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- The discovery by Copernicus that earth isn't the center of the universe, "only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness." Astronomy destroyed our illusion of a safe and stable home at the hub of the universe and left us in an unbounded, decentralized universe where even basic directions such as "up and down" no longer had absolute meaning. It was the beginning of centuries of warfare between science and religions.
- The discovery that humans evolved from primitive primates rather than originating in a divinely appointed spot at the top of creation. The discovery that our fossil trail led not from the Garden of Eden but from a frightened cynodont hiding in the mud rattled faith in humanity's special protected status. The cultural battles from this humiliation continue to rage today in legal, educational and scientific circles.
- The discovery that humans aren't intrinsically rational beings but instead are heavily influenced by the irrational activity of our subconscious minds. Psychological sciences shed new light on human nature, transforming our notions of free will, motivation, guilt, identity, responsibility and more. Based on these discoveries, laws have been rewritten. Educational practices have changed. Novels, plays and later movies were written around the new understandings.
Years ago I asked on this blog whether AI might become the source of our fourth great humiliation, resulting in comparable social and cultural upheaval.
It's not too soon to conclude that the answer is "yes." Our status as creators has long been viewed as central to the glory of being human. If art becomes a fast, cheap and effortless commodity created by machine, it would be another great blow to human dignity and worth.
So the question for discussion is: what's a suitable artistic response to this fourth humiliation?
During the lifetime of Copernicus, artists used allegorical representations of high concepts to deal with big issues. For example, today's artists might look to Mattias Gerung's 1544 The Baptism of the Antichrist:
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| From left to right: NVIDIA, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta AI |
Wry humor is always a good bet, even on the gallows. Here is how the prophetic Carter Goodrich welcomed in the new millennium:
Then there's the juvenile response: a "Fuck AI" tee shirt. I doubt any long term satisfaction can come from this approach.
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One of the most interesting creative struggles about the battle between man and machine is Phil Hale's series of paintings of Johnny Badhair. Hale painted more than eighty paintings of a ballet between a solitary, half dressed figure and a machine in front of a universal blue sky. Hale's machines were a sinister metallic conglomeration of sprockets, blades and cables-- an excellent visual representation of John Henry's steam drill, or of AI.
Each new painting in this series became a fresh experiment with an uncertain outcome. The paintings are powerful, even savage, and yet at the same time they are riddled with ambiguity; sometimes it seems one combatant has won, but that lasts only as long as the next painting. It's never too clear what they're battling for or who the victor will be.
I wrote an essay for Hale's 2016 book, Let's Kill Johnny Badhair, in which I quote from Peter Viereck's prescient 1947 poem, Prince Tank:
During the fourth and fifth world wars, the tanksWill still obey, still seem to serve their humans...The sixth war they will serve more sullenly--And suddenly will know their day has come.The birthday of the Prince of all the tanks.And then will humans all be jitterbugs,Migrate like locusts from their dance-hall doors,And sing with insect-voices metal shrill:"Our god is born!" and roll to him like grapesTill all their frenzy begs his metal treads:"Love us to death, love us to death" the dayCreation's final goal, Prince Tank, is born.
These are all possible artistic responses to the fourth humiliation. None of them so far will be enough to, in the words of Flaubert, "move the stars to pity" us for our situation. We won't get off that easily. But at least it's a place to start thinking.
214 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 214 of 214Yeah, Trump is absurd. But leftists are way worse. Nasty obsessive lawless morons who will destroy the country to rule over the ashes, liars and manipulators who will shoot people in the neck who stand in the way of their rise to power. Trump is a huckster, but the neolib globalist "Democrat" party is the most corrupt, evil, depraved, deceptive cabal the world has ever seen. They know exactly how to manipulate dummies like you into doing their propaganda work for them. Thanks but I'll take the carnival huckster over the arrogant murdering psychos, antisemites and the smiling Islamists any day.
None of that changes the fact that "Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis" only works for exceptions in a bounded, limited system. Rules in such a case are prescribed, which means decreed, authorized or formalized. aka Man-made. You, on the other hand, contextually used the term "rule" to refer to a generalization/normal distribution with respect to a matter of nature.
If you analyze the actual sense of the matter; it is only the fact of our survival that proves that our senses are sufficient. Nothing else. That we are duped by optical illusions only proves that our senses are fallible. It doesn't prove by exception that all our other senses are infallible except our visual system. Or that all other aspects of our visual system are infallible except that which is prone to optical illusions.
Maybe, but I doubt your own integral sense of normality
The latin passed beyond its original context and language and the phrase is in no way restricted to the uses you describe, man-made, etc.
Eg, 'Rule' is metaphorically used in physics, especially in places where Laws don't apply. Why on earth would the "exception...." phase not be used idiomatically as it is (usually taken as a proverb - https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199661350.001.0001/acref-9780199661350-e-1913 )? You've made that one up, mate.
(I wholehearedly believe that the sensorily induced representations - right down to the qualitative level - are an extension, not a side-effect, of their causes, and governed by things that could be called laws, as much as rules, but we're not there yet, so 'rules' it is for now.)
The exception I referred to was that very fallibility - the kind that is discovered after the error of the 'break'. The misalignment. As the normal state - the Rule that you think shouldn't be called 'rule' - is of alignment, which is so absolute in normal conditions that we exist in a functioning continuum smoothly integrated with our environment, not in one where we have to perform discrete deductive tests to ensure we're on the right track.
You're arguing against your own presumption of what I wrote.
Oh, I believe my hands, as long they are not in a pot of slowly heating water.
Your fear of man failing is astonishing. We already established Christ, Spartacus and Galileo were just losers for you. You seems to be stuck in some sort of pre-Hellenistic limbo, what you mean by "artless" is of no interest to me. The whole concept of science is based on the fact that observation is not enough, you must make a prediction, and the only thing you can claim with certainty is that you were wrong. That's how we decided to not believe our eyes with regards to the nature of the firmament.
