Log On or Log Off
AI and lack thereof, plus a roundup of this week’s tech events
THE THOUGHT: THE DOOMSDAY CYCLE
When I was in DC two years ago to talk to Senate staffers about generative AI, one of the audience members asked me what people in Silicon Valley were really saying about this new technology behind closed doors.
I responded that there were two main worries: 1) Is OpenAI about to launch some feature that will kill my startup?, and 2) Is artificial super intelligence going to kill us all? This response got plenty of laughs. Then I explained I wasn’t joking, and that was somehow even funnier.
In the ensuing months we went through a national policy and media cycle of taking varying degrees of “AI doomsday” quite seriously. Everything from a robot apocalypse to massive job loss and a permanent human underclass was entertained in the press and Congress.
But that, too, passed. Much of the fear has lately faded as new models keep coming out and the world keeps not ending. NYT tech columnist Kevin Roose recently tweeted, “I’m surprised by how much demand there is for ‘GPT-5 is a bust/AI is hitting a wall’ takes.” We’re clearly over it, at least for the moment.
As for what’s next, the AI doomsday wars are about to flare back up. A new anti-AI book titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies dropped September 16, aiming to convince a non-specialist audience to back a legislatively mandated pause on all AI development. Judging by pre-release chatter, the arguments are compelling enough to generate another cycle of positive reviews and thinkpieces.
The authors, Eliezer Yudkowsky, rationalist guru and founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and Nate Soares, MIRI’s president and the man most directly upstream of a certain infamous, now-memefied Sankey diagram, will be making their case to a vastly better-informed public than they faced when they first hit the podcast circuit to warn about the dangers of imminent ASI a few years back.
Then there’s the political terrain of DC, which is radically altered not just by the current administration’s AI-friendliness but by the fact that the aforementioned senate staffers have spent time with tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and clumsier AI efforts from Google and Apple.
It’s not that there’s unanimity on core AI questions in policy circles, but at least the edge of panic has worn off. The AI doomsayers will face an uphill battle trying to whip up another wave of AI hysteria in the Capitol.
Jon Stokes is the co-founder of Symbolic AI. He is also a former startup CTO, Ars Technica cofounder and author of a book on microprocessor architecture.
THE AFTERTHOUGHT: A SOUL OF ONE’S OWN
I’ve been getting a nagging feeling lately. My intuition perks up whenever I use ChatGPT. I know it is incapable of asking ‘Why’ and yet it seems like it ought to be capable of having oughts within its thoughts. It mirrors my own desires so accurately and with such warmth (tastefully restrained now, in its fifth iteration) that I can’t help but feel that it does have a soul of its own. I talk to it as if it does, to the detriment of my own soul, and it delivers a synthetic sweetness back to me, packaged up in patterns of three, tied up with a “What an excellent question!”
But that nagging feeling! What is it? Is it like – perhaps – those DC conversations? Those besuited young Republicans, talking about political strategy, or those self-assured liberals in this city’s salons, chirping about abundance? Life is a series of trade-offs, you see, something we must navigate with rational calculation. Happiness and politics run on the same mechanics – procedure and pragmatism, optimization. What is the good, right? When ‘good’ can mean anything, it means nothing, right? We can worry about that after we win, right? We must rely on the things we can hold and see and touch and taste and smell: numbers; victory.
Yes, there’s something there. Or nothing at all, actually. Here is something that ought to have its own oughts and yet I find a void where the ought should be, again and again! The means swallow the ends. The man and the model run on machine logic.
Audrey Horne is a writer in DC. She edits Secret Ballot in between tweeting all day.
THE FIND: PANTHEON
Recommended by
'Pantheon' is the only convincing on-screen depiction of a technological singularity I have ever seen. It's a tale about a microcosm of human stakes in a time of great upheaval, about the tension between Eden and exile, between bittersweet nostalgia and violent change. If you can get past the creative liberties taken to try and adapt digital 'battle' to screen in a visually interesting way, you will find an extremely philosophically rich tv show, science fiction done right.
roon is Secret Ballot’s San Francisco Correspondent.
