Simone Weil Against Distraction

Weil saw attention as a gateway to the divine. But she also saw it as a tool for engaging deeply with other people. To truly understand others and their suffering, we need to attend to them. Yet she wrote, “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” And elsewhere, she declared that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It is “a recognition that the sufferer exists… exactly like we are.” Attention is nothing less than a gift.

This rings eerily true today, when we are all pulled in a million different directions. We talk about feeling alienated, overextended, and atomized, but how often do we carve out the time to attend fully and completely to the person in front of us?

April Owens, The Hedgehog Review

Move Fast and Break Nothing

In a world of AI, it turns out that a 5,000-pound Jaguar SUV may be less concerning than an interactive text box. The AI boom has led OpenAI and many other companies to rush out their products, sometimes with disastrous results: Gemini has engaged in bondage scenarios with adolescent users, Elon Musk’s Grok recently went full Nazi for a few hours, and OpenAI is mired in a pending wrongful-death lawsuit after ChatGPT allegedly played a role in a teen’s suicide. (OpenAI declined to comment; Musk has posted that Grok was “manipulated” into going on an anti-Semitic rampage; and Google, which runs Gemini, has said that it has enacted additional safeguards to protect kids.)

“I like to tell people that if Waymo worked as well as ChatGPT, they’d be dead,” Bryant Walker Smith, a self-driving-car expert at the University of South Carolina School of Law, told me. Imagine if, instead of turning left at a stop light, a robotaxi decided to blast the stereo and start doing figure eights. Waymo pokes a hole in Silicon Valley’s prevailing ethos, especially in the AI age: Move fast and break things. Mark Zuckerberg has said that the risk of “misspending a couple hundred of billion dollars” on AI is smaller for Meta than risking a future in which his company is “out of position.” If you slow down, you might fall behind in building world-changing “superintelligence.”

Saahil Desai, The Atlantic (archived)

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