I don’t want to bury the lead, but before I begin this post I want to point out that I added some more to the end of my last post about some troubling trends around humans’ relationships with their AI technologies. Namely, links and quotes from articles published last year.
One of the most delightful things I’ve found on the internet recently is James A. Reeves’ website. His Midnight Radio transmissions, in particular, are the perfect blend of words, images, and sounds. The kinds of web pages I aspire to leave out here.
I struggled just now with “web pages”. Isn’t there a better phrase for these artifacts of a brilliant artistic mind? But I’m going with that one. Stumbling upon a site like James’ is like finding a scene-specific illustrated encyclopedia on a random shelf in a smelly used book store in a town you were just driving through. Except the pages also have music players.
via People and Blogs – James A. Reeves:
I’ve spent so much time chopping myself into pieces over the years: a blog for writing, a separate website for design work, another for music, and yet another for artwork. But last year, I woke up one morning with a rare revelation: I should just be James. So here we are.
I’m perpetually redesigning my website, hoping to achieve a Platonic blend of legibility and calm while also evoking the inside of my head, which is very much neither of those things. Fiddling with my website feels like rearranging the furniture: a cleansing, sometimes a humbling, when I’m forced to accept how I actually live.
One night I asked myself: what do I like to do when nobody’s paying attention? Well, I tend to make heavily reverberated mixtapes of slow-motion songs while ruminating about spiritual matters. So last year, I turned this tendency into a ritual: Midnight Radio—a short mix and an essay that I send out ‘round midnight on the first and fifteenth of every month.
More cogent thinking about AI: On AI & Society: Does More Data Mean Better Decisions?
One of the biggest challenges [is] everybody’s looking at everybody else going, “Oh they’re doing it, we must! Oh look at what they say,” and it’s like a business version of Facebook…because everybody’s talking about the wonderful stuff they’re doing…and what a lot of organizations are not talking about…is the blood sweat and tears or the sticky tape or the cardboard Blue Peter models that are going on in the background…somebody’s going, “Look at this incredible beautiful meal in my home, and they’re showing you this bit of the kitchen and not the carnage that is around the way–they’ve got tomato juice on the walls and all that kind of stuff. You’re only getting a snapshot that they want you to see and that’s exactly what’s happening with business and organizations…What it’s doing is making other businesses believe that they’re missing out because they’re not in the same state when they couldn’t be because you’re only seeing the smoke and mirrors part of it.
So the amount of conversations I’m having with boards and with executives which are going, “Caroline we need to get on this AI stuff we need to do AI,” and the first thing I always say is, “That’s fantastic, that’s wonderful. What do you want to do for? What is the problem you’re going to solve? What is the direction you want to take the organization in? How is this going to serve your purpose?
Art and morals are…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
The enemies of art and of morals, the enemies that is of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis. One may fail to see the individual…because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined. Or we may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own. Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination… The exercise of overcoming one’s self, of the expulsion of fantasy and convention…is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly which we hardly ever do, painful.
The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves…Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.
This had me asking, “How am I 50 years old and just now finding out about Iris Murdoch?” Existentialists and Mystics is now on my reading list, as are a couple of her other works. Same for Robert Graves.
The title of this post comes from David Grey’s Late Night Radio from 1996’s Sell, Sell, Sell, which is what comes to mind when I hear “Midnight Radio”, for some reason.