Category Archives: Uncategorized

This Aeon article by Phillip Ball tempers the fatalistic, dual techno-optimist/doom narratives currently surrounding Aritfical Intelligence, by looking at the promise and history of nanotechnology: https://aeon.co/essays/no-suffering-no-death-no-limits-the-nanobots-pipe-dream?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=426d6e4486-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_09_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-19d630b572-70652573

“…magic dressed in the science of its time, by means of which almost anything is possible.”

“The oneiric technologies currently in vogue in Silicon Valley include the notion of terraforming other planets, transforming their geosphere and atmosphere to render them inhabitable; cryonic freezing of your head after death so that your consciousness can one day be rebooted; and the related idea of mind-uploading to computer circuits. These techno-fantasies are central to the utopias regularly forecast by tech billionaires.”

The similarity of these technodreams? Like the recent New Yorker article on the pursuit of immortality, they spring from their billionaire dreamers’ shared terror of death. These billionaires are all men. Some women come close to death in childbirth, get comfortable with it, realize not to fear it. Cultures rooted in community and transmission and kinship likewise know we are nodes on a continuum, that we live for those who came before and those who come after will carry us on with them.

Nanotechnology didn’t follow the magical thinking of it’s boosters. And the article author sees this again with ai. “We are accepting the fantastical prophecies of the likes of Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, who has forecast that ‘within three to five years we’ll have … [artificial] general intelligence, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as the smartest mathematician, physicist, artist, writer, thinker, politician’ (the ‘smartest artist’ being a concept that apparently means something within Silicon Valley).”

Is the difference that anyone with an internet connection can use chatgpt, (i love that my auto correct hasn’t “learned” that “word” yet and wants to change it to “chat get”) whereas not everyone could create/use a nanobot?

In this instance, I hope history repeats itself.

Huh. Whaddya know? I started this blog a little over ten years ago.

It means what we make it mean.

Temporal milestones offer opportunities to reflect. On origins, evolution, current state, and potential future (or lack thereof). Not least on temporality itself. Decades come fore me more swiftly these days. Ten years since high school, college; then 15. Coming up on 20. I am as old as my parents were. Again. The years whip by, significance ever elusive. How am I old enough to have been friends with some people for a quarter century? Old enough for my youngest cousins, people I remember as babies, to be getting hitched? Such revelations come for us all.

But that is immaterial to this blog and its original project, which was to have a space for my brain to continue thinking anthropologically, historically, critically. To turn analytical tools on the culture I live in. To rail against insidious injustices.

In September, briefly, I decided to be more intentional about focusing on the good. The positive. What was going well. Fell off that wagon quickly, but it’s a wagon worth catching up with. For those of us with a cynical kneejerk, who find negativity and complaint to be cozy bedfellows, however hungover they make the rest of our travels through life, training our attention on positive aspects of reality takes a lot of work. It is reminding ourselves, over and over, to breathe and think of something good. And it turns out, there are many parts of life that attract this attention and warrant gratitude. I continue to relearn this lesson.

One project I’m devoting more attention to these days than this neglected blog:

• Lost is Found (Every object has a life story; are you listening?)

Blogs, if they persist, change with their creators. I am not who I was ten years ago. Thank goodness. Hopefully I have retained and am adopting what’s of service to the universe.

Along with focusing as much as I can on what is good in life, I am trying to orient toward this thought:

We matter to those who love us.
What we create matters most to the people who already know and love us.
The rest is gravy.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog. I am being ultra-lazy and posting it for a largely uninterested posterity. Thank you to all my readers–human and spam-bot alike–who have made the past year in blogging a memorable and thought-provoking one.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,600 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 43 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.