Whole lotta AI goin’ on

This oughta go in Frank Bruni’s “Love of Sentences”

“I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses.” Sam Anderson writes a wonderful little review of his fancy Meta glasses: “Look, it would be easy to dunk on my very expensive, staggeringly incompetent sunglasses. Critiquing A.I. these days is like shooting fish in a barrel — and I mean poorly animated fish that keep sprouting human fingers inside a barrel that, as soon as you ask it a question or two, reveals itself to be a Nazi. Meta is investing heavily to promote its new product (a Super Bowl ad starring Spike Lee, a brick-and-mortar store on Fifth Avenue), which made me curious to take a peek through the eyes of the future. Yet A.I. glasses also feel so clearly unnecessary, so easily adaptable for malevolent ends. I was perfectly ready to hate them. Instead, very quickly, I started to feel sorry for my sunglasses. They were like a kid who hasn’t done any of the reading but keeps being called on in class — and who also can’t make friends, because all of his classmates think he’s a spy.”

Front Porch Republic

It’s not so much that I’m obsessed with AI as it is that the people I read with pleasure currently are obsessed with it.

How very, very ABA

The Wall Street Journal reveals/reminds that the American Bar Association has a DEI requirement for accreditation (and that ABA Accreditation is all but mandatory for a law school’s success).

It wasn’t this issue that caused me to drop ABA membership early in my law practice, but another where the bien pensants “think” one way, I another. The power levers in the ABA are, and long have been, controlled by people who feel like space aliens to me, and who probably think I’m a troglodyte.

Populist lessons

The lesson, as I see it, is that populism can never deliver on its fantastic promises: to insulate a national economy from the global one, while maintaining prosperity; to represent the will of the people, while persecuting a large share of the people who oppose populist policies; to champion “democracy” through illiberal means; to pretend you’re speaking for the forgotten man as you grow fat, rich, and arrogant in power. By the way, that’s as true of left-wing populism as it is of the populism of the right. As someone with some family ties to Hungary, I’m just glad to see Orban gone.

Bret Stephens

Pope versus an illiterate degenerate

Pope Leo is not likely to have the honor of going the way of my patron saint, Thomas Becket, that “turbulent priest” …

No, these are not those kinds of times. Pope Leo only has the American president, an illiterate and a degenerate, to snipe at him on social media. Trump is what you’d get if you’d given Benito Mussolini a frontal lobotomy and a double orchiectomy. He will order and exult in the mass murder of seagoing South Americans whose names nobody knows, but whatever else he may have in common with late-life King Henry VIII, the American president is not likely to make any martyrs in the classical sense.

…

One here recalls the famous words of Francis Cardinal George:

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

Prophetic? I think so–properly understood.

The role of the prophet is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Christianity. A prophet may or may not foretell future events, but making predictions is not the prophet’s main business—his business very often is the here and now. The prophet is a kind of public prosecutor, speaking in an inspired way to the shortcomings of the people, of the state, and, especially, of government and religious leaders ….

Kevin D. Williamson, The Pope Against the Idolators

“Shorts” on AI as Christian Heresy

I stumbled onto a piece by L.M. Sacasas (I think his intimates call him Michael; I’m not his intimate) that warrants many “shorts” of its own:

[T]he narrative of technological inevitability … frames the development of technology as a deterministic process to which human beings have no choice but to adapt, and to do so on the terms dictated by the emerging technological apparatus.
[T]he victors write the history, in technology as in war, and the technological “paths not taken” are often suppressed or ignored.
The narrative is useful precisely to the degree that it is the rhetorical equivalent of washing one’s hands in the face of events you have the power to sway but would rather not.
Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it.
We must at least entertain the possibility that the appropriate response to certain technologies at certain times is simply outright refusal. We do not need to water down our conviction with a myriad of qualifiers about how there are undoubtedly good and proper uses.
AI in its present mode can be understood as a fundamentally conservative rather than radically disruptive force to the degree that its function is to preserve modernity’s core commitments to scale, efficiency, rationality, control, and prediction.
[W]e continue to reap the consequences of a failure to address the problems of growth and complexity in a manner that would serve the human person and human communities.
We are discovering … that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (That last, bolded, sentence was a pull-quote and very apt.)
[W]e are operating with a “human of the gaps” model when we try to locate the essence of the human creature by pointing to what cannot yet be accomplished by a machine, whether these be matters of physical prowess, cognitive ability, or creativity. Such an approach to the human is misguided, just as it was when it was applied to God.
Without suggesting that this is an exhaustive and definitive account of the human person, I would invite us to consider the possibility that what is distinctive about the human should be sought in the quality of our capacity to respond to our Creator, the Alpha and Omega of our existence.
[O]ur flourishing is conditioned not so much on the accomplishment of certain feats or tasks, many of which, in any case, exclude the youngest and oldest and most vulnerable among us. Rather, it is conditioned on our capacity to respond to the call of God on us as unique individuals made in his image and thus made to resonate with his presence as it is manifest to us throughout creation.
“[S]tillness … is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real … has not yet descended into words.” (Quoting Josef Pieper, Leisure As the Basis of Culture)

L.M. Sacasas, AI as Christian Heresy.

This is one to return to periodically until I’ve modified my DNA with it or found a fallacy and dumped it. I want to make sure I’m not acting like a machine.

Shorts (more generally)

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
It was once the useful role of conservatives to stand athwart declining moral standards, yelling “Stop”. They lost whatever right they had to play that role when they got behind Trump. (Bret Stephens)
She says she has critiqued Trump for ten years so she should be trusted when she “defends” him thus: He is too stupid to realize that the même was sacrilegious.
The messianic iconography of Mr. Trump’s AI-generated image was more lavish than that which the North Korean regime uses to promote the cult of Kim Jong Un. (J Budziszewski)

Elsewhere in Tipsyland

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.