email #52 — update on AI fear, some books I've been reading, yet another zohran take
Leon Kraiem
Hi friends,
Last time I wrote you, I was very freaked out about the prospect of superintelligent AI, and I was hoping that, before I returned to New York from my weekend sojourn up north, my friends would have shown me that, in fact, the risk is not so urgent, or not so great, or not so clear-cut.
They didn't, really — except insofar as I know how smart they are, and how much they know about this stuff. "I was really concerned about the singularity when we were in high school — remember?" Heila said, around 1am on Saturday night, as I interrogated her and Yoni, demanding the best explanation they could muster for why the entire human race is not at risk of extinction within the next ten years. (Just ten years, I told them. If you can get me to 2035, I'll go to sleep.)
"That's why I studied computer science, was out of concern about superintelligence,” she said. “And I'm telling you, that version of the story didn't survive my first semester, once I actually knew how this stuff works." Then Yoni said something like: "The scary story is intuitive; the real story isn't." And I suppose I'm epistemically humble enough — or, more likely, complacent and also sleepy enough — for that to sound decently plausible, so it allowed me to close my eyes for the night.
But of course, when it comes to things like this, there is always the risk, and then there is also the risk that there is a risk, if you'll allow me to get Rumsfeldian for a moment (though the alignment should not, att.: friends who read my emails and shake your head about my politics, be interpreted as anything more than stylistic). Your assessment leaves you confident, but how confident are you in your assessment? What’s the chance that you’re wrong? When the really consequential failures happen — the close-at-hand example being the army on Oct. 7 — it's the lack of accounting for that risk that people find so hard to forgive, not the failure to predict with perfection.
Of course, when all the experts are on one side of an argument, and it’s just Joe Rogan and your cousin on the other, it’s probably fine to handwave the objections away. But when there's an expert here, and an expert there, and some of them, even just a few, are warning of the worst possible outcome for everyone, soon, what can a layman do but aggressively err on the side of caution? But then, do I even know who’s an expert and who’s a quack? I was a philosophy major, I can’t even decipher the acronyms for people’s second degrees.
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But that’s being wrong about one thing. What about the possibility that you’re wrong about everything?
This is the premise of a very dark Norm MacDonald bit (“I think it’s time to go down to the rope store at that point…”), and it’s also the premise of a very silly Weird Al song (“I was driving on the freeway in the fast lane with a rabid wolverine in my underwear…”), the two being about as far apart as can be in terms of mood, but converging on a sort of you-wasted-your-life, nihilistic ‘nothing matters anymore’ upshot for their utterly-mistaken protagonists.
But I read a very convincing book this week suggesting that I am, in fact, wrong about everything — and I don’t feel that way at all!
The book is called “Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics,” and it’s an accessible introduction to the idea that the universe is not made of matter, but rather of consciousness — that, in the case of a human being, the brain doesn’t give rise to our thoughts, the brain is our thoughts, just seen from the outside.
It’s a wacky idea (or, it seems to be, until it doesn’t), and there’s no way I can communicate it in an email — I know that, because I’ve been trying for the last forty-five minutes, writing and deleting, writing and deleting, writing and deleting. And this idea isn’t woo-woo word-salad, either, to be clear — this is a serious philosophical stance, flowing out of an Anglo-American analytic tradition that is one of the very few things I am actually certified as knowing something about (fraudalent as I may feel that aforementioned degree to be, all considered; I certainly wouldn’t have awarded it to me. Still, I should have a somewhat functional BS meter for this stuff.)
It’s just… very hard to explain.
The reason it’s so hard, I think, is that words are meant to describe specific, discrete things — a french fry, the feeling of pins-and-needles in your feet, a high school English class, Mike Tyson — but when you talk about metaphysics, you’re not talking about any thing, you’re talking about anything. If you’ve got your ontology confused, you aren’t wrong, per Norm and Al, about every thing — far from it; you’re really only wrong about one thing — namely, everything — and that could turn out to be a pretty small thing, in the grand scheme of things.
(Once I bought the idealism book, Amazon saw right through me: it recommended, and I immediately ordered, another book, called “Nothing Matters: A Book About Nothing.” Its description begins “Is nothing everything?” and then insists that the book is “Provocative and accessible, free of jargon.”)
This feels like an opportune moment, by the way — apropos of nothing — to note Heschel’s observation that “There is no equivalent for the word ‘thing’ in biblical Hebrew. The word davar, which in later Hebrew came to denote thing, means in biblical Hebrew: speech; word; message; report; tidings; advice; request; promise; decision; sentence; theme, story; saying, utterance; business, occupation; acts; good deed; events; way, manner, reason, cause; but never ‘thing.’ Is this a sign of linguistic poverty, or rather an indication of an unwarped view of the world, of not equating reality — derived from the Latin word res, thing — with thinghood?"
