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The Seven Virtues

Charity, Faith, and Hope.  Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.

Dante, The Divine Comedy

Who sees need and waits a plea, already half refuses.

 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

 

The Coming Wave

[T]he entirety of the human world depends on either living systems or our intelligence. And yet both are now in an unprecedented moment of exponential innovation and upheaval, an unparalleled augmentation that will leave little unchanged. Starting to crash around us is a new wave of technology. This wave is unleashing the power to engineer these two universal foundations: a wave of nothing less than intelligence and life... defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. This wave creates an immense challenge that will define the twenty-first century: our future both depends on these technologies and is imperiled by them. From where we stand today, it appears that containing this wave — that is, controlling, curbing, or even stopping it is not possible.... Even as we worry about their risks, we need the incredible benefits of the technologies of the coming wave more than ever before. This is the core dilemma.

Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave

The nations were not sane—rational, composed, aware, but not sane. In each nation, the arsenal included potent distrust and even hatred. 

Greg Bear, Eons

If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be? Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position, for instance by turning off the power at strategic moments, we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled. … This new danger … if it comes at all … is remote but not astronomically remote, and is certainly something which can give us anxiety. It is customary, in a talk or article on this subject, to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some particularly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. It might for instance be said that no machine could write good English, or that it could not be influenced by sex-appeal or smoke a pipe. I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set.

Alan Turing, quoted by Sebastian Sunday Grève in AI’s first philosopher:  https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-remember-alan-turing-as-a-philosopher

From a wonderful and beautiful book

Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.... The truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

 

Origins of our American culture

American culture in this early period [the 17th and early 18th Centuries] becomes most fully comprehensible when seen as the exotic far western periphery, a marchland, of the metropolitan European culture system.

This whole world ... was a borderland, a part of the expanding periphery of Britain's core culture; and its inner quality derived from that fact. Like the Welsh borderland two hundred years earlier, like the Scottish middle marches a century earlier, like Ireland and the Caribbean islands in the colonists' own time, and like Australia later, the mainland North American colonies formed a typically disordered border country in which ... "violence [was] a way of life." Concentrating, as American historians have done, on the origins of a later American civilization, and hence viewing the colonial world as a frontier -- that is, as an advance, as a forward and outward-looking, future-anticipating progress toward what we know eventuated, instead of as a periphery, a ragged outer margin of a central world, a regressive, backward-looking diminishment of metropolitan accomplishment --looking at the colonies in this anachronistic way, one tends to minimize the primitiveness and violence, the bizarre, quite literally outlandish quality of life in this far-distant outback of late seventeenth-century Britain.

Partly this wildness, extravagance, and disorder were simply the products of the inescapable difficulties of maintaining a high European civilization in an undeveloped environment. Partly, too, they were products of the hostility that developed between the Europeans and the native peoples. But in large part, too, they were products of the common European, and indeed British, conception of America as an uncivil place on the distant margins of civilization -- a place where the ordinary restraints of civility could be abandoned in pell-mell exploitation, a remote place where recognized enemies and pariahs of society -- heretics, criminals, paupers--could safely be deposited, their contamination sealed off by three thousand miles of ocean, and where putatively inferior specimens of humanity, blacks and Indians, could be reduced to subhuman statuses, worked like animals, and denied the most elemental benefits of law and religion, those fragile integuments which even in England could barely contain the savagery of life.... This mingling of primitivism and civilization, however transitory stage by stage, was an essential part of early American culture, and we must struggle to comprehend it.

What did it mean to Jefferson, slave owner and philosophe, that he grew up in this far western borderland world of Britain, looking out from Queen Anne rooms of spare elegance onto a wild, uncultivated land? We can only grope to understand.

Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America

The Singularity

The Grand Singularity and A.I. autonomy
Building the superman
Minus the man

Yes, Minus the Man (from The Quest)

If studying history mainly makes you feel happy and proud, you probably aren’t really studying history.

Quoted without attribution by Fara Dabhoiwala in the New York Review (July 1, 2021)

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.

Edward Gibbon

Humans were one lucky tribe of apes with just enough intelligence and creativity to build a badly functioning civilization.  And being only barely competent, there was no reason to believe that humanity's greatest achievements amounted to anything more than the average anthill lost on the infinitely intriguing savanna.

Robert Reed, "Integral Nothings" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February, 2021)

Life in the COVID-19 Age

The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability....The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. 

Marilynne Robinson, What Kind of Country Do We Want? (NYRB)

Though all that has arrived, by report, of our knowledge of times past should be true, and known by some one person, it would be less than nothing in comparison of what is unknown. And of this same image of the world, which glides away whilst we live upon it, how wretched and limited is the knowledge of the most curious; not only of particular events, which fortune often renders exemplary and of great concern, but of the state of great governments and nations, a hundred more escape us than ever come to our knowledge.

Montaigne

Authority is not given in favor of the magistrate, but of the people.

Montaigne

The justice which in itself is natural and universal is otherwise and more nobly ordered than that other justice which is special, national, and constrained to the ends of government.

Montaigne

I do not disapprove the use we make of things the earth produces, nor doubt, in the least, of the power and fertility of Nature, and of its application to our necessities: I very well see that pikes and swallows live by her laws; but I mistrust the inventions of our mind, our knowledge and art, to countenance which, we have abandoned Nature and her rules, and wherein we keep no bounds nor moderation. 

Montaigne

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving.

Jia Tolentino, as quoted in the New York Review by Jonathan Lethem

Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

While sitting at the fireside in the winter, at ease on soft couches, well fed, sipping tasty wine and nibbling tidbits, it is then that a host may duly inquire of his guest:  Who are you among men, and whence do you come?

Xenophanes, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)