Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’
“Something that doesn’t actually exist can still be useful”*…
Gregory Barber on ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite. Ultrafinitism has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy, but it is also producing new insights in math and beyond…
Doron Zeilberger is a mathematician who believes that all things come to an end. That just as we are limited beings, so too does nature have boundaries — and therefore so do numbers. Look out the window, and where others see reality as a continuous expanse, flowing inexorably forward from moment to moment, Zeilberger sees a universe that ticks. It is a discrete machine. In the smooth motion of the world around him, he catches the subtle blur of a flip-book.
To Zeilberger, believing in infinity is like believing in God. It’s an alluring idea that flatters our intuitions and helps us make sense of all sorts of phenomena. But the problem is that we cannot truly observe infinity, and so we cannot truly say what it is. Equations define lines that carry on off the chalkboard, but to where? Proofs are littered with suggestive ellipses. These equations and proofs are, according to Zeilberger — a longtime professor at Rutgers University and a famed figure in combinatorics — both “very ugly” and false. It is “completely nonsense,” he said, huffing out each syllable in a husky voice that seemed worn out from making his point.
As a matter of practicality, infinity can be scrubbed out, he contends. “You don’t really need it.” Mathematicians can construct a form of calculus without infinity, for instance, cutting infinitesimal limits out of the picture entirely. Curves might look smooth, but they hide a fine-grit roughness; computers handle math just fine with a finite allowance of digits. (Zeilberger lists his own computer, which he named “Shalosh B. Ekhad,” as a collaborator on his papers.) With infinity eliminated, the only thing lost is mathematics that was “not worth doing at all,” Zeilberger said.
Most mathematicians would say just the opposite — that it’s Zeilberger who spews complete nonsense. Not just because infinity is so useful and so natural to our descriptions of the universe, but because treating sets of numbers (like the integers) as actual, infinite objects is at the very core of mathematics, embedded in its most fundamental rules and assumptions.
At the very least, even if mathematicians don’t want to think about infinity as an actual entity, they acknowledge that sequences, shapes, and other mathematical objects have the potential to grow indefinitely. Two parallel lines can in theory go on forever; another number can always be added to the end of the number line.
Zeilberger disagrees. To him, what matters is not whether something is possible in principle, but whether it is actually feasible. What this means, in practice, is that not only is infinity suspect, but extremely large numbers are as well. Consider “Skewes’ number,” eee79. This is an exceptionally large number, and no one has ever been able to write it out in decimal form. So what can we really say about it? Is it an integer? Is it prime? Can we find such a number anywhere in nature? Could we ever write it down? Perhaps, then, it is not a number at all.
This raises obvious questions, such as where, exactly, we will find the end point. Zeilberger can’t say. Nobody can. Which is the first reason that many dismiss his philosophy, known as ultrafinitism. “When you first pitch the idea of ultrafinitism to somebody, it sounds like quackery — like ‘I think there’s a largest number’ or something,” said Justin Clarke-Doane, a philosopher at Columbia University.
“A lot of mathematicians just find the whole proposal preposterous,” said Joel David Hamkins, a set theorist at the University of Notre Dame. Ultrafinitism is not polite talk at a mathematical society dinner. Few (one might say an ultrafinite number) work on it. Fewer still are card-carrying members, like Zeilberger, willing to shout their views out into the void. That’s not just because ultrafinitism is contrarian, but because it advocates for a mathematics that is fundamentally smaller, one where certain important questions can no longer be asked.
And yet it gives Hamkins and others a good deal to think about. From one angle, ultrafinitism can be seen as a more realistic mathematics. It is math that better reflects the limits of what people can create and verify; it may even better reflect the physical universe. While we might be inclined to think of space and time as eternally expansive and divisible, the ultrafinitist would argue that these are assumptions that science has increasingly brought into question — much as, Zeilberger might say, science brought doubt to God’s doorstep.
“The world that we’re describing needs to be honest through and through,” said Clarke-Doane, who in April 2025 convened a rare gathering of experts to explore ultrafinitist ideas. “If there might only be finitely many things, then we’d better also be using a math that doesn’t just assume that there are infinitely many things at the get-go.” To him, “it sure seems like that should be part of the menu in the philosophy of math.”
