How generative AI is trying to rip the screaming soul out of the Enlightenment

This seems like a good time for people to learn about what modern Luddism is. No, it is not simply a group of people destroying the machines that replace them. It is about people as a whole refusing to be swept up in the sole narrative by thinking critically as to what the new technology gives or takes away and to whom or what.

People who are creative will always find ways to be creative.

Yesterday it was by painting, today it’s by using generative AI to create images, sounds and video, tomorrow it’ll be by using who-knows-what to create who-knows-what-else.

The spirit of the enlightenment isn’t in the type of art, it’s in the artistic expression, and that will always find an outpour. It’s like saying water can’t flow unless it flows in rivers.

> The offices were explicitly designed to be a play-pen for geeky adults, but this is the company whose various products lie behind vast political disorientation, teenage cyber-bullying, body-shaming, and far-right radicalization with real-world violent effects for actual communities. I found myself weirdly longing for the steel-and-glass skyscrapers of high finance. At least the finance sector doesn’t pretend to be saving the world, and doesn’t cloak itself in a childish image of wacky creativity. Financiers have a certain grim authenticity about their narrow interests.

Choice quote. Totally on point.-

Genuinely confused by the relaxed funny Facebook tone of the article

AI is destroying capitalistic artistry. The concept of people who do nothing but art is itself a product of capitalism. Before capitalism, we all worked, and we all sang, and we all drew pictures, and we all told stories. It is only capitalism that enabled the artistic expressions of a tiny fraction of the population to drown out that of the rest of us. Well, too bad, we're taking creativity back. Your voice, your words, your pictures don't get to be ten thousand times louder than the average person's anymore and you can't stand it. Generative AI isn't ripping the soul out of the enlightenment, it's ripping the monopoly on cultural influence out of the hands of the tiny fraction of people who've completely dominated it for two hundred years.

Tech bad, science bad, industrial revolution bad, western civilization bad. Haven't we had enough of these ramblings already?

The setup of this article promised insightful consideration of the history and progress of intelligence since the Enlightenment, but after a couple paragraphs of un-inquisitive ranting about the philosophy of Descartes with a couple of nods to the author's formative-experience regards for a movie and a game, the essay devolves into a simple warning to not trust any prescription from the ambassadors of 21st social-tech culture, because they are soulless and tend institutions of unremitting greed.

Thanks and duly noted.

But we need only observe the Bay Area, the heartland of social tech, which is a shining beacon on a hill for a grotesquely dysfunctional and stratified high-tech culture that utterly fails— luckily— to deliver on the ambassadors' endless promises of a high-tech utopia.

Regarding the invocation of Descartes, the author oversimplifies and misunderstands the significance of Descartes philosophical legacy. The soul (mind) was what was to be demonstrated: "Though I may doubt everything else, I know that I am." To obviate this certainty destroys any possibility of consideration. QED.

Descartes "body" was an intellectual remainder, being merely a label for the corporeal self based on mechanical principles.

In Descartes' time, machine meant objects interacting by direct contact. Newton showed beyond doubt that the world is not "mechanical" and with his theory of gravity any coherent philosophical notion of "body" was lost. But Descartes' "mind" was left intact. This has never since been contradicted. The mechanical philosophy branched into numerous theories that avoid any attempt to formulate an intelligible world (to quote Chomsky) and quietly make due with intelligible theories about the world.

That any idea of "mind-body" dualism persists today is an artifact of trivial common sense, which is notoriously incapable of apprehending the mysteries of the world with any scientific depth or subtlety.

Final thought: the author resorts to ranting in post-feminist terms about the historical predisposition of European males to their collective milieu betrays the authors' lack of interest in the history of science, and in turn lack of interest in aspects of the Enlightenment that gave rise to today's ambassadors.

Interest in history of science can inform and catalyze ways of thinking about a progressive 21st century commons. The Enlightenment gave rise to classical liberalism: The recognition of the apparently divine human spark of creativity, which is a total mystery, but self-evident since Descartes. The capacity of free thought and action including the ability to freely express one's thoughts. A spark unique to the human species, and an endowment which should be nurtured by any decent society.

The author's critique thus comes down to the simple observation that Zuckerberg and Andreessen, and the corporate finance institutions they serve, have no decent regard for the human experience.

Well tell us something we don't know!

Unfortunately for the commons, these cats insulate themselves from curiosity rather than encourage it.

Many those Enlightenment white dudes were a special breed of cat?

Hard to take seriously anything in an article that says things like

> If I was to rewrite the Wikipedia summary of the Enlightenment, my cynical side might just edit it to: An Age in which European men developed a high opinion of themselves as transcendent rational beings steering the chaos of irrational nature, women and the body.

And

> So, when Enlightenment thinkers referred to multi-gendered humans as Man, they were not talking about actual humans, but rather about their one-sided ideal of a rational problem-fixer. It is Man at the helm of the juggernaut of industrial progress, with its militaristic states and megacorporations.

In some ways, left wing ideology is the radical rejection of reason.

Reason, being the ultimate tool of survival, becomes the dominant value of any social hierarchy. The left-wing instinct is to give voice to the unformed chaos, so that it may receive the attention it requires to realize its potential.

Thus, that which is rejected by the dominant values of society is seen as the domain of chaos, that requires tending to in order for its potential to come forth.

For that reason, anti-rationalism comes to be seen as the highest value for the left-wing instinct. In the long run, the destabilizing and decentralizing effect of this instinct may spur innovation and counter-act ossification.

This article is a prime example of that left-wing instinct manifested, as it takes as a priori that the enlightenment, capitalism and technology are harmful, because the forces of reason deem them to be beneficial.