I’ve been reading the work of L.M. Sacasas for a very long time, certainly since before he moved his writing to “a Substack.” He is a modern philosopher who I often agree with, and also sometimes vehemently disagree with—but never in a way that made me kick him out of my RSS feed.
I say all this because I haven’t linked to him in a while, and when I say “I think you should read this article by a philosophy dude” I don’t want you to dismiss it out of hand. In Do Not Resign From Life he takes on what we now all know as “the AI revolution”, and argues that even though there is plenty to complain about, one thing it shouldn’t do is make us think that we don’t matter as humans any more.
I don’t want to say much more about this essay, I just really hope you decide to read it. If you’re intrigued enough, stop here and click the link. If you’re not there yet, here’s a taste of the argument:
I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason or use language in a manner that corresponds to the human use of language, etc. But let us grant for argument’s sake that they can. They can certainly generate passable simulations of such things. But why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.
The machine cannot make us yield our ground. It is true that other humans can turn the machine against us, but that is a different problem. Here, I simply want to encourage us not to abandon those activities that bring us purpose, meaning, and delight, which are often the very activities that also bring us together.