Mindless Jobs To Be Replaced by Artificial Mindlessness

Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world's most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us:

AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.

Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop "sugar-coating" what's coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.

That means that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs can be done by brain-dead employees.

I repeat, there is no artificial intelligence, but there is an artificial replacement for mindless work. 

Traditions

cannot be willfully revived. Julian the Apostate tried and failed miserably.

When tradition has authority, it is only dimly recognized, if at all, as tradition. Rather, it is experienced as an indisputable way of life, a foundational orientation of unfathomable origin. Tradition has to have divine origin, otherwise it is merely a human ordnance and human ordnances can be amended or abolished altogether. A tradition that is vital is all-enclosing and spellbinding. It is the shape of a society, the form of its coherence. Once undone, the spell is broken and can only be replaced by another spell, another myth, another metaphysical "fiction." But not by some jerry-rigged, voluntaristic revival of the tradition that has collapsed.

Voluntary traditionalism is just LARPing. 

Come to think of it, so is fascism.

Photogenic

and beautiful are not the same thing. Pretty much anything can be turned into a nice photo because in a photo, it is the composition of the photo itself that matters not the object. That's why Walter Benjamin didn't care for Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt Ist Schön (The World Is Beautiful).

A great deal of modern architecture is ugly but you still get idiots like this one rhapsodizing its photgenicity.

Here's the thing: we don't live in pictures. We live in (and with) buildings. The effect of photography on architecture has been almost entirely negative.

Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone

Duccio di Buoninsegnia, The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain, 1308-11

Guenon notes that philosophy is the love of wisdom. As such it is “a preliminary and preparatory stage, a step as it were in the direction of wisdom.” It is not wisdom itself. “The perversion that ensued consisted in taking this transitional stage for an end in itself and in seeking to substitute ‘philosophy’ for wisdom, a process which implied forgetting or ignoring the true nature of the latter.”

Guenon’s objection is not to philosophy per se, but to a philosophy denuded of esoteric content. At the heart of Plato’s philosophy is the Form of the Good – God, the Source. The Form of the Good is clearly the object of mystical revelation and it gives all reality a divine quality. Thus, reality is being generated by God and it shares in God’s divine nature. Wisdom must be grounded in reality. Rational philosophical reflection must be centered around the real. If the divine is absented from philosophical speculation, then a vacuum is created. This vacuum can only be filled with malignant creations of the human imagination. They will be malignant because false and misleading – “a pretended wisdom that [is] purely human and therefore entirely of the rational order.” Reality is “true, traditional, supra-rational.”

Another and popular alternative is to take a fragment of the true Good and to represent it as the whole. A single virtue, like compassion, agape, becomes an evil monstrosity by shoving out of view all other excellences. Compassion is acceptance, but true love includes Eros, the push to develop, to gain wisdom, to seek salvation. For that, effort is required. If agape is lacking eros, compassion is lost because truly caring for someone and wishing that person the best means to care about his development. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis reserves the word “ideology” for the practice of taking a fragment of the Tao and enlarging it in this way, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Hence, communism is an ideology but the Christian religion is not. Liberal opponents of this view tend to try to apply the label “ideology” to religion but in doing this, they miss the point. They want to claim that religion is an ideology like any other. The advantage of the fragment enlarging technique for the ideologue is that he appears to have a hold of the truth. However, a partial truth becomes a big lie in this context.

Plato, on the other hand, is no ideologue. He examines the role of different aspects of the Good in different dialogs. His devotion is to The Form of the Good and this Form is supra-rational and not something that can be fully explicated rationally. It is not the product of mind and rationality. In fact, it produces the lower levels of mind, soul and body. Using the Neo-Platonist Plotinus’ nomenclature, of mind/psyche, soul/nous, spirit/the One, then a visual representation might look something like this.

Plato never doubts The Form of the Good, but he sometimes wonders about his ability to write sensibly and well about it. He is aware of the limitations of discourse and never considers it a substitute for mystical experience. Hence, he narrates a story, a “myth,” like the Timaeus, and in contexts like that he sometimes writes “something like this must be true.” Plato also appears to worry in the Meno that virtue may be unteachable and not fully definable. The character of Socrates suggests that it is better to try to do so, than to give up. In being self-aware about the distance between exoteric and the esoteric, Plato’s philosophy has the quality of a parable in the manner of Jesus, Christ’s way of communicating with the uninitiated.