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That, by the way, is something I really enjoy when I’m in the States, is how fast I can get my hands on any given book.
In Jerusalem, there’s really only one bookstore with a good selection of new English titles, and ordering something can take weeks, maybe a month — as the good people at Adraba learned, to their misfortune, when I popped in every single day last winter to ask if my C.S. Lewis had come in. (The one day I didn’t ask, it arrived. Which is as compelling an argument as any philosophy book, in my view, that there’s more to the world than meets the rational eye.)
Before leaving Cambridge last weekend, I stopped by the Harvard Coop — every good city has a bookstore that, when you’re in town, you really have to visit, in the same way (albeit not to the same extent) that you have to visit each of your old friends who live there.
I picked up a book called ‘Small Rain,’ by Garth Greenwell. It’s a first-person novel about a guy who has an out-of-nowhere medical emergency, and it chronicles his subsequent hospital stay, tracing his inner monologue through the poetry he teaches for his day job, to his utter dependence on the nurses and their little gestures that preserve or obliterate his dignity, to all the renovations on his newly-purchased house that so strained his relationship with his partner over the previous year, to the blinding pain of the initial injury, to the pleasant buoyancy of the IV-drip oxycontin, and so on and so on — and all of it takes place in June or July of 2020.
This book won a big award, it says on the cover, and I understand why — among other things, the writing brings you right back to that time, with the masks, the gloves, the riots on TV: but it doesn’t dwell on them any more than we actually did dwell on them in that period, when it was all so ubiquitous, despite it all being so weird. I don’t read a whole lot of fiction (I read almost none from age 10 or so until age 26, when I started taking a prescription stimulant every day and my whole life changed), so that may account for some of what I’m about to say, but: This is the first time I’ve read a novel set in a particular historical period, that I’ve actually been brought back to what it was like to live through those events.
After the last two years — with the missiles, and the hostage posters, and the friends in and out of reserves, a nonstop parade of days that will each have their own Wikipedia page — it’s interesting to reflect that Covid was really the first historical event I lived through in a way that’s admitting of madeleine treatment. (I have a very early memory of being inside the Twin Towers some months before 9/11, and of the immediate aftermath, but you’d really have to be a magician to conjure up the PoV of a 4 year old.)
I suspect that when the Israeli novels about this period are written — in Hebrew editions, though I will surely give up and read them in translation, which I figure with AI must be coming to Kindle before we know it, with more grace and subtlety than we ever thought a machine could muster, but we’ll have been wrong — they’ll bring me back in a similar way, and that’ll be interesting; but what will be more important, I imagine, will be those books’ ability to bring me into the experiences of other people, people close to me, who went through this period so differently than I did. People I have yet to meet, but also people I already know, whom I’ve done my best to be around for, but whose inner life has crossed any number of boundaries of which I’m on the other, safer and infinitely preferable side.
And of course, there will also be the 2023-2025 novels that don’t take place in Israel, including the ones — how many do you think are being written already? — narrated by Jews in the Diaspora in general and in New York in particular, who have experienced that other post-Oct. 7 thing that I always find myself exploring when I’m here, that’s so much easier for me to imagine but that in fact requires imagining, because I spent that time in the eye of a different storm, quite far away.
Hopefully, some of those novels will also be written from the point of view of my friends with whom I so strenuously disagree about the war and everything related to it — both the friends that I can currently talk to about it, because listening to someone’s reasoning is very different from understanding their point of view, and also those friends who I currenly can’t, who are on the other side of a different sort of chasm that’s opened up, which I’m as bad at bridging as anyone.
There’s an old childhood friend I was thinking of reaching out to on this trip, who’s visibly and outspokenly on the other side of that divide. I thought maybe I’d suggest we get a coffee, and I might have actually done it, if I weren’t so confident she’d take me up on the offer. I so want to want to have that conversation — but I really don’t want to have it. Or at least I can’t, even if I want to. I’m the emotional one, it’s on me. And it’s a shame, because it could really be so interesting and so warm and so redemptive in its way. But I think, for now, I’m waiting until the novels come in.
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And on that note.
I know, it’s been such a good email, talking books and consciousness and even looking at my own imperfections when it comes to difficult Israel discourse. Am I really going to ruin this by ending with yet another Mamdani screed? Yes, yes I am. I’m sorry, dear reader, but it’s important to me.
(And also, at least one of you — Hi, friend— has been added to this list specifically because you asked me what I thought about the election and I told you these emails would tell you; instead you’ve been spammed with AI anxiety and metaphysical gobbledygook. Well, here it is.)
