Apocalyptic Pc Games

[Kapil Grunewald]

Inher new book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, McQueen focused on the works of political realists who lived during times of heightened tensions: Renaissance political theorist Niccol Machiavelli; Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English political philosopher; and Hans Morgenthau, a 20th-century international relations theorist. As realists who perceived politics through power and interest rather than ideology, each criticized apocalyptic rhetoric. But each also embraced it to some extent. The study of political realists reminds us, McQueen believes, that true political change is hard work.

I became curious what the great canonical thinkers had made of apocalyptic politics, and chose three who wrote when many people expected the imminent demise of the known world: Niccol Machiavelli, the great Renaissance theorist; Thomas Hobbes, an extraordinary philosopher of the 17th century; and the influential postwar political scientist Hans Morgenthau. Did these thinkers take the apocalyptic mindset seriously? Did they share it? Did they worry about it?

The United States has a rich tradition of apocalypticism. Many of the Puritans who came to America thought they were escaping the wars of the last days in England and establishing the New Jerusalem foretold in the Book of Revelation.

2. Ezra Klein, discussing the disconcertingly high number of researchers work on AI, who appear to believe, rather earnestly, that their work poses a non-trivial risk of causing cataclysmic harm to the human race:

6. It is also important to be a bit more specific, and to classify the religion of technology more precisely as a Christian heresy. It is in Western Christianity that Noble found the roots of the religion of technology, and it is in the context of post-Christian world that it has presently flourished.

However, a part of wisdom is knowledge of ignorance. The Socratic attitude is to know that one does not know. And this realization of our ignorance can be of great practical importance in the exercise of the power of judgment, which is after all related to action in the political sphere, into future action, and far-reaching action.

Another way to think about this is to recognize that modernity derived its cultural power and energy from an unstable ideological compound. The constituent elements of this compound were, on the one hand, a liberal commitment to the individual human person and, on the other, a drive to transcend the perceived deficiencies (later simply the inherent limits) of the human condition. Alternatively, we might also describe the unstable compound as mixture of the promise an unfettered individual will realizing its desires coupled to a system which ultimately demands that human desires be managed, predicted, and channeled to serve the ends of a market economy.

Fears about AI signal the decomposition of the ideological compound. The two constituent elements can no longer be synthesized. The resulting system demands or threatens the elimination of the human person. But this must not be understood ultimately as the risk of the appearance of a new, alien super-intelligence. Rather, it must be understood as the culmination of a longstanding trajectory. The default eschatology of technological modernity has always been the eclipse of the human person, and this is because its model of the human person was dominated by the image of a disincarnate mind exerting rational control over the material world. Now, as it turns out, those most enthralled by this model of the human being grow increasingly anxious about the prospect of a man-made disincarnate mind overthrowing the human race as it pursues its own rationally optimized goals.

An interesting trend I've noted is watching my peers, many of whom are thoughtful people who are ex-Christian, move from young adulthood to adulthood along an intellectual trajectory of Christian academics to general disillusionment with faith to jobs in/interest in the tech sphere to seeking meaning through the power of physical craft. For what it's worth, I count myself in this group. The attraction for us, near as I can tell, is the bodily incarnation of playing, practicing, focusing, and creating material artifacts - at least for me, I'm astounded when I can create by hand what I'm so used to seeing as machine-made. What that signifies about our estrangement from our bodes/ourselves is telling.

I'm especially finding joy in weaving lately, and I think I'm enjoying it as a refuge against the fact that in my work life in a tech company, I'm surrounded by an almost fanatical enthusiasm with AI and data collection and all of that. And I just can't get on board, so I turn to poetry and weaving and blacksmithing and arts that teach me the practical applications of math, attentiveness, imagination, the sublime, tactile pleasure, etc.

Anyways, I just discovered SAORI weaving, which is ideologically committed to the idea that we are flesh and blood creatures and so we ought not to imitate machines. We should, instead, develop our aesthetic senses, create imperfections that we can bring into harmony with the overall piece, find creativity in being untrained and therefore unconstrained by inherited notions of how weaving should be, seek to honor the creativity and dignity in our own sensibilities by enjoying and attending to what we make. It's such a refreshing antidote to the "more productivity, don't do boring stuff" language I hear about technology at work (not to discount the very valid ways in which technology has brought up the human standard of living and liberated folks from certain types of drudgery).

It's been interesting as my co-readers are a Philosophy PhD currently teaching at a classical Christian school, and an AI PhD currently doing computer vision research for Microsoft. Some *very* good discussion to be had, for sure!

Welcome to the Convivial Society. A newsletter about technology and culture with both those terms understood quite broadly. AI, of course, is the topic of the moment, and it is the topic of this newsletter. Ordinarily, you would find a rather traditional essay below. What you have here is a sub-genre of the Convivial Society which I\u2019ve taken to labeling \u201CFragments,\u201D a loosely structured list of associated quotations, reflections, and provocations. I\u2019m drawn to this form because it reflects the provisional and associative nature of thinking. It also reflects the way fragments of thought, often surfaced from another time, can gather around a problem to illuminate its contours, disclose its depths, and perhaps even reveal lines of actions. Such fragments, in any case, may be all we have to work with. I also appreciate the fact that the form invites rather than forecloses further thought.

1. Thinking cogently and insightfully about AI is a bit of challenge right now. Or maybe I should be more modest in my claim. I am myself finding it challenging to think cogently and insightfully about AI. Part of the problem is that the term is used rather indiscriminately, so it is hard to pin down what exactly one is talking about with the kind of specificity that sound thinking requires.1 It\u2019s also difficult to fix your thinking on a phenomenon that is rapidly developing. Finally, it is challenging to think about AI because it\u2019s hard to distinguish among what is actually happening, sound speculation about what may happen, hype, and criti-hype (historian Lee Vinsel\u2019s term for critical reflection that takes the hype at face value). But you\u2019re not reading me for the hottest take on emerging trends, so I\u2019m going to proceed as per usual, deliberately. I\u2019m sure we\u2019ll be thinking about AI for the foreseeable future, and I\u2019ll continue share my thoughts insofar as I judge them to be potentially helpful.

In what follows, I\u2019m using the term \u201CAI\u201D in a manner similar to how Kate Crawford uses it in Atlas of AI. Crawford observes that \u201Cartificial intelligence\u201D is a term that \u201Cis both used and rejected in ways that keep its meaning in flux.\u201D She notes, too, that \u201C\u2018machine learning\u2019 is more commonly used in the technical literature.\u201D Consequently, she chooses to \u201Cuse AI to talk about the massive industrial formation that includes politics, labor, culture, and capital\u201D while using \u201Cmachine learning\u201D to refer to \u201Ca range of technical approaches.\u201D Likewise, I am using AI here not to designate an array of specific technical practice and capabilities, but rather the present amorphous techno-cultural idea of AI as it is deployed, debated, feared, and celebrated. This idea of AI is not only as a massive industrial formation including politics, labor, culture, and capital, but also the consummation of a historical development which we ordinarily gloss as modernity.

\u201CI often ask them the same question: If you think calamity so possible, why do this at all? Different people have different things to say, but after a few pushes, I find they often answer from something that sounds like the A.I.\u2019s perspective. Many \u2014 not all, but enough that I feel comfortable in this characterization \u2014 feel that they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world.\u201D

\u201CHowever it is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there were some debates about what to do with it after it was made. I cannot very well imagine if we had known in late 1949 what we got to know by early 1951 that the tone of our report would have been the same. You may ask other people how they feel about that. I am not at all sure they will concur; some will and some will not.\u201D

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