Tom White

AI can help you produce more, faster—but it can't tell you if what you wrote is any good.

the morass of maddening tasks that swallow modern life.

"I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense."

~ David Lynch

AI’s fluency and availability create a path of least cognitive resistance. When taking that path is frictionless and produces good-enough outputs, the effortful alternative (actual thinking) is harder to justify in the moment. They describe the same phenomenon that the empirical studies find: the gap between what AI does for the output and what it... See more

Diplomacy, in Cooper’s view, is high-stakes drama. An admirer of Shakespeare, he approaches it as a playwright would. Or a screenwriter. For example, here’s how he sets the scene for Kennan’s epoch-making Long Telegram, the embryo of the U.S. policy on containment: “February, 1946. Moscow. George Kennan is sick in bed . . . His ambassador is away... See more

Proximity to the frontier is so valuable that it changes what the math on a “good deal” looks like.

“The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That’s why I ran to the woods.”

— Jim Harrison

While this anthropomorphization can be entertaining, it is also deceptive, particularly for the most vulnerable. Because chatbots are excessively “affectionate,” as well as always present and accessible, they can become hidden architects of our emotional states and so invade and occupy our sphere of intimacy.

No matter where we live in the world, then, it would be wise for us all to think carefully about the global chaos that is only beginning to consume us all. What is happening? Why is it happening? Where are we headed? What, if anything, can and should we do, individually and collectively?