re: AI
Corey Robin post:
In the New York Review of Books, Dan Chiasson has an excellent piece on capitalism and AI, and how what it seeks to rob us of is time, particularly those long impasses where we’re struggling to find words, on the assumption that it can just do it for you, and do it for you better, thereby saving you time, when in fact, saving time is exactly what you don’t need or want, because struggling to figure out what you think and feel and want has so much to do with what *you* ultimately think and feel and want, and why these are your feelings and thoughts and wants, not just for the moment but into the future, as opposed to someone else’s. AI is like having someone else just live your life, super fast, because that would be far more efficient. Along the way, Chiasson offers some pertinent passages from T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Lowell.
From East Coker:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious.
From Robert Lowell:
Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf,
cling to the very end, revolve in air,
feeling for something to reach to something?
Do
you still hang your words in air, ten years
unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase—
unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?
From Dickinson:
To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it—
Block it up
With Other—and ‘twill yawn the more—
You cannot solder an Abyss
With Air.
