AI, Crypto, and the Arms Race for Superintelligence: “We speak of an ‘arms race’ because there is some prospect of irreversible global lock-in. First, recursively self-improving machine intelligence introduces the possibility of rapid ‘takeoff’ scenarios, where the progress next year is not double but 3x the progress last year, then 4x the following year, and so forth. Second…the ultimate outcome of an intelligence explosion is plausibly sensitive to subtle differences in the initial conditions at takeoff.”
Beyond the Frontier: “What is needed is a radical reorientation of cultural and artistic production towards a hard embrace of the reality of this society. We need new forms of thinking and practice across all creative mediums: a new seriousness, a new discipline, a new passion. We need a new art and a new avant-garde, which abandons the exhausted sterility of conceptual art and returns to the spirit of poetry.”
Dreamwork and Ideology: Unraveling the Dreamwork That Makes The Dream (Nightmare) Work: “Dreamwork is a narrative synthesis that smooths over conflicts, errors, to make the world and our experience tolerable, etc. (this is not unlike the oeuvre of Kant‘s model of cognition where our faculties and categories insistently and persistently interface with the outside to produce an experience of the world – i.e., synthesis.”
Embodiment Is A Superpower In An Abstract World: “If you want to stand out from the machines, stand next to another person.”
Hyperamerica: “America, along with its economy, market, culture, and theology, can be viewed not as a static, fixed system but as a shifting, cybernetic meta-organism that interacts with and intensifies apocalyptic feedback loops. American hegemony is, consequently, not merely a question of the military power and cultural dominance of a single nation. America is a mythic force that shapes geopolitics through a Promethean will.”
Propontis: “The wilderness, with its dense woods and unseen trails, whispered of the world’s true face.”
The New World Open and Clean: “As Romano Guardini writes in The End of the Modern World (1956), one advantage of our ‘last age’ is that love may very well ‘achieve an intimacy and harmony never known to this day:’
If we understand the eschatological text of Holy Writ correctly, trust and courage will totally form the character of the last age. The surrounding ‘Christian’ culture and the traditions supported by it will lose their effectiveness. That loss will belong to the danger given by scandal, that danger of which it is said: ‘it will, if possible, deceive even the elect’ (Matthew xxiv, 24).
Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world (Matthew xxiii, 12), but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ. Perhaps man will come to experience this love anew, to taste the sovereignty of its origin, to know its independence of the world, to sense the mystery of its final why?”
The Red Hand Files: “Grief is the expansion of the essential substance upon which we order our lives.”
