with original human-generated content on the internet, the internet will become less and less useful. All the more so when intelligence agencies, corporations, governments, PR firms, and other propaganda actors us AI to deliberately seed the internet with false informat... See more

This, I think, is another reason why Updike has so many detractors. Ever since F.R. Leavis wrote The Great Tradition , there has been a school of literary criticism that has demanded that great novelists also be great moralists: that the job of the writer is not just to reflect the world but to tell it the difference between right and wrong.

That is... See more

The propensity to draw these manifold fault lines between good and evil is a recurring symptom of our tradition's dislocation from God.

First, the lines are sometimes drawn between different aspects of creation. Herman Dooyeweerd identifies three such dichotomous ways of understanding the world-or "ground motives"-in the history of Western

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In a completely ultra-poptimist world, there would be no available incentives to create novel, complex, or ambiguous works of art. We would have to rely on artist altruism or insanity.

Our discomfort with this indifference manifests in a predictable pattern: we try to turn AI into a comprehensible villain. In reference to Girard, every society is built, in part, on the ritual of scapegoating, a mechanism by which collective anxieties, rivalries, and fears are projected onto a villain or outcast, thereby restoring temporary order ... See more