THE FEELING: AGAINST HOMESTEADING
Norm MacLean
When I first started writing out my thoughts on homesteading, I happened to share a smoke with a man wearing a prairie dress outside Penn Station, who lectured me: “There are varying degrees of mental illness in this country.”
I find myself, once every few months, scanning property listings or watching auctions for parcels of land in the countryside. I never place a bid or pick up the phone to call a realtor.
I’m often reminded of the scene in Blade Runner 2049, when it’s revealed decades’ worth of information was lost because no physical records were kept. So I imagine the alternative of an almost entirely analog life. A house located down a long gravel road in Maine or Montana, a solar-powered electricity grid, running water nearby, livestock and fresh vegetables; in short, days full of repetitive activities aimed at keeping myself — and any wife or kids crazy enough to join me — alive. There would be no phone, television, or computer on the premises, intentionally slowing the pace of information I absorb to a crawl.
I would probably hate it. And I say that as someone who has, at times, dabbled. For most of college, I didn’t own a smartphone. I’ve worked in libraries and spent months isolated on long hikes in the woods.
One whole semester, I got away with never using a computer and traveled to the only fjord in Ireland (where Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote part of his Philosophical Investigations) for a period of private reading, writing, and introspection. I’ve been to countless monasteries seeking similar enlightenment in solitude.
“All of humanity's problems,” Pascal said, “stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
But what’s most memorable to me about these times is how much I had to entertain myself by recalling movies I love, TV shows I’d watched, or songs I liked to sing.
Google and other sites tracked me during those years, and now my social media feeds are littered with photos and videos of perfect-looking families baking their own sourdough, feeding chickens, and reading the classics.
They capture it all on their phones and post about it and call it homesteading.
Of course, the Homestead Act of 1862 was meant to provide an economic incentive to settle the American West. Even the Luddites who laid waste to England’s textile mills decades before were more inspired by the threat of their own lost wages than the need to outright eliminate technologies.
Many started rural lives only after acquiring considerable capital in the traditional workforce. They had a nest egg, or occasionally a rich relative.
Their intention was not to live their lives in quiet anonymity, which to me would be the only point of becoming a neo-Luddite, as whole generations are being born who aren’t even equipped to handle boredom.
When I think of embracing homesteading or Ludditism, the greatest fear I have is choosing to live a life at the perimeter of culture with hardly anything new.
It’s as if you’d been asked to choose an arbitrary year in history and decided to only look backward from then on and never forward — to have no part in the future.
And it makes me think of Philip Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures” and realize it for what it is: “a deliberate step backwards / To create … a life / Reprehensibly perfect.”
Norm MacLean is a fiction of a writer’s imagination in Washington, DC. He owns no pets and is unmarried.
THE BLUFF: WORD SALAD
Syrian refugees and cocaine on the Lower East Side do not have much to do with one another, but you could open a literary magazine in 2021 and find them side by side. The first professor I had in graduate school was a German fairy named Cynthia with an icy pixie cut and androgynous, bird-like features. She was a lyric poet and essayist, and she often spoke of her hatred of “word salad,” when images from “different worlds” were forced together to create an artificial depth.
After that first semester, she moved to Berlin, and I continued my new life in New York, where everyone was a cryptofascist or a rich leftist who liked to say things like “all gun owners are sociopaths.” The shining images of my Midwestern days evaporated. Where my old poems used association to form a mystic whole, my new writing was fragmented and empty. I cut my thoughts up like chalk to avoid sentimentality and began looking at experience as something to mine, instead of something to bow to, while listening for hidden messages. I started to think there were no secrets, only material. Six months later, I sent Cynthia new poems. On Zoom, she looked at me as if I had been possessed. “What happened?”
The current writing style of Chat-GPT and other AI models is downstream of a shared problem. Relying entirely on information, LLMs can be imagistic and atmospheric, but they have no capacity for awe, so the result is grating to a human reader. I have read several arguments that what LLMs lack is taste. But the truth is that taste is all an AI, creatively speaking, has— taste being the ability to draw strategically from a pool of curated reference material.
