"It is the idea that we all contain the world and the world disappears when we disappear. There’s a word for that and I can’t f***ing remember what it is."

"That’s what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of that happening to me and every time that I can’t remember a word or something, I think, 'This is the start.'"

Said Stephen King, quoted in "Stephen King on dementia — ‘I’m afraid of that happening to me’/The bestselling author, 77, talks about why he writes every day — and says each time he can’t remember the right word he worries: 'This is the start'" (London Times).

The article isn't entirely about the fear of your own brain pre-deceasing you. It's about other fears, including the fear of AI. King says:

“I don’t really care about AI. My sons [Owen King and Joe Hill] are both writers … and they’re all hot to trot about AI and how awful it is for writers.... I just think that it’s a foregone conclusion that people are going to write better prose than some kind of automated intelligence.... I think that once there is a kind of self-replicating intelligence, once it learns how to teach itself, in other words, it isn’t going to be a question of human input any more. It’s going to be able to do that itself. And then … have you ever read The Time Machine by HG Wells? In it, a Victorian scientist travels to the year 802,701...

I like how he has the precise year, down to the 1, still in his mind and worth saying as a challenge to the fiend, Dementia, that wants to infiltrate and destroy.

"A famous economist once remarked: 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.'"

"That epigram, issued by Robert Solow in 1987, became the subject of a lot of debate among economists in the 1990s.... A decade later, another famous economist made a similar observation about the internet — actually, a prediction: 'By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.' That was Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.... We’re now hearing similar questions about artificial intelligence...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "Are we in an AI bubble that’s getting ready to pop? The promised AI revolution isn’t here yet. But it’s a smart bet that productivity gains will follow" (WaPo).

And this caught my eye: "A friend who is a lawyer... asked a chatbot to draft a document, and though the draft needed work, he estimated it had saved him two to four hours of typing. I asked him what he did with the extra time. He pleaded the fifth." Pleaded the Fifth, eh? That makes it sound as though he billed the client for the 2 to 4 hours it would have taken to do the work traditionally!

It's not just the "typing" that the AI did for him. It also composed material into solid standard English, wrote the citations in the required form, put the substance in some sort of order, and probably much more. It wasn't just "typing" he'd have been doing during those hours. 

McArdle is using the word "typing" in a way that reminds me of Truman Capote's famous insult to Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." Oh, Jack wasn't just typing typing. He was typing typing. 

"Yeah, well, you know, maybe like, I think it's part of what people in America wanna, you know, people in America wanna feel excited and inspired about the future."

Said Elon Musk — here, in the transcript at TurboScribe — at 1:36:27 in his conversation last night with Donald Trump. He continues with this very generic, very sunny vision:

MUSK: They wanna feel like the future is gonna be better than the past and that America is gonna do things that are greater than we've done in the past, reach new heights that make you proud to be an American and excited about the future. They want the American dream back.

Trump responds echoically, then darkly: 

"Be safe out there!"

Page break for your protection from TikTok:

"Biden has nothing to say about the future. The future is beyond his imagining...."

"If the Republicans are offering right-wing populism, the Democrats can’t just continue to offer grievance agendas, especially since most of those grievances have been dramatically meliorated. The dirty little secret of Diversity, Equity and Identity (DEI) programs is that they’re indicative of past-thinking, not the future. Indeed, when someone like former Harvard President Claudine Gay—a product of the DEI-industrial complex—blames her firing on racism, not lunkheaded Congressional testimony and plagiarism, the traditional Democrat identity-rhetoric begins to seem laughable.... At this point, the Dems need to offer an anti-identity agenda, an American unity agenda...."

Writes Joe Klein, in "It's Not Just Biden/The Democrats are Senescent, too" (Substack).

But Klein is 77 (the same age as Trump) so he says it's not for him to say what belongs in the Democrats' future-looking agenda. He wants "some fresh young genius" to tell us what to do, someone who understands... what? Video games and A.I.! 

"Grimes is enlisting free labor - potentially thousands of people, and a lot of them children - to make music with various aspects of her likeness, under the guise of a creative endeavor..."

"... and the chance to 'work with Grimes.' In reality, she's a burgeoning CEO in the midst of building a virtual sweatshop, something companies have been doing for eons, except now it appears this artist wants to give it a try. For example, not long ago she brought up taking 50% of the royalties of some of the more popular songs made with her likeness. And, just now in this article, she's playfully bringing up taking one of the AI-sampled songs someone made, and making her own version. She has all the right in the world to do it, but it's not a revolution I would like to see, and I don't understand why this would be something to praise."

The top-rated comment on "Grimes Invited Anyone to Make A.I. Grimes Songs. Here Are Her Reviews. The producer and pop singer, long a proponent of technological experimentation, has 'open-sourced' her voice using new A.I. tools. She’s been impressed by the results" (NYT).

Here's a page full of the labor of artists using Grimes AI and competing for a $10,000 prize.

Here's one example that was embedded over at the NYT and commented on by the true winner of this game, Grimes:

She said: "I love how weird this song is — it sounds really inhuman.... You can hear the technology very profoundly. What I like about the early A.I. stuff is that you can hear the technology very profoundly. I think people will appreciate that more in five years when they realize people only made stuff like this for a couple months."

So don't worry. This seems inhuman, but later AI will seem human. You'll be nostalgic for this in the future. You'll think something like: Remember when what was inhuman felt sweetly and tragically inhuman? We've lost touch with the poignancy that was the inhumanity of early AI. It's all just uniformly "human" now.

"Young women at the time were turning their backs on the corseted shapes of their mothers, with their nipped waists and ship’s-prow chests — the shape of Dior..."

"... which had dominated since 1947. They disdained the uniform of the establishment — the signifiers of class and age telegraphed by the lacquered helmets of hair, the twin sets and heels, and the matchy-matchy accessories — the model for which was typically in her 30s, not a young gamine like Ms. Quant."

I'm reading — with tears in my eyes — "Mary Quant, British Fashion Revolutionary, Dies at 93/Known as the mother of the miniskirt, clad in her signature play clothes and boots, with huge painted eyes, fake freckles and a bob, she epitomized London’s Swinging Sixties" (NYT).

Thank you, Mary Quant! Thanks for the great joy of the very best fashion — in my subjective experience — the most fun, the most relief from formality and stodginess.

And thanks to the NYT writer, Penelope Green, for coming up with "nipped waists and ship’s-prow chests" to express so concisely what felt great to rebel against.

Futurism was much cheekier then:

"I think we’re probably going to be embarrassed by the pandemic, every kind of reaction to it and the way it’s sort of defined our time."

"To me, it’s already sort of becoming an embarrassing topic, and you can feel people not wanting to talk about it.... I feel embarrassed about being a little irrational about certain topics and the politicization of every single thing that happened in that whole time period, where how people handled their own health was a political topic. And that just doesn’t make rational sense. Also, how every single thing in our lives — even what music we listen to and what art we see — you have to align yourself with a certain political agenda. I think that will eventually feel embarrassing, or it’ll hopefully turn into something else, because I feel like there’s no end to that thought process. It makes people go a little crazy and become conspiracy theorists or just totally isolated from all of their friends."

Writes the essayist/novelist Natasha Stagg, one of many contributors to "Future Cringe/One day we’ll look back on this moment and wonder: What were we thinking?" (NYT).

I love the big question, what are we doing now that we are going to be embarrassed/ashamed of in the future? I noticed this question when I was a child and heard things said about people in the past, as if those people were benighted and ridiculous. We are those people to people somewhere out there in the future. How can I avoid being looked at by them the way people today are looking at the people of the past?

"This feverish techno-utopianism distracts funders from pressing problems that already exist here on Earth..."

"... said Luke Kemp...  an 'EA-adjacent' critic of effective altruism... 'The things they push tend to be things that Silicon Valley likes,' Kemp said. They’re the kinds of speculative, futurist ideas that tech billionaires find intellectually exciting. 'And they almost always focus on technological fixes' to human problems 'rather than political or social ones.'  There are other objections. For one thing, lavishly expensive, experimental bioengineering would be accessible, especially initially, to 'only a tiny sliver of humanity,' Kemp said; it could bring about a future caste system in which inequality is not only economic, but biological.... Kemp argued that effective altruism and longtermism often seem to be working toward a kind of regulatory capture. 'The long-term strategy is getting EAs and EA ideas into places like the Pentagon, the White House, the British government and the UN' to influence public policy, he said...."

From "Power-hungry robots, space colonization, cyborgs: inside the bizarre world of ‘longtermism’" (The Guardian)(which begins "Sam Bankman-Fried said his billions would save the world – but his philanthropic ideas ranged from the worthy to the severely outlandish").

"We take a human-centered approach to design a future massively better for everyone."

I love this phrase, painted on the window of a design firm in Munich, Germany:

 

Massively better.

The photo was taken by my son Chris, who also made this video walking around the Marienplatz ("Mary's Square"):

"To see how population stagnation or even decline need not spell disaster, you can look at countries where it’s already occurring..."

"... as Daniel Moss... did last year. Take Japan: 'Despite the caricature of the country as an economic failure in the grip of terminal decline, life goes on,' he wrote. 'True, growth in overall G.D.P. has been fairly anemic in past few decades, but G.D.P. per capita has held up well.' What’s more, he added, Japan’s unemployment rate is very low and has remained so throughout the pandemic.... Japan’s example lends some credence to the view of Kim Stanley Robinson, a widely acclaimed science-fiction writer, who believes that an aging population with a smaller work force could actually lead to economic prosperity. 'It sounds like full employment to me,' he argued.... 'The precarity and immiseration of the unemployed would disappear as everyone had access to work that gave them an income and dignity and meaning.'"

From "U.S. Population Growth Has Nearly Flatlined. Is That So Bad?" by Spencer Bokat-Lindell (in the NYT).

"If people matter morally regardless of their distance from us in space, then they also matter regardless of their distance in time."

"So we should care about future generations. And right now, we as a society are not doing nearly enough to protect the interests of future people. None of this means we can’t show any partiality to specific people. Maybe we owe some additional obligations to those who are close to us in space and time, who are near and dear, who have benefited us. Nonetheless, we should still give very substantial moral consideration to people who are not yet with us. The second premise is just that, in expectation, there are enormous numbers of future people. We really might be at the beginning of a long and flourishing civilization. And when you take the sheer number of future people into account, then we shouldn’t just think about future generations a little bit but really quite a lot. How much precisely is open to debate. All longtermists think we need to be doing more to benefit future generations. 'Strong longtermism' holds that the well-being of future generations is actually the most important thing to consider, at least when we are making our most consequential decisions."

 
From "Why Effective Altruists Fear the AI Apocalypse/A conversation with the philosopher William MacAskill" (NY Magazine).

Much more at the link — including the fear of the AI apocalypse — but nothing about abortion. I pictured commenters raising the subject, so I looked elsewhere to see what MacAskill has to say about it.

Here's an interview he did with Tyler Cowen a couple weeks ago:

"Fuller’s theory of ephemeralization anticipated the digital age; his invented terms 'synergy' and 'Spaceship Earth' became part of the language..."

"... scientists who discovered a carbon molecule that looked like a geodesic sphere were aided by his insights (and named it buckminsterfullerene). But it’s also hard to take some of his more eccentric ideas seriously, such as 'air-deliverable housing,' or the proposal to cover Midtown Manhattan with a huge dome. National Lampoon parodied his apparently limitless technological optimism in a feature titled 'Buckminster Fuller’s Repair Manual for the Entire Universe.'... Fuller’s public lectures, which could go on for five or six hours, were famous. Always extemporaneous, these modern-day Chautauquas were a startling weave of poetry and science, delivered in his own peculiar locution. Stewart Brand summed it up well: 'Fuller’s lectures have a raga quality of rich, nonlinear, endless improvisation full of convergent surprises.'... The counterculture eventually lost its enthusiasm for the domes, which, according to Brand, always leaked, wasted space and were impossible to subdivide and furnish. 'When my generation outgrew the domes,' Brand wrote, 'we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.'"

 
Writes Witold Rybczynski, in "Buckminster Fuller, Role Model and Cautionary Tale/The biography 'Inventor of the Future,' by Alec Nevala-Lee, explores the dreams and failures of an American optimist" (NYT).

There's a Wikipedia article for "Spaceship Earth," and it refutes the assertion that Fuller "invented" the term:

Weeds of July.

Joe Pye weed:

Butterfly weed:

Feel free to write about anything you want in the comments. Raise your own topics. Myself, I've read a lot of news stories this morning and my rejection rate is unusually high.

Some headlines feel so stupid — "Finally, the dam is breaking against Trump" — that it puts me off all the surrounding headlines. It's like a disease.

Did you know monkeypox is an emergency? Did you know there's a movie called "Nope"? Did you know "Liz Holtzman Wants Another Crack at Congress, 50 Years Later"? Did you know "Joe Manchin Squanders an Opportunity and Ushers In Despair"? Are you interested in News of the Future: "Jan. 6 Panel After 8 Hearings: Where Will the Evidence Lead?"

"Faced with a potentially campaign-ending crisis this weekend, Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman of Pennsylvania released a Sunday statement thanking the 'kick ass staff and doctors' who treated his stroke."

"The vernacular was not the stuff of parliamentary propriety — 'I need to take a minute,' he wrote about stepping back from the trail — but that was the point, as is often the case with Fetterman. At 6-foot-8, with a shiny pate, a salt-and-pepper goatee, tattooed arms and a sports-bar fashion sense, Fetterman was announcing from a hospital bed that even in illness he remained a different kind of Democrat. It’s a pitch that paid off Tuesday in a state primary that could set up the one-term lieutenant governor to lead his party into the marquee open-seat contest of the 2022 election — a chance for Democrats to find out whether they can arrest the building red wave and their declining White, working-class support with a candidate who does not fit easily into any partisan box. Fetterman, 52, easily beat his principal Democratic rival, Rep. Conor Lamb, a clean-cut Marine Corps veteran and prosecutor whom President Biden had compared to his late son Beau and whom other party leaders as recently as 2018 had held up as an exemplar of the party’s future."

From "Democrats pick John Fetterman for Senate in Pennsylvania/He could represent a chance for a party facing declining White working-class support to put forth a candidate who doesn’t fit easily into any partisan box" (WaPo).

So... one guy may "represent a chance" for the Democratic Party as it faces decline and the other guy was "held up as an exemplar of the party’s future." Looks like the party went into the primary assured that the winner would represent the future. Whatever happens will of course be what was once that crazy thing called The Future. The version of the future that actually arrived is the one without the clean-cut Marine preferred by Biden and other party leaders. The Fetterman future is here:

"Every generation has had an apocalyptic view of their lives... We’re not wired to save.... We’re wired to consume."

"If you have an exciting vision of the future, those are the people who aggressively save for retirement. If you have an apocalyptic vision of the future, why would you save for it? Of course you wouldn’t."

Said Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist, quoted in "The World’s a Mess. So They’ve Stopped Saving for Tomorrow. Many adults under 35 are throwing financial caution to the wind. It’s all about saving less, spending more and pursuing passions" (NYT).

Sentence of the Day.

This is the last sentence of a NYT T Magazine article by Nick Haramis titled, "What’s Behind Fashion’s Rediscovery of the Bare Midriff? It might be that in exposing the waist, designers are also revealing their hope for a bolder and better future." 

Are you ready to diagram (or at least think about diagramming)?

As much as this procession of bare midriffs was a form of immediate wish fulfillment in a time of isolation, uncertainty and protective layers, it was, too, an invocation for the future — an attempt to manifest, by exposing one of our most defenseless, most provocative zones, a future in which we might once again let our guards down and see our bodies not as vessels for disease or targets for injustice but as sources of power.

It's easy to get started:

 

It's a lot of work to complete the diagram, but feel free to jump right into the meaning... if you can. I can get you started on that too. Your midriff is defenseless and provocative — though I have not seen your particular midriff, and it may provoke something quite different from what the toned, sleek runway-model midriffs provoke — but it means something different in the future from what it meant in the past, because in the past we had the isolation of the lockdown, and moving into the future, we're trying to reengage with social life. It's one thing to dream about a defenseless and provocative midriff when you're home alone and can't go out, quite another to venture into the world again — it's hard enough with a fully covered torso — with your bare belly exposed. But what if we could take our defenseless and provocative midriff out in public with a better, stronger attitude, as a source of power? Then it might help us get over our dismal feeling that our body is a vessels for disease or a target for injustice. Maybe! It's all in the mind. Expose the space from the bottom of your breasts to the line reached by low-rise pants. Just get it out there. Think: power!! And then maybe you too will have emerged — truly emerged — from the lockdown.

"Readers of Michael Pollan or Amanda Little understand that it’s morally indefensible to purchase Chilean blueberries or, God forbid, New Zealand lamb."

"But even a humble loaf of sourdough requires the equivalent of about 5.5 tablespoons of diesel fuel, and a supermarket tomato, which Smil describes as no more than 'an appealingly shaped container of water'... is the product of about six tablespoons of diesel. 'How many vegans enjoying the salad,' he writes, 'are aware of its substantial fossil fuel pedigree?'... One must further account for the more than three billion people in the developing world who will need to double or triple their food production to approach a dignified standard of living. Then add the additional two billion who will soon join us. 'For the foreseeable future,' writes Smil, 'we cannot feed the world without relying on fossil fuels.' He performs similar calculations for the world’s production of energy, cement, ammonia, steel and plastic, always reaching the same result: 'A mass-scale, rapid retreat from the current state is impossible.' Smil’s impartial scientist persona slips with each sneer at the 'proponents of a new green world' or 'those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point.'... He finds a worthy target in the inane rhetorical battle, waged by climate activists (and echoed by climate journalists), between blithe optimism and apocalyptic pessimism.... Smil’s book is at its essence a plea for agnosticism, and, believe it or not, humility...."

From "Everything You Thought You Knew, and Why You’re Wrong" by Nathaniel Rich (NYT), reviewing "How the World Really Works/The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going" by Vaclav Smil.

The highest rated comment over there quotes something Smil said in an interview last month:

"The day after his mother died in 1977, Barthes began writing reflections of her death on small strips of paper. The collection of 330 cards..."

"... was published... as 'Mourning Diary.'... Note by note, he attempted to record and make sense of his mother’s passing in a collection of reflections accumulated into a postulation of a book. In one of his earliest entries, he notes how after someone dies, the future itself gives way to a sort of unhinged manufacturing of time he refers to as 'futuromania.'"

From "A memoir of loss, in encyclopedia entries/When my mother died, I struggled to untangle grief, time and memory" by Kristin Keane (WaPo).

Her memoir is called "An Encyclopedia of Bending Time." I would rule out reading any author who puts words together like this: "a collection of reflections accumulated into a postulation." It's close to the way rap music sounds to me, except for "accumulated." Try again, with "accumulation," and you might achieve something with intentional rhymomania.

Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink on "Peng Shuai and China's Anti-American Propaganda."