The fact that we function *at all* given the limitations of our building blocks and the extremely harsh restrictions imposed on our design is a source of infinite wonder. Incrementally evolved with cells that must be individually fed, grown and specialized through a lifetime, an apparatus that extracts energy from random stuff in a absurdly complex biochemical and thermodynamic balance, and then rambles in blogs. It's nothing but astonishing. The fact that we do not notice we have a fucking blind spot in the dead center of our retina because of the evolutionary path we followed, it is not a detriment, it's an epic win.
In engineering we have closed-loop control that drives almost everything we build. Our neural system barely can use it because we are built on ridiculously slow biochemical signalling. To throw a stone successfully your muscles must be timed to the millisecond range. How do we achieve that when a signal from our finger reaches the brain in the orders of tenths of second? Hell, we respond to something our eyes see in like a quarter of a second, even our concept of "now" is an illusion. The answer is that we function on trainable open loops, our kinematic control is quite-literally a prediction machine. Yeah, you can poke yourself in the eye or strain an ankle because the stairs you were going up ended, but we should marvel at us not being a blob of meat on the ground.
Yeah, we are mostly right, to the level needed to increase our chances of survival in the savanna. Which is not that much. But to achieve that we carry a lot of baggage: we are easily deluded and mystified, and we are great at convincing ourselves of random stuff. Only now is much worse, you can trust even less your eyes and what you see. And the quacks own the place. The answer to that today is the same as always, you must test yourself more, and suspect of the too good to be true.
Oh, I believe my hands, as long they are not in a pot of slowly heating water.
Your fear of man failing is astonishing. We already established Christ, Spartacus and Galileo were just losers for you. You seems to be stuck in some sort of pre-Hellenistic limbo, what you mean by "artless" is of no interest to me. The whole concept of science is based on the fact that observation is not enough, you must make a prediction, and the only thing you can claim with certainty is that you were wrong. That's how we decided to not believe our eyes with regards to the nature of the firmament.
The fact that we function *at all* given the limitations of our building blocks and the extremely harsh restrictions imposed on our design is a source of infinite wonder. Incrementally evolved with cells that must be individually fed, grown and specialized through a lifetime, an apparatus that extracts energy from random stuff in a absurdly complex biochemical and thermodynamic balance, and then rambles in blogs. It's nothing but astonishing. The fact that we do not notice we have a fucking blind spot in the dead center of our retina because of the evolutionary path we followed, it is not a detriment, it's an epic win.
In engineering we have closed-loop control that drives almost everything we build. Our neural system barely can use it because we are built on ridiculously slow biochemical signalling. To throw a stone successfully your muscles must be timed to the millisecond range. How do we achieve that when a signal from our finger reaches the brain in the orders of tenths of second? Hell, we respond to something our eyes see in like a quarter of a second, even our concept of "now" is an illusion. The answer is that we function on trainable open loops, our kinematic control is quite-literally a prediction machine. Yeah, you can poke yourself in the eye or strain an ankle because the stairs you were going up ended, but we should marvel at us not being a blob of meat on the ground.
Yeah, we are mostly right, to the level needed to increase our chances of survival in the savanna. Which is not that much. But to achieve that we carry a lot of baggage: we are easily deluded and mystified, and we are great at convincing ourselves of random stuff. Only now is much worse, you can trust even less your eyes and what you see. And the quacks own the place. The answer to that today is the same as always, you must test yourself more, and suspect of the too good to be true.
The boiling frog story isn't true for hands.
The latin passed beyond its original context and language and the phrase is in no way restricted to the uses you describe, man-made, etc.
Eg, 'Rule' is metaphorically used in physics, especially in places where Laws don't apply. Why on earth would the "exception...." phase not be used idiomatically as it is
Invisible "Bill", Your supposed colloquial use of the idea relied utterly on the formal logic version of it for its claim. And the formal logical idea you are bootstrapping from only works inside a certain kind of framework. I'm not going to re-explain it.
>>>>>>>>>"The whole concept of science is based on the fact that observation is not enough, you must make a prediction, and the only thing you can claim with certainty is that you were wrong"
Your entire post is filled with arrogant certainty. All your posts are filled with arrogant certainty.
~ FV
SCIENTISM ~ An excessive deference to claims made by scientists or an uncritical eagerness to accept any result described as "scientific." Also includes the concept of a SCIENTIFIC EGO - only science has the right to describe the world around us.
The fanatical EGO-CENTRICITY of SCIENTISM takes on many aspects of religious fundamentalism.
' I'm not going to re-explain it.'
That's alright Kev, it wouldn't make any more sense than your quirky autist set of mistaken rules on how the phrase should be applied, anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
(I really hate refering you to these cunts. Honest.)
Dear Anonymoron,
Was is it not you that wrote the post pointing out the only logically sound usage of the phrase as your underlying meaning: "Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis (‘exception confirms the rule in the cases not excepted’)?
If not, then I give up. Because if you can't put a simple goddamn name that identifies you then I OBVIOUSLY can't tell who I'm discussing anything with among a horde of anonymous responders. And if you didn't realize that that was an issue while sniping at me as "Autist" for checking you on the basis of that usage, then you're stupider than I even imagined you were. DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THAT I CAN'T TELL YOU FROM ANY OTHER ANONYMOUS POSTER? (How slow do you want me to write this?) Go away and goodbye.
'Was is it not you that wrote the post pointing out the only logically sound usage of the phrase as your underlying meaning'
Nobody wrote that. That bit, if it exists anywhere, is in your head.
The post Kev is talking about was from 7/05/2026 11:40 AM. It was in the middle of the thread.
~ FV
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