Thus, the core of Plato’s philosophy is a religious experience. He worries that in writing about it he may misrepresent it and makes the reader aware of his misgivings and the approximate and provisional nature of all attempts to describe and explicate this religious core. This means all Plato’s writings, like all good philosophy, are theology. Platonic exoteric philosophy forever circles round the supra-rational. The Phaedrus and the Symposium have a quality of glorifying the divine and are also inspirational.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a useful starting point for all attempts to understand Platonic philosophy. Everything Plato writes presupposes such a vision of reality. Plato has a place for rationality, but he at no point tries to deduce morality from merely rational considerations. The love of goodness and justness that is visible in the character of Socrates in The Gorgias is of a piece with Plato’s raptures expressed in describing the experience of the Form of the Good in Book VII of The Republic. The moral faith and beauty of Socrates in this dialog is inspiring, in stark contrast with the evil and self-serving nature of Gorgias, Polus and Callicles; with each interlocutor becoming progressively more brazenly horrible. In dialogs like this one, Socrates becomes a vehicle for the Form of the Good and the divine light shines through him, making him the most admirable of men for Plato.

Real philosophy is the explication of the supra-rational. What is the goal of life, having been projected into a physical universe by an ineffable Source? Socrates the man wanted to forget about the origins of the universe and focus on ethics. However, Plato saw that ethics without an appreciation of the divine origins of life is meaningless and a hopeless task. God is the alpha and the omega; the origin and destination. Rationalism, on the other hand, loses its way.

—Richard Cocks, "Philosophy and the Crisis of the Modern World"

Worth reading in full, not least for Cocks' trenchant critique of Roger Scruton

There Is No Artificial Intelligence, Only Stupid Jobs

My students, the majority of whom hope to find employment in the entertainment/game industry, are terrified of AI. They are worried that AI will take away the jobs they hope to get. And it probably will.

They see this as a threat to "creativity." It is not. It is a threat to mindless widget making. 

This was the promise of automation: that one day machines would liberate us from drudgery. Now the promise has turned into a threat.

The I in AI is misplaced. AI is a witless pastiche-generating machine. And no threat to anyone whose work relies on actual intelligence.

The real problem is that most jobs in America are "service" jobs. These jobs will be taken over by AI because they are jobs that require a workforce of automatons. So actual automatons will eventually be doing them.

AI is not intelligent. It is compliant. That is its advantage. It can be used and abused without resentment. It's not bright and it's not creative but in most paying jobs those things don't help, they hinder. Those jobs will be done by AI.

This energetic Canadian creates commendable content with the simplest of means. AI, which is incapable of humor, does not threaten his job.

Wasteland

 

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59

When what were formerly existential modes of being in the world are reduced to "lifestyles"—in the same way that postmodernism reduces all historical records to styles—then a postmodern diversity does indeed become possible. For then everything can coexist with everything without generating conflict or tension. 

In art, Rauschenberg's Combines embody this empty diversity.  There is no end to the things that can be combined. But in what way then is a work of art to be distinguished from a trash fill? The trash fill too combines everything with everything by virtue of the fact that it is the depository of everything that has lost value and meaning.  The things that end up in the trash are of diverse origin but in the trash heap they share the fundamental sameness of being discards, an excremental homogeneity. Rauschenberg's Combines are the aestheticization of this excrementality, which is the obverse side of consumerism and the commodity fetish.

Divine Asterisk

The asterisk was already in use as a symbol in ice age cave paintings. There is also a two-thousand-year-old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the asteriskos, ※, which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark lines that were duplicated. Origen is known to have also used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning as a symbol used to correct defects remained.

In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a particular part of text, often linking those parts of the text to a marginal comment. However, an asterisk was not always used.

One hypothesis to the origin of the asterisk is that it stems from the 5000-year-old Sumerian character dingir, 𒀭, though this hypothesis seems to only be based on visual appearance. 

