I am mildly trypophobic — that is, I am revolted by certain images of symmetric profusion: seed pods, virus cells under a microscope, voids appearing as positivities, that sort of thing — my mind balks at dredging up examples. I felt the fear even before I had to look up how to spell the word
Isn't this just another iteration of Walker Percy's "Loss of the Creature?"
I've never been interested in taking photos and generally don't in order to avoid that diminishment in the same way that I avoid being a tourist. If I take photos, it's rarely of people. Pre- and post-digital photography, I just want to document or find a new way to see and represent a special landscape. So the technology has always been a way to slow down and see things more clearly or just differently. Just as you describe the birdwatchers. I'd never want to mistake their trophies with an AI-generated image, and I'm not worried about that happening because the real thing comes with that experience and story attached. If National Geographic tries to fake us out, we'd reject it — and I suppose that would signal the end of anything new to see. It will all be online, grist for a collective AI dream.
If there is any resistance or defiance at work, it's the refusal to be a tourist/pornographer always looking to consume and extract attention-grabbing novelty from a fully documented and exhausted planet.
Understanding the essence of technology in our modern age is to understand that technology is an ordering and calculating seeking of efficiency, for its own sake. Of course this is driven by capital. This idea has infused itself so intensely in society that every discussion of technological potential is wrapped around the idea of replacing something old and less useful or efficient with something more superior. Every new technology is providing an opening for our modern way of living our lives by giving us more mastery over something that we have previously had to overcome. We may not have known we’d need to overcome it, but technological thinking has brought forth our desire to do so by providing the solution.
This is something much more devastating to our nature as humans than the technology itself. This way of being human has become wired into us so deeply that we strive to order things efficiently, so much so that we even do it to ourselves. We keep ourselves as resources to tap in to when we need to overcome problems to solve, we entrepreneurialize ourselves, with even more options to do so in our new age of AI.
So many of the articles responding to AI are caught in this dilemma of efficiency and flexibility. It’s going to change our lives! For the better, for the worst! A new way to lose ourselves.
I did not know that I needed more efficiency in experiencing “reality.” That we needed to find a more efficient way to impress each other. I like the example of the bird watchers because it’s such a contrast to losing oneself in efficiency because it’s all about finding oneself in the world, in nature. Face to face with a way of being that brings fulfillment. It’s a testament that we can choose our way of being, we do not need to be in such a state where reordering ourselves is the paramount task. As soon as we recognize this and let the world gather us more than we need to master it, the more we can be in touch with ourselves.
Isn't this just another iteration of Walker Percy's "Loss of the Creature?"
I've never been interested in taking photos and generally don't in order to avoid that diminishment in the same way that I avoid being a tourist. If I take photos, it's rarely of people. Pre- and post-digital photography, I just want to document or find a new way to see and represent a special landscape. So the technology has always been a way to slow down and see things more clearly or just differently. Just as you describe the birdwatchers. I'd never want to mistake their trophies with an AI-generated image, and I'm not worried about that happening because the real thing comes with that experience and story attached. If National Geographic tries to fake us out, we'd reject it — and I suppose that would signal the end of anything new to see. It will all be online, grist for a collective AI dream.
If there is any resistance or defiance at work, it's the refusal to be a tourist/pornographer always looking to consume and extract attention-grabbing novelty from a fully documented and exhausted planet.
Understanding the essence of technology in our modern age is to understand that technology is an ordering and calculating seeking of efficiency, for its own sake. Of course this is driven by capital. This idea has infused itself so intensely in society that every discussion of technological potential is wrapped around the idea of replacing something old and less useful or efficient with something more superior. Every new technology is providing an opening for our modern way of living our lives by giving us more mastery over something that we have previously had to overcome. We may not have known we’d need to overcome it, but technological thinking has brought forth our desire to do so by providing the solution.
This is something much more devastating to our nature as humans than the technology itself. This way of being human has become wired into us so deeply that we strive to order things efficiently, so much so that we even do it to ourselves. We keep ourselves as resources to tap in to when we need to overcome problems to solve, we entrepreneurialize ourselves, with even more options to do so in our new age of AI.
So many of the articles responding to AI are caught in this dilemma of efficiency and flexibility. It’s going to change our lives! For the better, for the worst! A new way to lose ourselves.
I did not know that I needed more efficiency in experiencing “reality.” That we needed to find a more efficient way to impress each other. I like the example of the bird watchers because it’s such a contrast to losing oneself in efficiency because it’s all about finding oneself in the world, in nature. Face to face with a way of being that brings fulfillment. It’s a testament that we can choose our way of being, we do not need to be in such a state where reordering ourselves is the paramount task. As soon as we recognize this and let the world gather us more than we need to master it, the more we can be in touch with ourselves.