There was a really important test last week, and Zohran failed it. Not the White House thing — obviously, I think “genocide” is blood libel, etc. etc., but ChatGPT could tell you what I'd say about that, I don't need to waste your time on it.
I’m talking instead about Wednesday night, when Park East Synagogue, on 67th St, hosted an informational event by Nefesh b’Nefesh, the semi-governmental agency that helps American and Canadian Jews immigrate to Israel. (As a proud, if somewhat out of touch, cousin of the Mexican Jewish community, I won’t just say ‘North American’ when that country's not included, but that’s neither here nor there.)
A demonstration was held outside the synagogue protesting the event. The crowd of some 200 chanted: “Death to the IDF”; “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada”; “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out.” Luke Tress, the New York correspondent for the Times of Israel, included an audio in his article, where you hear the leader say: “…to protest this event that will root Zionist settlers. It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared.” The crowd repeats each sentence word for word, in that human-microphone thing, which I still associate, I think correctly, with Occupy Wall Street.
(Individual protesters also shouted things like “Fucking Jewish pricks” at passersby, and one of the signs said “Pedophiles & rapists are running our government to serve ‘Israel,’” but we can call those bad apples. The more important statements are the ones that the crowd chanted as a whole.)
Tress asked a Mamdani spokesperson what the next Mayor of New York thought of that demonstration. Here’s the statement:
“The Mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so. He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
For what it’s worth, I think the fact it was in front of a synagogue is irrelevant, contra just about everyone on all sides of this. The demonstrators weren’t protesting Shabbat services, they were protesting a specific event that happened to be held inside the building. If Ben Gvir spoke at Park East, I’d protest in that same spot. And if the mosque on 97th St. held a fundraiser for Hamas, I’d protest over there myself, and it wouldn’t be hateful to do so. This isn’t the most important part of the story, but I still think it’s important to note. Too often, the discourse around hateful speech betrays the value of free speech, which is sort of the only thing I believe in 100%.
Also, the synagogue is what gave Mamdani the hook for that international law comment — which is a pretty-close-to-explicit way of saying: “The synagogue was in the wrong and deserved to be protested.” The statement reads to me (let me know if you feel otherwise, because I should know if my intuitions are not as universal here as I think they are) as: “The protesters were in the right, but they really should have had more tact.”
There are two points to rehearse here, very briefly: The first is that you have to be really, really purist to decide that a Nefesh b’Nefesh event ‘promotes activities in violation of international law.’ All it does is help Americans immigrate to Israel — a teeny tiny droplet of the country’s population growth year-to-year. Now, some of those immigrants do go live in settlements, I’m sure, and that’s pretty plausibly a violation, from what I understand; but some of the immigrants also come and commit crimes, and Nefesh b’Nefesh isn’t promoting that just because it put them on the plane.
(I can, of course, imagine ways this isn’t a 1:1 comparison — NbN probably advertises life in settlements to some immigrants, it certainly won’t decline to subsidize new-immigrants if they happen to be east of the Green Line, etc. — but surely, that’s not the sort of thing the protesters, or Zohran, is talking about. When they talk about ‘rooting Zionist settlers,’ they’re just talking about people moving to Israel, and it surely applies to leftists moving to Tel Aviv as much as it applies to rightists moving to Shilo.)
I immigrated to Israel via Nefesh b’Nefesh. I didn’t just attend an informational event, I actually did the thing — I am a Zionist settler, who rooted in (West) Jerusalem. And one of my good friends works for Nefesh b’Nefesh, and often finds herself at informational events in New York. When the protesters chant “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out,” and “Settlers, settlers, go back home, Palestine is ours alone,” and “We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared.”, what do you suppose they mean, vis-a-vis me?
The election is over. There is no longer a necessary, binary choice, with lesser-of-the-evils calculations. Zohran’s the guy, for better or worse.
And so the questions, for me, are fairly concrete: How does the incoming Mayor of New York feel about people 1) calling for my murder in Israel, and 2) making open, if just-barely-implicit, threats of violence at anyone who, like me, explored that immigration process here in the city itself?
If ‘Discouraged the language and will continue to do so, but the shul is a bad guy too’ communicates to you a serious objection to either of those things, you’re hearing Mamdani differently than I am.
(It's worth noting, of course, that if anyone is a legitimate target, it would be me, insofar as it was a choice for me to move. The vast majority of people "taken out" by the "resistance" are guilty only of having been born there — this is a point I think holds true even or especially of soldiers, conscripted in a country whom the 'resistance' attacked, consciously initiating a war; but I'm focusing on myself here, because that's more concrete.)
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Whoo. That was a long one. This email is what I did with my evening.
I’m around most nights; I leave early next week. NYers, now’s your chance.
LK