June 2025

I’m Not a Part of Your Machine, I Am the Machine

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, nietzsche, technology

In sum, I don’t know how you’re using AI, or whether you can relate to this experience, but as for me, at least, I cannot shake the feeling that we are not only conjuring a superintelligence into being; we are also coming to share, ourselves, as individual human beings, in that same superintelligence.

— Justin Smith-Ruiu

A friend of ours forwarded a link to an article about a recent MIT study that used brain scans to show that heavy use of LLMs like ChatGPT “reduces memory, critical thinking, and brain activity.” I sighed and marveled at the fact that it’s only been fifteen years since midwits were enamored of Nicholas Carr explaining that Google searches and hyperlinks were actually making them dumber. Ironically, that may have been correct in a way he didn’t intend: no one learned anything from that hyperbole, so here we go again.

Smith, a cognitively-privileged philosophy professor (it’s okay, he’s one of the good ones), reports what others of us have also discovered: as with most technological tools, you get what you give:

The experience I am reporting, I’m aware, is by no means universal. AI is making some of us a lot smarter, as individuals. But there’s a paradox here: on the whole it is making society a lot dumber. How do we make sense of this?

The answer has at least something to do with age. Those of us who are old enough to have learned to do research prior to the rise of the online search typically bring to our exchanges with LLMs a mature ability to scrutinize their claims, and, when in doubt, to verify these claims independently. When the exchange is shaped by such scrutiny, it offers, as I think I’ve illustrated with the example of studying an “obscure” language, a more fruitful, intense, and rapid learning experience than has ever been had in the entire previous history of humanity.

…It seems, however, that if you had not already oriented yourself in the world as “aspirationally omniscient” prior to the arrival of our new information tools — if, that is, you have no preexisting personal project of encyclopedism to which to strap your new booster rockets, then AI does not so much supercharge your own effort, as simply take off without you. You have to want to absorb, to internalize, to make yours, all of the flow of information between you and your AI study partner if you want it to transform you in any significant way, rather than simply to do your work in your place.

I fear that a near-equivalent way of saying the same thing is that you have to want to become one with the machine, if you wish to claim your human share of our new transhuman superintelligence.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to help find more of the music and writing I like. It’s like a more-refined Google search. I’ve used it to research questions which would have previously admitted of no known interlocutor. I grew up in a time where the only thing to do with questions like that was ask them of a parent or teacher, or maybe consult a reference book or a librarian. Otherwise, you could shrug and consign the answer to the “Here there be dragons” section of your mental map. For people like me, the internet and chatbots have been a godsend, allowing me to read and learn things that would have remained forever unknown had I been born a few decades earlier. Nietzsche knows what I’m talking about:

“Oh, my greed! There is no selflessness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs and eyes and hands – a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” – Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.

Of course, I’m sure that Oliver Bateman’s dystopian vision of the first human-AI marriage will become real sooner rather than later. And I’m sure that the web will continue to be awash in obvious AI-written articles passed off by humans too inept to make them sound unique. Technology didn’t create sad, broken humans, though, nor did it teach them how to cheat. Technology’s sin is that it confronts us with the results of our choices and reveals our priorities, and for a species as enmeshed in fantasy and self-deception as we are, that’s unforgivable.

Obiter Scripta, no. 133

By in books, obiter scripta

To lie in wait for one’s mind, pen raised, ready to spear the slightest thought as it surfaces.

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

Childhood visits to my grandparents usually meant a day at Limestone Springs to fish for rainbow trout. It’s a preserve, so it was about as close to fish jumping into the net as it gets. No sitting in a boat for hours on a lake with nothing to show for it. I’ve spent years ranging far across the internet, stalking skittish herds of thoughts for days if need be. But with intellectual climate change in the past decade or so, the habitat has become desiccated and barren, and the thoughts are sickly, inbred mutants unworthy of an arrow. Hence my idea to build myself a thought preserve and stock it with more short-form writing. I don’t care if it’s unsporting. Sometimes a fellow just wants to cast his line over to the bookshelf and reel in a few plump aphorisms.

Obiter Scripta, no. 132

By in books, obiter scripta

Being alive means recording. What’s called inspiration only consists of special moments in which human wax finds an appropriate needle.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

Much of my reading had started to feel weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. It was as if someone injected Ozepmic into my brain — I’d lose my appetite halfway through a book and only finish it with effort. But without the nutrition of reading, there’s no energy for writing. So, I’ve decided to seek out more short-form writing — aphorisms, maxims, epigrams, journals, and notebooks. As with poetry, so too with prose — I’ve always preferred brevity and concision; the quick, sharp insight as opposed to the logorrheic essay. I feel better already.

Amazing Space, How Sweet the Site That Saved a Hack Like Me

By in writing

Ed West:

While I wouldn’t advise you to enter the media, I would suggest that you might become a man or woman of letters, which is a different thing altogether. In fact, while print journalism has been dying a prolonged death for two decades, now joined in its agonies by television, we live in a golden age of letters.

Substack is the leading platform for the renaissance in the republic of letters, making it much easier for writers to earn a living from the western world’s dwindling number of functionally literate people. Its growth continues unabated, and with good reason.

Yeah, well, the gentrification has started:

Why, it seems like it was just the other day that journalists were fretting about how Substack was a vile den of neo-Nazi misinformation. Then they discovered there was gold in them thar hills, and now they’re colonizing the place. So it goes.

The moral of the story is the same as ever. If you want to make money and be somebody important, then sure, join Substack. If you want to write for the pure fun of it, if you want to be beneath notice, forgotten by the world, and left alone, if you want to be a man of lower-case letters, then keep a blog.

