Hey, in about an hour at 8pm ET we're going to get together to talk about chapter 1 of Techno-Negative.

To be totally honest, I kind of struggled a bit with the psychoanalytic stuff around ancient Greek culture (actually for things Dekeyser pointed out - it's kind of shaky to apply psychoanalysis to a culture that you have no direct interaction with ("Plato never lay on Sachs's couch" and all that)), but I think I came around in the end at this idea he tried to unpack about things that make humanity what it is.

The idea that what fundamentally makes humanity humanity is intellect got me thinking about this example from earlier this week where OpenAI demonstrated some feature of ChatGPT that allows it to interrupt you while you're talking with it. It didn't really occur to me that I would feel a visceral emotional reaction about the idea of a chatbot emulating the features of human conversation that interrupting one another sometimes represents in some cultures (enthusiasm, understanding, agreement, etc...), but... it was really annoying to watch a chatbot constantly interrupt those older ladies.

I'd like to hear what thoughts you have about the chapter, what elements or arguments in chapter 1 you struggled with, disagreed with, resonated super strongly with, or whatever else; but if you're drawing a blank, I'd also like to hear:

Have you seen an AI product, service, or other thing that irritated you in novel and surprising ways that you couldn't immediately explain? Can you draw the (ontological) boundary being transgressed by that thing now? Or if not, can we help make sense of that boundary during the video chat?

When you're ready to join at 8p ET, you can click on this link or you can go here:

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

See you then.