Techno-capitalism
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AI and the Current Zeitgeist
Apologies if I'm throwing more AI stuff at you than you care to read, but things in the world of AI are happening fast, and the argument I've been making here for the last couple of years is that what's happening there is more important to understand and to resist than whatever is happening in
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Mountainhead: Some Quick Thoughts after Watching It
I'm glad it’s a movie rather than a full, multi-season series. I gave up on Succession half way through the first season, and I would have given up on this, too, if I had to watch much more of it. That doesn't mean it fails–the writing is clever, and the humor burns–but that there's just
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Christopher Lasch on Late Capitalism
Throughout the twentieth century liberalism has been pulled in two directions at once: toward the market and (notwithstanding its initial misgivings about government) toward the state. On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle—the cardinal principle of liberalism—that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and
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‘Mountainhead’, Late Capitalism, and the Catholic Moment
By his own admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of some of the founders he’s satirizing. Perhaps because he’s written from their perspective, he’s empathetic enough that he sees an impulse to help buried deep among the egos and the paternalism. “It’s like how the politician always thinks they’ve got the answer,” he said.
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Singularity in 2027?
Two pieces have appeared in the NY Times in the past couple of days that relate to the argument I was making in the Cathedral Lectures. The first is a Ross Douthat interview yesterday with Daniel Kokotajlo entitled "An Interview with the Herald of the Apocalypse", and the second today by Cade Metz entitled "Why
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David Brooks and the Contradictions of Capitalism
Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Especially after World War II and then into the 1960s, we saw the privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom.
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AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 2: Alienation, Boredom, and Technology
So last week we talked about if—and it’s a big IF—AGI becomes something real, we will be looking at ourselves as if in a mirror and that these AGI machine/persons will be looking back at us. What will they see? The best of us, or the worst? So following John Vervaeke, I explored the implications
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AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 1: What Is Human Flourishing?
[This is a transcription of the talk I gave at St. James Cathedral on 2/8/24. I’ll be posting the Lectures 2 and 3 in the next two weeks.] Before we dig into the topic tonight, I’d like to frame it by identifying two critical issues. Both have a lot to do with our current social
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The Argument I’m Making: Resisting the Techno-Capitalist Matrix
I just gave a series of three talks at St. James Cathedral in Seattle entitled AGI, Hope, and the Human Future. Here is a succinct summary of the argument that I made: One. Humans, especially with the prospect of developments in AI that may lead to AGI, are developing technologies that are likely to create
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AI and How Washington Works
Effective Altruism (EA) gets some attention from Politico for being a "hot new philosophy" funded by deep pockets: EAs are particularly fixated on the possibility that future AI systems could combine with gene synthesis tools and other technologies to create bioweapons that kill billions of people — a phenomenon that’s given more traditional AI and