Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti-AI

On the mimetic machinations of the discourse.

I recently returned from a conference in the Vatican on A.I. where I was strapped to a table so that a giant bird could peck at my liver every day. To be fair, that’s how I feel at basically any conference. But this one was particularly painful—about a hundred of us were packed in a room without enough water, in U.N.-style stadium seating with name tags. Mine might have included the letters “Mr.” before my name, but I can’t remember. The people sitting on the ends of the rows were the only ones who had free access to get up. If you weren’t seated at the end, you were trapped on the inside and could only leave if everyone else who was seated in the direction you were attempting to exit from got up and moved first. That triggered a unique kind of spiritual claustrophobia for me. (“Hold up, what if I’m stuck here on the inside, and the panel becomes intolerable, and I have no way of leaving for a pretend bathroom break without asking everyone in my row for permission first?”). It gave m…