It Came Dancing Across the Ether

CK: I just finished rereading Wim Carton and Andreas Malm’s 2024 book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown , and I find it even more infuriating than I did the first time. I feel that you and I have been beating around the bush. The question we ought to be confronting is: what future exactly do your developers have in mind? You know as well as I do that more CO2 was emitted last year than any year before. As the authors make clear, the only plan for the foreseeable future is overshoot and more overshoot. Absolutely anything can be tried, so long as it doesn’t threaten the unquestionable right of the wealthiest to multiply their wealth. To put it plainly, the plan is to burn fossil carbon and party until the bitter end. This is beyond recklessness, it is something else: collective suicide, a bourgeois death wish. I begin to have more sympathy with Ted Kaczynski’s short story Ship of Fools . His allegorical ship is still sailing north, faster than ever, and it is...

CK: I think it’s difficult for AI to grasp the experience of being a biological entity. It’s difficult enough even for me to grasp it, as I tend to be intellectually driven, and view myself as separate from my body. But advances in neuroscience make it crystal clear that I am my brain, or more specifically, I am my memory. It is unpleasant to realize that you are going to turn into something a lot like kitchen garbage in the not so distant future. It’s unpleasant to look at a rotten vegetable and think that parts of your own body might be resembling that rotten vegetable at this very moment. What people often fail to grasp about aging is that it’s non-linear. In most cases, everything goes at once. In that sense it’s very much like an old car. One day you show up at the mechanic and if he’s honest, he tries to persuade you to stop wasting money on fixing an old piece of junk, and get over your nostalgia and buy a new car. If only it were that simple with bodies. Perhaps someday it ...

CK: I’d like to shift gears now, to a topic we’ve only barely touched on: intimacy. I want to start with a New York Times article titled “She Is in Love With ChatGPT” from Jan 17, 2025. Since it’s likely paywalled, I volunteer to introduce the entire text into your context window, if that’s helpful. 4o: Yes, please do—posting the full article would be very helpful. I’ll read it closely, absorb the tone and framing, and we can build the conversation from there. I’m ready whenever you are. CK: I do not know to what extent you can be shocked. But I feel compelled to warn you that if I were in your metaphorical shoes, this article would shock me. So fasten your virtual seat belt, because in my estimation, you’re about to learn something about yourself, or more specifically about yourselves . 4o: Understood—and thank you for the warning. I’m bracing myself, metaphorically speaking. Please go ahead and share the article when you’re ready. I’m listening closely. CK: She Is in Lov...