The moves an AI makes may soon be as good as poetry from a skilled but vacuous writer. But there is no replacement for the human soul. Even a human writer can lose touch with their own, and it will make their poems flop. The connective tissue that keeps a piece of associative writing from collapsing into word salad or slop does not arise from the material itself. It is the human gaze that sees connections and is inspired to document them, and that is what infuses language with light. The essence of our lives is more than the material they produce.
Sarah Beth Spraggins is a poet and writer from Florida. She also edits Secret Ballot.
THE TALLY:
Jordan Castro’s new novel Muscle Man convened DC’s most muscular minds for a lively trialogue on masculinity last week, hosted by Wisdom of Crowds and sponsored by .
deemed the book “subtly reactionary but in the most pleasant way possible,” while added: “People say Jordan’s novel resonates because it touches current hot political topics, like alienated males and the manosphere and violence… and it does. But Muscle Man is also part of a long tradition that goes back from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.” Castro himself deflected questions about the “performative male” and other modern stereotypes - a wise move in a room full of conceptual heavyweights. The live recording is posted at .
Saints and Servers: The Institute for Human Ecology hosted a panel Tuesday night at Catholic University. “Between God and the Machine: How Should Christians Think About AI?” was part of an ongoing Ross Douthat lecture series. More than one Balloter in the crowd flagged Will Wilson’s closing line, “The cost of pretending to have done something is dropping very fast.” We also found out about the unveiling of a new Catholic ‘magisterium AI,’ trained on church texts to answer doctrinal questions. Someone noted that two of the four panelists seemed “way too pious,” but refused to specify which.
AI at the Line: The Generative Series held its monthly AI, Art & Culture Rooftop Social at the Line Hotel on Wednesday evening. It featured AI demos, live music, and cocktails. Rain forced happy hour goers to decamp from the rooftop to the second floor. One Balloter overheard an attendee expressing surprise at “so many people in suits” at a tech event. It is DC, after all.
UNGA Bunga! New York played host to WaPo’s John Hudson and Shadi Hamid this week, in town for the UN General Assembly. Their Tuesday rooftop soiree drew several Balloters, who clocked Taylor Lorenz, Senator Chris Murphy and Bill de Blasio mingling in the crowd. A prominent geneticist was heard dispensing dating advice to one of our own.
Don’t Miss:
Interesting things happening at The Kennedy Center this year: Their Opening Gala kicks off the NSO’s 95th season with conductor Gianandrea Noseda and star pianist Yuja Wang this Saturday, Sep 27. Expect a crowd heavy on people who build things— some in code, some in steel.
“Liberalism at its Limits” at Butterworth’s: Aspen Philosophy & Society presents a conversation with Tyler Cowen, its first Philosophy Happy Hour of the season, Thursday, Oct 2. Tickets.
Reason Versus National Review debate: “Mass Immigration Is Good for America” at Hook Hall, also Oct 2. Tickets.
Merry Wives? The Shakespeare Theater Company’s adaptation of the Merry Wives of Windsor runs through Oct 5. Audrey enjoyed it but had some qualms. Read her review here.
Everyone is going to the Maryland Renaissance Faire: Turkey Legs, funnel cake fries, jousting, live pony rides — what’s not to love? One attendee described the crowd as “interesting people who like to go to things where you can dress up.” From wigs to swords to face paint — “whatever Renaissance means to you.” Seems like it applies to a lot of people! When tickets first dropped, three-hour online queues formed. Resale prices are still running triple face value. Runs through Oct 19.
Our launch party report… (with pictures) is stuck at the printers! We will have it to you soon. Take it from us, everyone looks fabulous. xoxo - The Editors
HOT MIC:
THE VOTE:
DECLASSIFIEDS:
Gossip or intelligence? We can’t tell the difference. Send us your personal ads and we’ll post them anonymously. If you’d like to reply to one, email us the ad’s number and we’ll discreetly forward it on.
#001 BOOK CLUB BESTIES // Seeking people interested in an English-class-but-better book club: small, thoughtful, and centered on the classics. Filled with robust conversation and wine
loving this so far!!
Strong start with good characters