By the Bishop
1 Song
El Himno de Andalucía (performed*) By Rocío Jurado
1 Quote
These early days of AI are already absurd. Humans, walking and talking bags of water and trace chemicals that we are, have managed to convince well-organized sand to pretend to think like us. We don’t know what will happen next, and what dangers and opportunities the next generations of AI will bring. But we do need to realize that trying to convince ourselves that AI is normal software will not protect us from disruption. Instead, it may make it harder for us to see what is coming.
Ethan Mollick
1 Idea
In the same piece from which the quote is taken, Ethan Mollick reiterates the vital point that (generative) AI is still a relatively new tool(?) and we should be experimenting with it and learning how to use as much and as soon as possible.
Don’t get left behind.
h/t Ethan Mollick
1 Poem
Days
What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields.Philip Larkin
1 Picture
A Sunny Day
1 Essay
In Praise of Shadows: Ancient Japanese Aesthetics and Why Every Technology Is a Technology of Thought
Although Tanizaki is writing at a time when a new wave of polymers was sweeping the industrialized West, he paints a subtler and more important contrast than that between the Western cult of synthetics and the Japanese preference for organic materials. This elegant osmosis of art and shadow, he argues, is to be found not only in what materials are used, but in how they are being used:
Wood finished in glistening black lacquer is the very best; but even unfinished wood, as it darkens and the grain grows more subtle with the years, acquires an inexplicable power to calm and sooth.
This temporal continuity of beauty, a counterpoint to the West’s neophilia, is central to Japanese aesthetics. Rather than fetishizing the new and shiny, the Japanese sensibility embraces the living legacy embedded in objects that have been used and loved for generations, seeing the process of aging as something that amplifies rather than muting the material’s inherent splendor. Luster becomes not an attractive quality but a symbol of shallowness, a vacant lack of history:
We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice… We begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky patina. Almost every householder has had to scold an insensitive maid who has polished away the tarnish so patiently waited for.
[…]
We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity.
Tanizaki speaks affectionately of “the glow of grime,” which “comes of being touched over and over” — a record of the tactile love an object has acquired through being caressed by human hands again and again.
But nowhere does Tanizaki’s ode to shadows flow more melodically than in his writing about Japanese lacquerware:
Maria PopovaDarkness is an indispensable element of the beauty of lacquerware… [Traditional lacquerware] was finished in black, brown, or red, colors built up of countless layers of darkness, the inevitable product of the darkness in which life was lived.
This is essentially a Zuckerberg-Newport dichotomy rather than East Vs West. Don’t fear technology, leverage it but never lose sight and why you are using it. Furthermore make sure it is you that is using (controlling(?)) the technology not the reverse.
This essay also reminded me of:
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold — built on the idea that in embracing flaws and imperfections, you can create an even stronger, more beautiful piece of art.
There is beauty in use and wear and tear, rather than buying the best brand new thing. To misuse a term it is creative destruction but also rebirth. It is as if they are repairing their tools with the blood of a Phoenix and giving them a second life or more appropriately a new life. It is now a new thing. See the Ship of Theseus.
N.B. Harry Potter has taught us that Unicorn blood is silver, so by inference Phoenix blood is gold.
1 Question
How do we deal with grief?
Massimo Pigliucci