Even more concluding unscientific postscript.

Part Three

1. People who equate the printing press and artificial intelligence misunderstand both. Just because something is disruptive doesn’t mean disruption always serves the same end.

2. Technologies exist within larger systems. Take the printing press—a system of education for literacy, a system of paper production, a system of distribution—all are necessary to produce a book. Or take something as simple as a pencil. Milton Freidman famously used a pencil to illustrate the vast division of labor needed for its production. But books and pencils continue to exist after they leave the dynamos that brought them into being. Not so with artificial intelligence. On a moment to moment basis it only exists so long as you’re connected to the system. And information moves in two directions. Users are being used. So, a technology that promises independence from the natural world—the analog world—actually creates a new form of dependence.

3. If I were to add anything to the list of disciplines needed to keep from being coopted by AI it would be long-form reading, preferably from physical books, and not screens. There is something about sustained attention to a line of thought that is good for the soul. Video pacifies the mind, reading activates it.

4. Large-Language Models (LLMs) provide a standard of mediocrity. We should all strive to be better than mediocre.

5. “Learn to code!” That was the conventional wisdom of high school guidance counselors for years. Yet again, high school counselors gave stale advice. If anything, AI will soon code quicker and better than any human—and if that isn’t already the case, it soon will be.

6. The “gray wave” will soon meet the “baby bust” and there will be a shortage of healthcare workers to care for all the aging Baby Boomers out there. The Boomers could be called, “the scorched earth” generation because they leave ruins behind when they pass over any social institution. Fortunately, AI and robots will likely fill the void. Serves them right.

7. Just how many people can be “creatives”? Whenever some evangelist for AI is preaching the message can be summed up as follows, “All the tedious work will be done by machines leaving the high value creative stuff to people.” Right.

8. Returning to Donald Fagen’s IGY, the line that goes, “more leisure for artists everywhere” is proving ironic. Artists are rare birds, the good ones, anyway. And when the arts are democratized the best are lost in a sea of swill.

9. You need a cutting board business. Generally, artists can’t survive on their best work. For it to generate enough interest to justify enough monetary value to live on, years must pass. In the meantime, there is the “starving artists” and many don’t make it. I recall learning about a furniture maker who kept the bills paid by having a cutting board business. It was dull enough, and predictable enough, that his creative energies were freed up for his passion to make high-end furniture for wealthy people. If AI can be your cutting board employee, freeing you up for the good stuff, as far as I’m concerned, more power to you. Go for it.

10. A fuller treatment of transhumanism would have blurred the focus of this book, but transhumanism is bigger than artificial intelligence. It includes biotechnology, in particular generic therapy and editing and the industrialization of human reproduction through IVF. Monstrous things are being done in the name of self-actualization.

11. When it comes to using artificial intelligence well it is important to know—at least in a rough sense—what you’re after. The last thing you should do is allow the technology to tell you what you should want.

12. Perhaps the most promising use of AI and robotics I can imagine is the recovery of small scale, highly efficient production. It might eliminate the advantages of high-scale production. This might be the breakthrough that makes a recovery of the productive household possible. One of the criticisms of the oikos of antiquity is its reliance on slaves. But believe it or not, Aristotle in Politics speculated about the possibility of machines replacing slaves. (He refers to the mythic tripods of Hephestus, and the statues of Daedalus.) There will need to be some creative work here. There’s no evidence that this is something the developers of the technology envision. But something like subsistence farming and cottage industry could be viable again for many people with the right application of the new technologies.