For mathematicians to take it seriously, though, ultrafinitists first need to agree on what they’re talking about — to turn arguments that sound like “bluster,” as Hamkins puts it, into an official theory. Mathematics is steeped in formal systems and common frameworks. Ultrafinitism, meanwhile, lacks such structure.
It is one thing to tackle problems piecemeal. It is quite another to rewrite the logical foundations of mathematics itself. “I don’t think the reason ultrafinitism has been dismissed is that people have good arguments against it,” Clarke-Doane said. “The feeling is that, oh, well, it’s hopeless.”
That’s a problem that some ultrafinitists are still trying to address.
Zeilberger, meanwhile, is prepared to abandon mathematical ideals in favor of a mathematics that’s inherently messy — just like the world is. He is less a man of foundational theories than a man of opinions, of which he lists 195 on his website. “I cannot be a tenured professor without doing this crackpot stuff,” he said. But one day, he added, mathematicians will look back and see that this crackpot, like those of yore who questioned gods and superstitions, was right. “Luckily, heretics are no longer burned at the stake.”…
Read on for the history of ultrafinitism, the critical dialogue surrounding it, and its implications: “What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?” from @gregbarber.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* Ian Stewart (whose point was somewhat different from Zeilberger’s :-), Infinity: A Very Short Introduction
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As we engage the endless, we might spare a thought for a man whose work touched on the infinitesimal, Isaac Barrow; he died on this date in 1677. A theologian and mathematician, he played a key role in the development of infinitesimal calculus (in particular, for a proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus). Barrow was the inaugural holder of the prestigious Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a post later held by his student, Isaac Newton (who, of course, shares primary credit for the development of calculus with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”*…
… nor, perhaps, as widely read as it should be. “Urubos” is here to help…
The Extrapolated Futures Archive is a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction. Describe a situation you are facing, and find the SF stories that already worked through the implications.
The catalog connects stories (novels, novellas, short stories, films) to the speculative ideas they explore: thought experiments about technology, governance, biology, society, and more. Every idea is tagged with domains, scenario types, and outcome types so you can filter by the kind of future you are thinking about.
How to use it:
- Search by title, author, synopsis keywords, or idea descriptions
- Filter by domain (AI, biotech, climate, space, governance…), scenario type, outcome, decade, or series
- Browse ideas to find transferable thought experiments, then follow links to the stories that explore them
- Browse stories to see what speculative ideas a particular work contains
- Book Club discussions (marked with 📖) offer section-by-section roundtable analyses by AI personas modeled on SF authors
- What-If Query (via the What-If Query page/link) lets you describe a real-world scenario in plain text and get ranked matching ideas
The archive is designed for decision-makers in government, industry, and NGOs who want to widen their thinking by surfacing fictional precedents for novel real-world challenges…
Over 275 ideas, which cluster into 20 different “domains,” explored in over 1,900 stories, via over 3,500 links…
Mapping real-world scenarios to the science fiction stories that explored them first: “Extrapolated Futures Archive“
* William Gibson
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As we ponder prescience, we might spare a thought for Charles Hoy Fort, the prolific chronicler of paranormal phenomena; he died on this date in 1932. Fort collected accounts of frogs and other strange objects raining from the sky, UFOs, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, stigmata, psychic abilities, and the like, publishing four collections of weird tales and anomalies during his lifetime: Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). So influential was Fort among fellow-questers that his name has become an adjective, “Fortean,” often applied to unexplained events… The Truth is Out There…
“Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it—in a decade, a century, or a millennium—we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?”*…
From Plato on (if not, indeed, from even earlier), we’ve struggled to resolve the “shadows on the cave wall” into ever-sharper understandings of the reality “behind” those shadows. The quantum of that effort is the “idea.”
But what is an idea? “Roger’s Bacon” offers a provocative answer…
1. Ideas are alien life forms with an agency and intelligence independent of any mind or substrate which they inhabit. When we say that an idea (a story, a joke, a theory, a work of art) has “taken on a life of its own”, our language betrays an intuitive understanding that science has not yet grasped.
They are as you and I—eating, loving, mating, evolving, dying.
