Gil As someone who spends hours every day using AI tools with – dare I say – great efficacy, I’m very personally aware of how it magnifies my ability to produce. On a good day, I’m extraordinarily productive; on an off day, I can take care of myself, my children, my wife, and still meet a minimum threshold for production.
I still appreciated the break from the new normal though. 😂 Gave me a chance to breathe and catch up a bit in a world that’s moving too darn fast.
Noticing the difference between artists’ and programmers’ attitudes towards sharing and reusing others’ creative outputs – and the history of patronage in the arts and basement coding in dev – and I’m trying to unravel the connection between classism and the claim of intellectual property.
I use AI all day every day.
The leverage it gives me is astounding. The path from ideation to creation to implementation is shorter than it’s ever been in my life – and the ability to have parallel chains of tasks running on my desk while I take care of my daughters, manage my household, or just expand my consciousness, has opened my eyes to what a future of automation could materially mean for your average person.
AI is not perfect. It is not infallible. When it comes to operating a business, the combination of autonomy, impetuousness, overconfidence, and speed can be frustrating but the blast radius is ultimately limited to money.
When it comes to operating in a war, that combination is not just dangerous but possibly catastrophic, with a blast radius including human lives.
A decade ago Boston Dynamics and other companies started developing military-grade killer robots.
A couple of years ago our military started using AI in targeting and establishing kill lists.
A couple of days ago the first human soldiers were killed by military drones operated by autonomous AI.
AI can be problematic but it’s not the problem.
The problem is the people giving it the power to kill.
If I offered you a flower
Plucked from the patch
Growing between concrete
And asphalt
No word could hold its petals
Or trace its severed stem
What passes between lovers
Of the same love
Is the slow spreading of a dawn
Across wild rooftops
Answer me
With a smile
I have met men with Down Syndrome who were wise and empathetic, not to mention mostly self-sufficient.
I have met men without Down Syndrome who were foolish and self-centered, not to mention utterly incapable of taking care of themselves.
The right of a woman (I could end the clause there but I’ll continue with) to freely decide what to do with the fetus she is carrying, nurturing, growing within her own body, needs to be accepted as part of the foundation of a civilization in which the power dynamics that have strangled human societies for millenia are not just disrupted but dissolved.
The life of a parent given a child with unexpected needs and unfamiliar challenges – faced with raising that child in a society that does not value post-natal life, does not value social support, does not value difference of any kind, be it neurological or cultural – stumbling forward with no resources and no guidebook and no relief – is not an easy life.
Hold those truths in your heart…
And also hold some grief for a potential human being – who could have grown into a wise, loving, capable person – who was never given a chance to become anything at all.
“-Bellum: A Meditation on Thanotic Theater”
The roar of the modern age
Tears across my night sky
The mask has fallen
The reverberating backdrop of stitched sounds
The vibrations painted on stretched canvas
Against which we played our roles
Have become the unfolding drama,
Center stage
The scene speaks for itself
In tones no human voice can take
When I began my lines
I did not know danger
Now I wonder what the thunder brings
“The Israelis” “The Palestinians”
I looked for two sides
I found only one side
The side of humanity, life, and love
8 billion human beings and counting, created in the imago dei
I appreciate your support for some of us
But I invite you to leave your world behind
Support all of us
Because there is no them
שאלו את שלום ירושלים
Critics of Israel underweight everything good that comes out of this society. Defenders of Israel underweight everything bad.
Both groups are convinced of the unassailable rightness and reason of their position.
Both groups are consumed with fear.
Neither group acts in good faith.
Or with love.
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I don’t know if I can truly love God – God is so very different from everything that I know.
But I can try and hope to become someone who loves what God loves.
And within that love, to hold both criticism and defense in balance, as loving gestures themselves.
Working with AI every day really gives you an appreciation for the difference between thick and thin intelligence
It’s possible to be very fast, very informed, very articulate, but not very smart
Robots and humans alike
If what I write ever makes you mad
Sit with that feeling
And keep asking yourself why until you understand why I wrote it in the first place
My time here is short, and there are a lot of dogs I have to unmuzzle
“Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”