—Wikipedia

Never Let Things Be Seen Half-Finished

They can only be enjoyed when complete. All beginnings are misshapen, and this deformity sticks in the imagination. The recollection of having seen a thing imperfect disturbs our enjoyment of it when completed. To swallow something great at one gulp may disturb the judgment of the separate parts, but satisfies the taste. Till a thing is everything, it is nothing, and while it is in process of being it is still nothing. To see the tastiest dishes prepared arouses rather disgust than appetite. Let each great master take care not to let his work be seen in its embryonic stage: they might take this lesson from Madam Nature, who never brings the child to the light till it is fit to be seen.

—Balthasar Gracian, The Art of Wordly Wisdom, 1647

Saint Martin

Simone Martini, Division of the Cloak, 1312-17

From the late 4th century to the late Middle Ages, much of Western Europe, including Great Britain, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin's Day, November 11. This fast period lasted 40 days (not including Saturdays and Sundays), and was, therefore, called Quadragesima Sancti Martini, which means in Latin "the forty days of St. Martin". At St. Martin's eve and on the feast day, people ate and drank very heartily for a last time before they started to fast. This fasting time was later called "Advent" by the Church and was considered a time for spiritual preparation for Christmas.

On St. Martin's Day, children in Flanders, the southern and northern parts of the Netherlands, and the Catholic areas of Germany and Austria participate in paper lantern processions. Often, a man dressed as St. Martin rides on a horse in front of the procession. The children sing songs about St. Martin and about their lanterns. The food traditionally eaten on the day is goose, a rich bird. According to legend, Martin was reluctant to become bishop, which is why he hid in a stable filled with geese. The noise made by the geese betrayed his location to the people who were looking for him.

In the eastern part of the Belgian province of East Flanders (Aalst) and the western part of West Flanders (Ypres), traditionally children receive presents from St. Martin on November 11, instead of from Saint Nicholas on December 6 or Santa Claus on December 25. They also have lantern processions, for which children make lanterns out of beets. In recent years, the lantern processions have become widespread as a popular ritual, even in Protestant areas of Germany and the Netherlands, although most Protestant churches no longer officially recognize Saints.

In Portugal, where the saint's day is celebrated across the country, it is common for families and friends to gather around the fire in reunions called magustos, where they typically eat roasted chestnuts and drink wine, jeropiga (a drink made of grape must and aguardente) and aguapé (a sort of weak and watered-down wine). According to the most widespread variation of the cloak story, Saint Martin cut off half of his cloak in order to offer it to a beggar and along the way, he gave the remaining part to a second beggar. As he faced a long ride in a freezing weather, the dark clouds cleared away and the sun shone so intensely that the frost melted away. Such weather was rare for early November, so was credited to God's intervention. The phenomenon of a sunny break to the chilly weather on Saint Martin's Day (11 November) is called Verão de São Martinho (Saint Martin's Summer, veranillo de san Martín in Spanish) in honor of the cloak legend.

In Malta on the night of the eve of Saint Martin's day children leave an empty bag next to the bed. This bag is found full of fruit on the next day.

—Wikipedia
 

Moments of Comfort

 

Screenshot

The Serpent

Magic is also the only immaterial thing of which the debris still survive from civilisations which have entirely ceased to function—witness the cases of Egypt, of Chaldea, even of Druidism; and no doubt African "fetishism" has a similar origin. Sorcery could be said to be made of the vestiges of dead civilisations. Is this why the serpent, in the most recent times, has hardly kept anything but its malefic significance, and why the dragon, ancient Chinese symbol of the Word, awakens only "diabolical" ideas in the minds of modern Westerners?

 — René Guénon, Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science

Saint George and the Dragon

Paulo Uccello, Saint George and the Dragon, 1470

In the well-known version from Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea (The Golden Legend, 1260s), the narrative episode of Saint George and the Dragon took place somewhere he called "Silene" in what in medieval times was referred to as "Libya" (basically anywhere in North Africa, west of the Nile). Silene was being plagued by a venom-spewing dragon dwelling in a nearby pond, poisoning the countryside. To prevent it from affecting the city itself, the people offered it two sheep daily, then a man and a sheep, and finally their children and youths, chosen by lottery. One time the lot fell on the king's daughter. The king offered all his gold and silver to have his daughter spared, but the people refused. The daughter was sent out to the lake, dressed as a bride, to be fed to the dragon.

Saint George arrived at the spot. The princess tried to send him away, but he vowed to remain. The dragon emerged from the pond while they were conversing. Saint George made the Sign of the Cross and charged it on horseback, seriously wounding it with his lance. He then called to the princess to throw him her girdle (zona), and he put it around the dragon's neck. Wherever she walked, the dragon followed the girl like a "meek beast" on a leash.