Every Single Moment of Life

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy

Noah Smith:

If the side effects of these drugs continue to be minimal and the weight loss they cause continues to be permanent, then we’ve found a technological solution to obesity.

For some people, this seems like cheating. People who spent years believing that weight loss was a personal mountain to climb are now a bit deflated to find that you can just take a helicopter to the summit. People who viewed weight loss as a test of their self-worth may now feel melancholy that someone else came and made it easy. Thin people who felt special for their thinness may feel a bit devalued and commoditized. And people who relished the chance to shame the fatties of the world for being weak and irresolute will simply have to find someone else to feel superior to.

This, I think, shows the limitations of viewing fat as a moral or self-worth issue. During my own weight loss, I found out that it was just a matter of cost — of time and attention. And since time immemorial, human beings have been dealing with costs by automating them away. We don’t view washing clothes as a test of our self-worth; we just stick them in the washing machine and hit a button.

The Lady of the House and I have a good-natured running argument about the banal necessities of life. Basically, I’m for them, she’s against them. Housecleaning, yardwork, even eating — all irritating distractions that prevent her from doing things she’d rather do. She jokes — mostly jokes — I hope she’s joking — that she’d really enjoy being a brain in a jar, free to focus on cerebral things. Doomsaying killjoy that I am, I point out that without sensory organs delivering information, “she” would have nothing to think about. She asks why I have to piss on her dreams like that, and there the argument rests until rolling back down the hill like Sisyphus’s boulder. Until next time.

Whenever I hear the cliché about “taking a helicopter to the summit,” I reach for an invisible throat to throttle. Brad Warner, a Zen Buddhist, has argued this point many times in a different context, with people who claim that psychedelic drugs are just as good as meditation:

The helicopter guy misses out on the amazing sights there are to see on the way up. He doesn’t know the thrill of mastering the mountain through his own efforts. He doesn’t know the hardships and dangers involved in making the climb. And he’ll never know the awesome wonder of descending the mountain back into familiar territory. All he’s done is given some money to a person who owns a helicopter. He probably couldn’t even find the mountain himself, let alone make it to the top. When there are no helicopters around, the poor guy is helplessly grounded.

…What I am working on in meditation involves every single moment of life. So-called “peak experiences” can be fun. But they no more define what life is about than so-called “mundane experiences.” In fact mundane experiences are actually more what life is about than the thrilling ones. When you start thinking only your most thrilling experiences are important, you have already lost the most precious thing in life, the ability to fully immerse yourself in every experience.

It would sound pretentious to say that working out is something like a spiritual discipline for me, and I hate the word “spiritual” anyway. Nonetheless, it’s only vaguely goal-oriented, in the sense that I like trying to get stronger. But I don’t go to competitions, and I don’t obsess over setting new personal records. Looking fit and having low body fat is nice, but incidental. Lifting is a way for me to get right with myself and the world, a controlled experiment in challenging myself to work hard, overcome obstacles, and not give in to complacency.

I don’t care about the size and shape of other people’s bodes. Physiology and biochemistry are complex. There are genuine reasons why some people can live “right” and still be fat. I’m just harmonizing with Warner here in saying that, if you do care about being in shape, it is not at all the same thing to take a shot of Ozempic as to commit to a disciplined workout habit (leaving aside the whole point of body composition being far more important than your weight). The point of a dance is not to end up standing on a certain spot on the floor. The point of a symphony is not to reach the final note. The point of training is not to see a particular number on the scale.

It should go without saying, I hope, that not everyone could or should make working out their “practice.” My only categorical imperative would be that everyone should have something that fills that role. The iron law of trade-offs applies. People have to choose priorities based on finite resources. It doesn’t matter to me if Smith, or anyone else, relies on GLP-1 shots to lose weight rather than spend hours in the gym every week. What I take issue with is his progressive faith in technology “solving” problems rather than just kicking them down the road. What kind of life is it where you’ve outsourced all the mundane experiences, all the dilemmas, all the actual living, to machines and algorithms, just so you can be a brain floating in a jar? To paraphrase Holmes scolding Watson, you succeed, but you do not achieve.

Lifters In the Mist

By in battling personal entropy, fresh hell

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela:

After losing big with men under 30 in the 2024 election, Democrats have spent $20 million on a program called “Speaking with American Men” (SAM) to help figure out which “spaces” they need to show up in to fare better with this demographic. A smart place to start would be the gym; the booming men’s fitness market is expected to more than double by 2029, growth driven by men under 25, who are joining gyms almost twice as fast as women. And as SAM co-director Ilyse Hogue and I wrote here last year, the right has done an excellent job parlaying young men’s healthy interest in exercise into an embrace of reactionary politics.

…Yet destabilizing moments like the one we are now living through reveal an enduring dynamic: Men are encouraged with particular urgency to get moving when their social status feels in flux. Generation after generation, boosters sell men the irresistible idea that at the gym, if nowhere else, the sweat of your brow is all that stands between you and success. It’s an understandable, even healthy impulse, and Democrats would do well to start rebuilding their political muscle quite literally, by seeking to identify with the guy at the gym.

I love that they have to commission a study to figure out how to mimic normal people, for all the good that will do. On the one hand, there is obviously a lot of hilarious potential here. I look forward to seeing videos of awkward libs acting like Jehovah’s Witnesses, interrupting people during their sets to preach the good word about puberty blockers and green energy initiatives. And the gym has natural antibodies against weaklings who are averse to hard work, so I’m not concerned. But on the other hand, I despair a little bit — what will it take for these jerkoffs to stop attempting to politicize everything? When will they understand that this isn’t merely a messaging problem that can be solved with a public relations blitz? We already know what you’re all about. We reject it entirely. Let us know when the entire character of your party is completely different, and until then, get fucked.