Every decision inflects an intention, and intentionality is one of the hard problems in determining if there is any such thing as AI, strong or weak. Can an artificial intelligence form an intention?
But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning. —Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia
But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no...
Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.
And, you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there’s no way back, no way to go but onward.
If one’s physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that’s the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new...
Good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.
Why don’t you like it when you can’t say why?
When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. T...
What can I say, friends? he cried. This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.
Well, Amelia said, basically my polar bears have taken over my airship.
We have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.
We are making a better way to live. This was the myth, they had all grown up with it.
Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.
To hope without hope, which would be wise, is impossible. —MARCEL PROUST, Les Plaisirs et les Jours
To conclude and temporarily halt this train of thought, how does any entity know what it is? Hypothesis: by the actions it performs. There is a kind of comfort in this hypothesis. It represents a solu...
Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our unde...
This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing,...
Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.
There remained a main melody, or a path through a maze—a maze that was like the delta of the Po. He seemed to look down on it as he sang it. A great number of channels were weaving down a slightly til...