AI

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that interestingness is the very thing I feel falling away whenever I discover, or begin to suspect, that something I’m reading or watching was generated by artificial intelligence. It might continue to be impressive, or informative, but the flame that kept me fascinated sputters and dies. Which speaks to my point... See more

Because of the 20 years he’s been cultivating his ability in the craft of writing, what he thinks to do is just different from what I would think to do. I’ve seen the differences in what people get out of AI. The people who can get the best out of it need it the least.

The late biologist E.O. Wilson said that “the real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.” Wilson said that back in 2011, long before any of us were talking about large language models or GPTs.

What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?

I think we’ve still underestimated the harms of scrolling. I am careful to say “scrolling” because I don’t think social media is itself a bad thing, nor do I think screens are uniformly bad. I think it’s specifically the act of scrolling, which forces us to ingest,... See more

“You have the whole history of all recorded music at your fingertips for no money, and that devalues music in general. It doesn’t properly express the work that goes into it, and it certainly doesn’t express how essential music is to the human experience.”