2. We do not create or “have” ideas—if anything is doing the creating or having, it is the ideas themselves.
There are times when we recognize this truth (when an idea “magically” pops into your head from “out of nowhere”), but too often it is obscured by the post-hoc just-so stories we tell ourselves about how I, the Great Thinker, Precious Me, was able to “come up with” the brilliant idea (e.g. I combined two other ideas, I was inspired by a memory, an event, another idea, etc.). Whatever explanation you give, the experience is always the same—the idea simply arrives. All else is confabulation.
Why then does an idea enter one mind and not another? Ideas act as all organisms do—they seek habitats (i.e. minds) that can provide them with the space and resources (i.e. mental runtime, ideas eat the energy that enables action potentials) needed to survive and reproduce (i.e. create new idea-children). Just as some ecosystems are more diverse, abundant, and resilient, some minds are as well. What we call creativity is the quality of possessing a healthy mental ecosystem, one that offers fertile ground for a plenitude of ideas. Ideas may also be attracted to particular minds for more specific reasons—for example, an idea may see that other related ideas (members of the same genera or family) have found the mind to be especially suitable or perhaps the mind is in dire need of a certain idea and therefore will offer it ample resources upon arrival. Some minds (e.g. those that are dominated by one idea or set of ideas, perhaps a religious or political ideology) provide poor habitat and are avoided by all but the most desperate ideas (e.g. irrational and harmful ideas that can’t find a home elsewhere—this is why conspiracy theories and hateful ideologies tend to congregate in the same minds).
3. Dear reader, I ask you to conduct an experiment.
Create something, anything—write a line of poetry, doodle an image, hum a melody, take some objects near you and arrange them into a sculpture. Now destroy what you created—physically if you can, but also mentally. Forget it completely.
The world is changed. You are changed. The idea will return in one form or another, in your mind or another.
4. Highly creative people, those we might call “geniuses”, sometimes have the intuition that ideas are autonomous living entities. The standard scientific explanation would be that creativity is positively associated with certain mental characteristics (such as theory of mind and schizotypy) that make someone prone to the intuition that ideas possess a degree of autonomous agency, that they are independently alive in some sense. However, another interpretation is possible: ideas do not like to be treated as if they were lifeless, inanimate objects (would you?) and therefore they gravitate towards minds that treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve…
[“RB” shares the fascinating insights of Philip K Dick, David Lynch, Terence Mckenna, and David Abram…]
… 5. Our relation to ideas is an inextricable symbiosis, like that between plant and pollinator, a mutualism in which neither can survive without the other. At the dawn of civilization, a covenant was made between humans and these alien entities which inhabit our minds—honor and respect each other and all will flourish beyond their wildest dreams.
Ideas will help us if we help them. This is why the growth of knowledge depends on certain moral values—freedom, openness, honesty, courage, tolerance, and humility, amongst others. Those cultures that respect these values provide ideal habitat for ideas, and where ideas thrive and multiply, so do humans.
The converse is true as well. When ideas are kept secret or willfully distorted, we suffer. When ideas are regarded as slaves, as mere tools that can be wielded for their owner’s benefit, the end is near.
Our treatment of ideas is at the root of all that ails us. The remedy: worship ideas like Wisdom, Justice, Equality, Peace, and Love as if they were Gods (because in fact they are, something the ancients recognized that we have long since forgotten), and follow one simple rule.
Do unto ideas as you would have them do unto you.
Teach the children, and in one generation—a new world.
6. Perhaps you has wondered if I am being serious, if I truly believe that ideas are alive in a literal sense—“surely he is just playing with metaphor, an interesting thought experiment and some poetic license, but nothing more.” I assure you nothing could be further from the truth. I am under no illusions; as it stands, there is absolutely no shred of evidence for my hypothesis. I have it on nothing but faith and intuition that one day there will be a paradigm shift of Copernican proportions, a revolution that utterly transforms our understanding of Mind and Matter.
Ask yourself: does history not teach us that there are new forms of life still waiting to be discovered which will seem utterly unimaginable to us until some new technology brings them to light? Is it not hubris of the highest order to suppose that we, Modern Man, have finally reached the end of nature’s catalogue? Democritus proposed that the universe consists of tiny indivisible “atoms”; over 2000 years later he was proven correct, however we still don’t understand the true nature of these atoms—might they too have a spark of consciousness? Is the idea that ideas are interdimensional endosymbiotic entities made of consciousness really so far-fetched? Yeah, maybe.
