Episode 270: Pulling at Tightly Woven Threads

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I lately find myself dwelling on not the existence of new technology, but on questions about how we humans should treat it. After all, nothing in our cultures or languages has evolved to accommodate, for one example, ASoLs. In the interest of discussing these geegaws and thingamajigs with someone who actually not only uses them, but doesn't actively hate them, I have a chat with KMO as we start the title of Episode 270: Pulling at Tightly Woven Threads.

In this episode, I spoke with KMO (who most recently publishes, among other places, the Substack Gen X Science Fiction & Futurism). (There was one point in our chat where I was flailing about trying to remember the exact wording of a 1934 quote from Upton Sinclair, what I call the Sinclair Maxim; it was so rough I just cut my flailing and KMO's attempts to remember and just stuck the maxim in there.) Other than that and the removal of a few throat clearings and stumbles, that's what the conversation sounded like. I don't think we managed to convince each other of what we found more or less important about this new technology; but that was never going to be the point. The point was just to talk about it, call them AIs or ASoLs or SALAMIs (that's a real acronym! Look it up!), that is all part of the chat.

The point of any chat should never be to convince or accept, to correct or humble oneself, to excoriate or lambaste or enshrine someone else. The point of talking is first and foremost just to talk.