source bank:
quote bank:
“The hard part is deciding, without nostalgia and inertia, which skills are keepers and which are castoffs. None of us likes to see hard-won abilities discarded as obsolete, which is why we have to resist the tug of sentimentality.” Kwame Anthony Appiah
draft:
Introducing grapple.ai
I have spent the last few years trying to regulate and define my artificial intelligence outlook as it oscillated between hysteria, hope, apathy, atrophy, utopian possibility and a hunkered medieval crouch. For some time, I was standing under a lightbulb wondering if electricity had arrived yet. But the world is lit up around us with change we did not consent to. Not that we ever have a say in what changes—the steamroll of power, printing, telegrams, cable and artificial intelligence roll over us all, created by a very few and then developed beyond even their control.
If artificial intelligence changes everything, what does “everything” look like? If every component of our lives shifts, where do we feel it? Does the AI shift live in our policy, our schools, our bodies, our nuclear armament, our dating, our courts, our economy, our climate? The answer is of course D, All of the Above. Like fish swimming in water (or maybe the frog slowly boiling in the pot) it’s difficult to map a consuming change as it happens. But you feel the heat nonetheless.
grapple.ai is a bi-monthly series trying to discern the changes that change everything.
This column will not map new product features, or break news on shifting regulations, or follow Nvidia’s stock price. Instead, each issue will grapple with another avenue of our lives touched by AI—including AI and intimacy, AI and school, AI and the ruling elite, AI and privacy, AI and warfare, AI and humor. It is an attempt to work through a consuming change by degrees.