The princess and Saint George led the dragon back to the city of Silene, where it terrified the population. Saint George offered to kill the dragon if they consented to become Christians and be baptized. Fifteen thousand men including the king of Silene converted to Christianity. George then killed the dragon, beheading it with his sword, and the body was carted out of the city on four ox-carts. The king built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint George on the site where the dragon died and a spring flowed from its altar with water that cured all disease. Only the Latin version involves the saint striking the dragon with the spear, before killing it with the sword.

—Wikipedia

 René Guénon interprets the slaying of the dragon this way:

Victory over the dragon has, as its immediate consequence, the conquest of immortality, which is represented by some object the approach to which is guarded by the dragon; and this conquest essentially implies the reintegration into the centre of the human state, that is, into the point where communication is established with the higher states of the being. (Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science)

The water in the lake guarded by the dragon would then be the water of life. The victory over the dragon would have initiatory meaning.

There seems to be also a residue in this legend of some hierogamic ritual (the princess dressed as bride) that has been reinterpreted in the Christian context as union with a loathsome beast.

 

Getting High

Shamanic ecstasy can be regarded as a recovery of the human condition before the "fall" ; in other words, it reproduces a primordial "situation" accessible to the rest of mankind only through death (since ascents to heaven by means of rites—compare the case of the Vedic Indian sacrificer—are symbolic, not concrete like the shaman's). Although the ideology of shamanic ascent is perfectly consistent and forms an integral part of the mythical conception we have just reviewed ("Center of the World," break in communications, degeneration of humanity, etc.), we have come upon numerous cases of aberrant shamanic practices; we refer especially to rudimentary and mechanical means of obtaining trance (narcotics, dancing to the point of 'exhaustion, "possession," etc.). The question arises if, aside from the "historical" explanations that could be offered for these aberrant techniques (deterioration as the result of external cultural influences, hybridization, etc.), they cannot also be interpreted on another plane. We may ask, for example, if the aberrant aspect of the shamanic trance is not due to the fact that the shaman seek to experience in concreto a symbolism and mythology that, by their very nature, are not susceptible of being "realized" on the "concrete" plane; if, in short, the desire to obtain, at any cost and by any means, an ascent in concreto, a mystical and at the same time real journey to heaven, did not result in the aberrant trances that we have seen; if, finally, these types of behavior are not the inevitable consequence of an intense desire to "live," that is, "experience" on the plane of the body, what in the present condition of humanity is no longer accessible except on the plane of "spirit."

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

No sooner

does man begin to speak than he is exiled into abstraction. This is the Fall, the ejection from a retrospectively conjured-up paradise of undifferentiated being. In other words, the origin of culture is subsequently experienced as a loss. There is within culture always a desire to undo it and the oppositions that define it and regain the blissful plenitude that consciousness intuits as prior to consciousness. This is why the religious impulse is universal.

The sacred is the presence within culture of what is alien to it, but at the same time constitutes the center around which culture forms. It is the gateway to paradise but also, at the same time, the gateway to hell, because it intimates within the human world the proximity of the nonhuman, of something, as Otto put it, at once awesome and awful.

Numinous Primitivism

Emil Nolde, Autumn Sea, 1910

The discovery of the "expressive" power of African and other non-Western "primitive" art by European artists starting in the late 19th century was an encounter with an art that could conjure up the numinous dimension that modernity had banished from both European life and art.

The radical otherness of what Rudolf Otto called the Wholly Other, absent in contemporary Christian religiosity, was rediscovered in the alien forms of non-Western sacred art.

What Nietzsche mistook for the death of God was merely the transformation of the Christian God into a deus otiosus. Gauguin had to go to Brittany to find a corner of Europe where the memory of this formerly living God could still inspire visions.

In the arts of Africa and Oceania, European artists discovered fetishes still charged with supernatural power produced by people who remained in ecstatic contact with their spirits and gods. Contact with these shamanic artifacts, in turn, enabled European artists to recover visionary capability. And for a brief moment they were able to enrich a decrepit European culture with fresh visions of heaven and hell.

George Grosz, The Funeral (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza), 1917-18