love in the age of algorithm

Building something new would be “a worldmaking project, aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than the mere critique of ones we already have.” In other words, we can’t just rearrange the furniture inside rooms we don’t like the shape of; we have to build entirely new rooms in better shapes.

What we all unequivocally value, readers and writers, all of us as enjoyers of creativity, is the mind-expanding energy that’s only found in art, in any of its forms, as a means to share the things that make our minds alike and the things that make them different. AI systems can do many things but they can’t — and never will be able to — expand our... See more

What effect internet performance and self-branding has on our psyches, not to mention our society and our economy, may be one of the most essential questions of our time.

A humanism that responds to the collapse of Big Authenticity will be sexier . As Magdalene Taylor recently wrote, “Real things and actual human experiences are hot, even in the written form. They have a libidinal energy that’s been drained from us in the current technological era. And we’re going to want to get that energy back.”

The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.

Although the practical success of neural networks is still undeniable, it must be observed that their most powerful applications are in domains where rules are set in advance and don’t change over time — where the goals are clearly defined. The way you win a game of chess or Go is fixed and unambiguous. Protein folding is constrained by the laws of... See more

The vibes are off, but they’re off fundamentally because they focus only on feelings and emotional connections that have already existed. They don’t provide or imagine pathways to new futures; they allow only for an understanding of what feels good or bad based on experiences that have already happened, things that have already been seen.

In other... See more

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long... See more