Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: technology and anthropology.
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What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
No Longer At the Top of the Food Chain
The most powerful leaders in tech have expressed — keep expressing — ambivalence about the future of the human race.
Who’s In Charge? On Thursday, Elon Musk predicted that AI would eventually rule over the human race:
Long-term, AI’s gonna be in charge, to be totally frank, not humans. If artificial intelligence vastly exceeds the sum of human intelligence, it is difficult to imagine any humans would actually be in charge.
Are You Sure? This past June, in an interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, PayPal andPalantir founder Peter Thiel hesitated for several seconds before affirming that yes, he would like the human race to survive:
Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
Douthat: Should the human race survive?
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: OK.
(We wrote about Thiel’s theological beliefs here.)
Human Extinction. In December 2024, computer scientist, Nobel laureate and “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton said that there is a 10%-20% chance that AI could wipe us out in the coming decades.
“Biological Bootloader.” In 2017, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote:
We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.
AI and the Future of the Humanities
Why are our tech overlords so uncertain about the future of the human race? A new book suggests it’s partly because they define human worth by what a human being can do.
“Remainder Humanism.” In Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, Leif Weatherby argues that humanities departments have responded to ChatGPT in the wrong way — by trying to compete with it:
“Remainder humanism” is the term I use for us painting ourselves into a corner theoretically. The operation is just that we say, “machines can do x, but we can do it better or more truly.” This sets up a kind of John-Henry-versus-machine competition that guides the analysis. With ChatGPT’s release, that kind of lazy thinking, which had prevailed since the early days of AI critique … hit a dead end. If machines can produce smooth, fluent, and chatty language, it causes everyone with a stake in linguistic humanism to freak out.
Instead of Freaking Out, Weatherby says, we should accept that LLMs are creating a new culture, and then subject that culture to critique. In that capacity to critique lies the essence of the humanities.
Some responses:
“Problems of Life.” Responding to Weatherby, Baylor University English professor Alan Jacobs points to an essay he wrote last year, where he ponders how to design homework assignments in the age of ChatGPT:
I am moved to consider it by reflecting on something T. S. Eliot wrote in 1944, a sentence I often have reason to quote: “Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.” With this sentence in mind … I could simply make the assignments that I believe best suited to what I want my students to learn, and then turn to them and ask: “What are the ‘problems of life’ that incline so many of you to turn to the chatbots rather than do these assignments?”
What Is an Author? In a probing review, Geoff Shullenberger notes that Weatherby’s argument comes from an academic culture that for decades has dismissed the question, “What is human nature?” as hopelessly metaphysical and outdated. But in the age of AI, neither Weatherby, nor academia as a whole, will be able to avoid that question for much longer:
At the end of his essay “What Is an Author?” — one of the foundational statements of antihumanist theory — Michel Foucault asked: “What difference does it make who is speaking?” For Foucault, the question was rhetorical: His point was to herald “the stirring of an indifference” as to the answer. But Weatherby and others who wish to salvage the humanities from the AI-occasioned impasse of antihumanism will need to reverse the valence of Foucault’s question and try to answer it literally and concretely.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
— Psalm 8, King James Version
The Death (and Life) of the Author
As Weatherby and Shullenberger suggest, the philosophical question of human authorship, once a topic for graduate seminars, is now central to the broader question of the destiny of humanity in the age of AI.
“The Death of the Author.” In 1967, French critic Roland Barthes wrote a seminal essay which questioned the idea that texts have ultimate meanings: “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.”
LLMs As Creators of Posthuman Culture. Language suggests meanings, Barthes argues, independently of authorial intention. Does this mean LLMs are generators of meaning, too?
“Writing for the AIs.” Intervening in a different, though related, debate — whether humans should “for” AIs, in order to influence them — Scott Alexander argues that our writing will be one day be inferior to that of AIs:
“Superior beings”, wrote Alexander Pope, “would show a Newton as we show an ape.” I don’t want to be an ape in some transhuman zoo, with people playing with models of me to see what bloggers were like back when everyone was stupid.
The Author Lives. On a podcast this past April, Sam Altman said that AI has brought about the “democratization of creating content.” On another podcast a few weeks later, Altman affirmed that in the future, human authors will still be valued over AI-generated writing.
From the Crowd
“A Necessary Condition of Civilized Life.” Jack Davey with a long response to David Polansky’s recent essay, “Political Theory in the Age of Mass Migration”:
I think liberal impulses on mass migration are actually artifacts of English speaking liberal opposition to the French Revolution and republican politics as a whole. Lord Acton writes in his essay on nationality that :
“The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society. Inferior races are raised by living in political union with races intellectually superior. Exhausted and decaying nations are revived by the contact of a younger vitality. Nations in which the elements of organisation and the capacity for government have been lost, either through the demoralising influence of despotism, or the disintegrating action of democracy, are restored and educated anew under the discipline of a stronger and less corrupted race. This fertilising and regenerating process can only be obtained by living under one government. It is in the cauldron of the State that the fusion takes place by which the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity of one portion of mankind may be communicated to another. Where political and national boundaries coincide, society ceases to advance, and nations relapse into a condition corresponding to that of men who renounce intercourse with their fellow-men. The difference between the two unites mankind not only by the benefits it confers on those who live together, but because it connects society either by a political or a national bond, gives to every people an interest in its neighbours, either because they are under the same government or because they are of the same race, and thus promotes the interests of humanity, of civilisation, and of religion.”
Although written in 1862 the above sentiment still rules the highest echelons of American and European society. Large republican states in liberal eyes would inevitably descend into fanaticism or despotism unless there was this diversity inspired by Austria Hungary and the British Isles. This grain of thought which you see in Constant too (perhaps inspired by the Swiss as well as Britain) is transmitted through British then American empire into the general west. Combined with the mythology of the civil rights movement and finally the utopian post 1990s world of economic growth we see global migration the likes of which its progenitors such as Acton would have seen as insane. I suspect the English religious settlement was also a great inspiration with a patchwork of sects being more conducive to liberty than the dangerous collectivism of one dominant force.
Berlin writing after the war railed against utopian thought for the twin collective evils of Communism and Fascism. Acton had done the same thing 80 years later with nationalism and socialism being the evils descended from the republicanism of 1790’s France. It is ironic that liberals own utopianism has led us to the point where the Jacobins have come again. To quote the inspiration for Berlin’s book title “out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made.”
See you next week!
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Heart of the matter. Another great Monday note. Thx as always. FWIW, my creation narrative:
https://open.substack.com/pub/apablog/p/cosmic-purpose-creation-and-individual?r=2xhbd&utm_medium=ios
Love this!!