News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I've been traveling this week for Spring Break, so the Water Dipper is briefer today than normal. But you'll also notice that we're publishing a new essay today; we have been having so many worthy submissions in recent weeks, that we'll be publishing six essays some weeks. Also, plans are coming together for the fall FPR conference: we should be announcing the dates, location, and keynote shortly.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about boys, suburbia, and repair.
- Richard Hawking introduces Adrian Bell who, over fifty years, produced "a body of finely crafted work—with his A Countryman’s Notebook Essays at the heart of it—that observes and documents the increasingly capitalisation of the countryside in the move towards industrial agriculture: a revolution that pushed aside traditional ways of farming forever, leading to a breaking apart of rural culture and communities. As a result, he is our British eyewitness and our recorder, and reading his work helps to shape our understanding of the scope and impact of the many changes on the soil, the land, the produce, the animals, and, of course, the people."
- Austin Hoffman considers what how artificial intelligence might render the people who rely on it, well, artificial: "If there is work that we truly do not mind replacing with artificial intelligence, perhaps it was not worth applying genuine intelligence in the first place. That is, if it is only worth doing by AI, maybe it is not worth doing. If an AI can replace teams of HR delegates answering pointless questions and regurgitating bureaucratic obfuscation, then maybe the HR department is a distraction from human relations."
- Evan Patrohay invites us to learn some lessons from the humble oyster: "Live like the oyster, eat an oyster, and remember to recycle your shell for the benefit of future generations of man and mollusk alike."
- Steven Knepper reviews Matthew Wickman’s Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor: "the Brigham Young English professor explores the relationship between spirituality and literature in his life. The resulting work is by turns wise and questioning, witty and candid, self-effacing and impassioned."
- Dennis Uhlman ponders how the theological concept of ordo amoris might help us avoid burn out in an age obsessed with productivity: "Only then can attention and passion be directed in the most life-giving ways and only then can a healthy culture emerge from a disconnected and attenuated one."
- Samuel Schaefer suggests that outer space has other things to offer humans than a venue for exploration and travel: " If space travel is not for mankind, then what is man’s relationship to space supposed to look like?"
I just re-read C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. It was even better than I remembered it being, and I can think of no book better suited to helping us think about the underlying temptations of AI. In particular, Lewis warns that black-box, pragmatic technologies, those that promise their users power rather than understanding or deeper participation in truth, may be a Faustian bargain. The following passage, which quotes from G.K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, gives an eerily prescient description of much AI-generated imagery:
Some of them belonged to a school of art with which he was already familiar. There was a portrait of a young woman who held her mouth wide open to reveal the fact that the inside of it was thickly overgrown with hair. It was very skillfully painted in the photographic manner so that you could almost feel that hair: indeed you could not avoid feeling it however hard you tried. There was a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis, and a man with corkscrews instead of arms bathing in a flat, sadly coloured sea beneath a summer sunset. But most of the pictures were not of this kind. At first, most of them seemed rather ordinary, though Mark was a little surprised at the predominance of spiritual themes. It was only at the second or third glance that one discovered certain unaccountable details — something odd about the positions of the figures’ feet or the arrangements of their fingers or the grouping. And who was the person standing between the Christ and Lazarus? And why were there so many beetles under the table in the Last Supper? What was the curious trick of lighting that made each picture look like something seen in delirium? When once these questions had been raised the apparent ordinariness of the pictures became their supreme menace — like the ominous surface innocence at the beginning of certain dreams. Every fold of drapery, every piece of architecture, had a meaning one could not grasp but which withered the mind. Compared with these the other, surrealistic pictures were mere foolery. Long ago Mark had read somewhere of “things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate,” and had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro