I have been trying to get rid of my smartphone habit for some time. Here's the latest attempt.
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I was speaking to someone about the kind of issues we often have with our parents and chanced upon an expression of the problem that I had not used earlier.
We have this running theme that AI is going to help us fix the world. That AI is going to solve problems like climate change or bring the cure to cancer and things like that.
To you and I, the world makes sense. Gods are good, demons are bad, and people are helpless before either. Bodhi knows better. (The Bodhi Mysteries is a fantasy series)
The problem with tech bros looking to decide the fate of all humans is that they lack the multiple perspectives that are necessary to gain a holistic understanding of the human world. I am not claiming to have access to all those perspectives either, but then again, I am not looking to tell the tech bro how he should live his professional life.
I was looking to write something and felt stuck, so I asked ChatGPT to pretend to be an alien and ask me questions. Basically, I used it as a source of writing prompts. Questions it asked me are in italics. My answers are in regular type.
We keep wondering why aliens have not made contact with us. And we keep wondering why we have not been able to find intelligent life in the universe. But do we even know what we are looking for?
Some time ago, on an episode of Game of Thrones, Sam and Gilly were walking back to the wall from the far North. To pass the time, Sam the nerd starts telling Gilly all that he knows about the wall and the history of the night's watch. He knows dates, names, and events of key importance. This amazes Gilly. To her, the fact that Sam can know all these things by simply looking at small squiggly lines on paper, is nothing short of magic. As someone who writes to convey ideas and is rather acutely aware that every word he writes will outlive him by centuries, I often find myself struck by this very same sense of amazement. Writing is a powerful kind of magic that transcends the limits of a human lifespan.
I begin by writing, like any human writer, in a notebook with a pen. Please note that this was only made possible with the help of technology. My pen, the paper I write on, and even language, are all technologies.
I cannot remember when or from whom I heard this, but it was a response by an older writer to a younger writer. It went like this: āDo you want to be a writer? Or do you want to write?ā
I think we have made too much out of āauthenticityā. In fact, we may have made more out of it than we should have. We are told to be authentic on social media, but ask yourself, do you really want to see peopleās authentic selves? I know I donāt. I want to see good peopleās authentic self. I donāt want to see the authentic selves of fascists and casteists and homophobes and transphobes. They can stay in the closet till they fucking die.
I was speaking to a chatbot the other day (because humans are stupid) and it told me (in response to a very directed prompt) that perhaps the way forward was for humans to give up trying to be better than AI at the things that they have so far thought of as being uniquely human achievements. Perhaps a Buddhism-flavoured religion of the future will be all about freeing oneself from this attachment to credit and accomplishment.
Our evolutionary history, stretching back as it does millions of years, has not been fair to us, and why should it be, when fairness is our own fragile invention? Nevertheless, since, I am human, I hereby give myself permission to complain about it.
I entered the URL of my latest live stream into Google's NotebookLM and got this 16-minute "podcast" created by generative AI. It freaks me out.
I wasn't always an atheist. And when I wasn't, I didn't like Richard Dawkins much (for obvious reasons). But even after I started identifying as an atheist, I didn't warm up to him much.
Not a week goes by without someone telling atheists that their religion "allows" atheism and that it "allows" debate and discussion or that it allows women to speak and go to work.
The pattern that seems to emerge when one looks at all the ways in which middle-class India engages with civic issues is that it is all little more than entertainment. And when the things they are obsessed with become something more than entertainment, they start to get queasy and often even hostile.
Popular fantasy has for long had a group of critics who complain about its 'race problem'. Simply put, in most novels, the heroes, wizards, queens and witches are almost always White. Only yesterday, I read a rather angry piece by David Dennis Jr on the new Ridley Scott movie Exodus. Apparently...
I got a question about the claims by certain "Indologists" about advanced modern technology in ancient India and gave a short answer. Below is the video clip of me doing it. And after it, a transcript of the audio. Enjoy!
I was talking to a coder about how there are promises in the air about how "anyone" can be a writer now. A few years ago, I remember similar promises about how "anyone" could create an app "with the click of a button". And of course, there were the promises from the early web about how "anyone" could start a business or a publication. Plenty of people did, but "anyone"?
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