7. And this you shall know:
Ideas are Alive and You are Dead…
What is it like to be an idea? “Ideas are Alive and You are Dead,” @theseedsofscience.skystack.xyz via @mastroianni.bsky.social
* John Archibald Wheeler (and apposite the piece above, here)
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As we ponder panpsychism, we might send sentient birthday greetings to a man whose passing we noted last month, and whose work wrestled in a way with these same issues: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he was born on this date in 1881. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere (“a planetary “sphere of reason, the highest stage of biospheric development and of humankind’s rational activities).
Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone”*…
… or better yet, as Neophytos of Cyprus attempted, both…
The Hermitage (enkleistra) of Saint Neophytos is one of the most celebrated Byzantine twelfth-century monuments worldwide, given the high quality and the unique iconographic program of its frescoes, encountered nowhere else in the Byzantine world, as well as the fact that the whole complex was cut in rock.
The monument is connected with an important intangible heritage. In fact, the community that was built and organised around Neophytos has been the centre of intellectual production with strong connections to the Byzantine elites of the island and the capital of the Byzantine empire (Constantinople), during the tumultuous period spanning the last decades of the Byzantine era -which ended with the conquest of the island by Richard the Lionheart in 1191- through the first decades of the Frankish period of Cyprus.
The intellectual production at the Enkleistra is evidenced by the writings of Neophytos and the composition of the pictorial narratives of the frescoes. The latter have been studied extensively in the past, whereas the writings of Neophytos, as well as the artefacts produced by or connected to the members of the circle of Neophytos –both monks and laymen– have made the object of far less studies.
Saint Neophytos the Recluse (1134-ca.1214) is one of the most important Cypriot Saints and historic figures. He was a prolific writer who composed his biography, an account of the first years of the Latin conquest of the island, as well as several theological treatises. At the age of 17 he became monk at Koutsoventis Monastery. In search of the solitary life, he quitted this Monastery two years later. After many adventures he decided to become an ascetic at the mountainous area above the city of Paphos. In 1159 he started building his cell, by enlarging and modifying an already existing cave, which was expanded into a complex comprising three caves: the Cell, the Bema and the Naos dedicated to the Holy Cross.
Neophytos soon became a well-known spiritual figure and in 1170 he was forced by Basil Kinnamos, the bishop of Paphos at the time, to accept a disciple. During this same period, the Enkleistra began to be extended and was adorned with paintings, while the whole cliff was excavated for the creation of additional cells. This extension phase included possibly as well the Refectory, which it was also adorned. According to Neophytos’ testimony, however, the Naos was excavated in 1183. The increasing number of pilgrims visiting him, obliged Neophytos to dig another cave above the first one (the so-called New Zion), in search of solitude and inner peace. This latter cave was completed and painted by the end of 1197. According to written testimonies, the Enkleistra was painted in 1183 by Theodoros Apseudis, likely a Constantinopolitan painter who came to Cyprus at the instigation of the bishop of Paphos Basil Kinnamos. To the same painter are also attributed the Bema and the Naos of the church of the Virgin at Lagoudera (UNESCO World Heritage monument in Cyprus, dated ca. 1192), as well as at least seven icons currently owned by different ecclesiastical institutions in Cyprus…
More– and more images: “The Hermitage of Saint Neophytos,” from @unesco.bsky.social
On the subjects of shared secrets and of things divine: Aadam Jacobs, a Chicago concert enthusiast, used a Sony cassette recorder to capture concerts… lots of concerts… around 10,000 concerts– everyone from (early) Nirvana and REM to James Brown and Phish. Now (with help from volunteer digitizers), you can hear them on the Internet Archive.
* Rainer Maria Rilke
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As we get away from it all, we might spare a thought for Ælfheah of Canterbury (or as he’s also known these days, Alphege); he died on this date in 1012. An Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Winchester, later Archbishop of Canterbury (from 1006 to 1012) renown for piety and sanctity, he furthered the cult of Dunstan and encouraged learning.
Ælfheah was captured by Viking raiders in 1011 during the siege of Canterbury and killed by them the following year after refusing to allow himself to be ransomed. He was canonized as a saint (by Pope Gregory VII) in 1078. (Thomas Becket, a later Archbishop of Canterbury, prayed to Ælfheah just before his murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.)
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
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As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
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