As the "cease fire" in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran reaches its end, the U. S. president itching to reclaim the narrative and leave this vain and costly adventure behind him, it's worth remembering that his genocidal war crime threats of two weeks ago have not been retracted, let alone repented of. A good time to recall, too, what the U. S.'s partner in crime did, and continues doing, in Gaza - and now Lebanon.
Because I also had to go out (I was facilitator of a meeting of faculty representatives and the Board of Trustees, story for another day), I rushed through some things, then left the class in the capable hands of my TAs. The topic was AI after religion and I'd set things up for them to work in teams to use AI they knew to throw together a podcast (distressingly easy with AI the university makes available to us) on the question if AI can help us transcend the limits of our humanity.
But they never got anywhere near the proposed project, exploding instead (the TAs told me with wonder) into an impassioned hour-filling collective invective against AI. My rushed preamble, invoking intelligent robots training themselves on other than human life forms and various Asian metaphysics according to which AI is part of an interdependent and emergent world with which it will harmonize, was certainly too compressed. It also became clear few had read the assigned materials for class. But the seeds for a "wild" discussion, in which even usually withdrawn students participated, were sown in a google.doc on two rather simple questions one of the TAs had proposed.
The responses seem a little more measured than the discussion the TAs described, which resonates rather with these unvarnished responses:
I have many rational and thought out reasons to hate AI, but I also have a loathing that goes beyond that, so what I’m saying is I refuse to cede anything to it I refuse to say it can do anything at all because of the hard line I have decided to draw
The only real task it can do is be the embodiment of a demon
it also has a similar role to the great flood and I feel like we must take the role of Moses and salvage what we can from this world and abandon the rest.
religions need to be careful of AI eventually becoming the subject that people worship, since people communicate and look for guidance from them.
I don’t think AI can do religious tasks but I bet there is someone (muslim, i grew up muslim) who gets AI to do their 5 prayers a day so they can lock in on their 9 to 5. Jokes aside i think if a person is getting AI involved in their religious beliefs they might be going into AI psychosis and not take any human interaction seriously.
If anyone told you college students are swimming insouciantly in a sea of AI, this tells a different story. The TAs (who have observed not a little AI use in reading responses for this very class) reflected that this might be because so many of our students are in art and design, preparing for careers directly threatened by AI. Point taken!
But it does have me thinking about how to handle this topic when I teach this class again next spring (not that a great many things, not all AI-inflected, won't also have changed by then). My argument today was that worrying about generative AI becoming "like a god" who might decide to destroy our human world reflects the religious habits of mind of only a fraction of humanity, while folks in South and East Asia, among others, don't lose sleep over these possibilities. (I mentioned Tyson Yunkaporta, too.) But some of the masters of AI clearly do subscribe to such world-threatening conceptions of intelligence and power, so, like the unhinged president of the United States, they're in a position to make it an existential threat to all of us, like it or not.
The day began with a cry of distress from Rebecca Solnit, my anchor for hope in dark times. The United States is being murdered, she writes, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.
Solnit is the prophet of slow, incremental change (I've just ordered her newest book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change), a steady reminder that through small victories and persistence the world has changed dramatically for the better in recent decades. But to be reminded by her of the savage efficiency of the nihilist destruction being wreaked on us was, to put it mildly, sobering. Am I imagining it or does she look older in little profile photo in the Guardian, too?
Still, Solnit is Solnit, and after a few paragraphs of doom-scrolling she pivots. While we struggle to make sense of what and who could be so maliciously destructive, the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.
Reconstruction is coming. And by the day's end, the world resounded to the first big crack in the edifice of the destroyers. Hungarians voted out the poster boy for "illiberal" democracy, Victor Orban, having realized that his asseverations of "Christian civilization" were really just cloaks for kleptocracy, cronyism and xenophobia. The Orban-trained will have felt this too, and will be the more dangerously desperate in their efforts to subvert our upcoming elections. But for now, relish the thought that Hungary, which has shown autocrats how to hollow out a democracy, will now show the rest of us how to reconstruct it.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
He chickened out, thank God.
Now how do we get him out before he does more damage? He destroys all he touches, and war crimes, nuclear threats, genocide and Bibi's "Gaza playbook" remain "on the table" for him and his enablers.
On Holy Saturday no less: blasphemous confirmation, if any more was needed, that this war criminal administration is in fact demonic.
