Thoughts renew, life shifts

Philip Davis, “William James” (OUP 2022):

WJS Spg/Summer '26 newsletter sneak peek: prez's message

My Vanderbilt mentor John Lachs once said four great things about being a professor are May, June, July, and August... (continues)

More Everything Forever

  Does anything more threaten to derange our understanding of human existence, its meaning and possibilities, than AI and "Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity"? Or to disrupt our proper relation to the rest of nature? This might just be a suitable title for both Existentialism and Environmental Ethics.

Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, science writer Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.

More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are. g'r

“If we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There is no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can't heal the world. We have to do that ourselves.”

quotes

Portrait of a virtuous virtuoso

What a wonderful tribute to retiring MTSU philosophy colleague (and virtuosic musician) Ron Bombardi from artist Steve Magada-Ward. Inspirations both.

Vital conditions

“Psychology in James was about amassing the vital conditions for living well…” Philip Davis, William James (in the My Reading series, Oxford University Press, 2022) https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mlvbfmtrns2o

At home in the stacks

Pedaled into Vanderbilt library yesterday, dusted off my ancient alumni ID and checked out a book from the WJ section up on level 5. First time I’ve set foot there in years. You CAN go home again.

Mom’s day out

Another fine Mother’s Day at Sonny’s in Germantown.

“a choice to believe”

Witting or not, Scott Borchetta gave a very Jamesian commencement address at MTSU on Saturday. His independent recording company, he says, made “a choice to believe [it could succeed] before there was proof.”

https://youtu.be/6lXYU9lW7-A?si=IitUV03h7dZAeDae

It was actually a more memorable address than the one I attended at Vandy on Friday, by the Chancellor. But Arthur Brooks's Thursday Graduates Day speech was the more provocative. 

Inscription on the Obama Center Museum

Bought our tickets, for September. Pleased to see they’re going fast. Back to the future. “Yes we can!”

  

Singularly “kooky”

Not the first kooky religion heralding the end of times as we’ve known them, but maybe the most bankrolled. Not that I don't love the Star Trek fantasy vision of an unbounded future, but Jeff and Elon really don't seem like the guys who'll take us there. (I'm glad Captain Kirk got his ride on Blue Origin, though.)

 “The desire for growth is a general feature of much of capitalism. But the idea of a big future filled with virtually unlimited growth, a future of the specific sort longtermism proffers, has held a great deal of currency in Silicon Valley for decades. 36 The most salient example of this is the concept of a technological singularity, usually referred to as the Singularity.  

Believers in the Singularity claim that technological progress has been accelerating and will continue to do so, leading to a singular point where so much change happens so rapidly that the fundamental nature of daily human life will transform beyond all imagination or comprehension. Superintelligent AI and human-machine hybrids will usher in a utopia, end scarcity, and make biomedical discoveries that will allow us to live forever or nearly so. Bounded only by the laws of physics, there will be no practical limit to what a post-Singularity civilization can achieve. According to Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent exponent of the Singularity, the current rate of technological change strongly suggests that the Singularity is coming very soon indeed—no later than twenty years from now, in 2045. “Ultimately, it will affect everything,” he claims. “We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.” 37 

 There’s little scientific basis for the idea of a Singularity and all the attendant miracles it will supposedly perform. Nonetheless, the idea is astonishingly common in Silicon Valley and across the entire tech industry. Kurzweil isn’t some kind of marginal figure. He is a director of engineering at Google, and his books on the Singularity have been bestsellers. 

“The Singularity is a new religion—and a particularly kooky one at that,” said computer scientist and artist Jaron Lanier. “The Singularity is the coming of the Messiah, heaven on Earth, the Armageddon, the end of times. And fanatics always think that the end of time comes in their own lifetime.”” 

      — More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Summer rerun season is already here, evidently. https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Rebecca Solnit, grateful meliorist

A more-than-perfunctory acknowledgments section: 

 “I’m grateful to everyone who refused to surrender in advance. To those who persevered when the future seemed dark, who saw the night as the time in which we dream and grow, who became torches or North Stars when we needed illumination or direction. To all the visionary souls and heroes who made the changes this book tries to describe. To all those making the shifts toward a better world now, the ones just coming into focus or that we’ll see clearly in ten or fifty or a hundred years, the ones that make the news and the ones that happen in secret and touch one life or protect one place. To everyone who keeps looking, hoping, working. To those who know that while we can’t save everything, everything we can save matters.” — The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit 

The long view

That’s what we need to take, if we think positive change can come again. 

“If knowledge is power, memory and perspective are among its most important aspects. Only in the long view can you see the patterns emerging, the way the present builds on the past, the way past surprises guarantee more surprises are coming, the ingredients of change over years, decades, centuries. If you don’t see time on the scale of change, you don’t see change; if you don’t remember how things used to be, you don’t know they’re different than they were and how that unfolded. While some people are too young to remember the past firsthand (and some know it other ways), I’m often struck by my peers who’ve lived through dizzying change and somehow adjusted without noticing it. 

I remember how the economic policies of Ronald Reagan created mass homelessness, but if you forget that, you can imagine homelessness is inevitable or the result of personal failings or local conditions, not primarily a creation of the radical rearrangement of the national economy in pursuit of a return to the old inequality (and similar cuts to social services in other countries produced similar forms of desperation and displacement). From the 1930s through the 1970s, from the New Deal to the War on Poverty, the US government created more social safety nets and more economic equality, lifting up the poor and taxing the rich. Beginning in the 1980s, these achievements were dismantled, and new policies created a more unequal, insecure society. To remember that this was created by specific decisions is to remember that it can be changed again; to remember that something once existed—like California’s tuition-free public universities—is to remember that it can exist again.” 

— The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit