Who Will You Be After ChatGPT Takes Your Job? in WIRED:
At the furthest edge of white-collar work is a species of task where competency is so admired that it becomes a sport or an art, and competency is rewarded by society with status and esteem, over and above financial compensation. This is the category of games of logic and art. Our shock at the new wave of AI models like ChatGPT and Midjourney comes from their proficiency at the artier, more creative tasks like writing and illustration. But the more strictly logical sports of chess and Go have long since been conquered by previous waves of AI, and so it may be instructive for the left-brainers to look in on how the right-brainers have handled usurpation, emotionally and practically.
The Legion Lonely in Hazlitt:
Slowly but surely, I feel my social world slipping away from me. . . . It’s not unusual for me to go several days in a row with no social contact. . . . I don’t think of myself as antisocial—I love people, love being around them, and have had so many good friendships—but it often feels like an uphill battle, and mystifyingly complex, to not slip back endlessly into this pit of despair. The thing is, I wasn’t always like this. How did I get here?
Behind the Closed Door: Remembering Edward Albee in Hazlitt:
When I watched the movie adaption of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with my first girlfriend, the witty, vindictive warhorse couple of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton seemed both aspirational and abject, like looking into a doomed but beautiful future. Being young enough to aestheticize cruelty with no moral remainder, we used Albee’s plays as a substitute for real experience—how glamorous to be professors, to drink and to hate each other.
Muse Feed at Real Life Magazine:
Like the sentient ocean in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, the movements of the scene, the replication and propagation of memes and the mutations of in-jokes, all modulated by Facebook’s algorithm, can feel like an enormous, amorphous mass of ambiguous consciousness that makes elaborate, alien patterns of great beauty.
The Missing Chair on Koffler.Digital:
It’s hard to describe the peculiar emotional fallout of definitively losing someone extremely close to you who nevertheless is not dead and could return to you any day—in theory, any of the individual seconds of your life. It’s similar to grief, but it’s not grief. It’s Schrödinger’s grief: each day of your life may be either, from the perspective of a future in which she has returned, part of a deeply-regrettable-but-ultimately-survivable ‘interim’, the pain of which was wiped out in a moment, OR, in an alternate hypothetical future, today might have been just another day I foolishly didn’t give up hope on a clearly lost cause.
Metafilter: The Internet's First Family in Hazlitt:
MetaFilter users are what I would characterize as “self-consciously smart,” which, I promise, doesn’t play out as gratingly as it sounds. It’s more like, “I know I’m smart, I know you’re smart, we’re all smart around here, so we don’t have to show off (although we do sometimes anyway cuz it’s fun).” And when someone comes around and says, with sophomoric hubris, “I know more about this than you can possibly imagine,” that person is laughed down heartily, and the phrase becomes just another site meme.
Songs of Another World in Little Brother 1:
And from a philosophical point of view, you can easily say, well, hairball jokes are a part of mouse culture just as much as they’re a part of cat culture; hairballs just have a more complicated relation to their audience in mouse culture. But do you want to be the mouse culture in this scenario? I don’t. I want to have my culture’s art reach directly into my heart and play all the crazy strings inside it like a violin.
(Excerpted as: The Coigne Of Vantage: A Letter From Tuscaloosa Concerning America And David Foster Wallace in Toronto Standard)