Maybe I should read just one book at a time. This is what I’m thinking as I make my way through Little Dorrit, with side forays into His Very Best (a biography of President Jimmy Carter) and Soetsu Yanagi’s The Beauty of Everyday Things. If I just stuck to one book at a time, I’d finish each one sooner. But I’d probably read the same number of books. Who knows.
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Well, you can tell that AI didn’t write that paragraph, right? My job involves writing, a lot of it, and so people ask me all the time if I use AI assistants. The answer is the most emphatic “no” (note that in conversation, it’s just a simple, polite “no,” and the emphasis is only in my mind). Once when I was working at home, with several Google Docs open in front of me, one of my sons said “Mom, maybe you should try ChatGPT.” I scoffed, “I don’t need ChatGPT. I AM ChatGPT.” As I tell my friends, writing is one of the few things that I’m good at, and I’m not going to give it up to a robot. If I can’t be bothered to write something, then why should anyone bother to read it?
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But that’s probably the point, right? Who needs writers with their quirks and their obscure references and their goofy jokes, when AI can churn out all the flawless “content” you would ever need? And really, who needs to read in the first place? If you need instructions, ChatGPT and Gemini can read them to you. If you need news and updates, there’s the TV and the radio and online newsfeeds with audio and video content. If you want entertainment, you can stream it. It is not out of the realm of possibility to imagine a future - and not a distant, centuries from now future, but a future that most of us will be alive for - in which most people can neither read nor write. Imagine the public interest ad campaign: RIS - Reading is Superfluous.
Full disclosure: I wake up in the morning waiting for the hammer to fall. The worst case scenario is my default setting. Keeping that in mind, feel free to take my predictions with huge crusty grains of salt. On the other hand, think about it - people don’t memorize telephone numbers anymore - everything is stored in the electronic memory of our phones. Lots of people don’t know how to multiply or divide (or even add or subtract) large numbers. If you buy a coffee that costs $3.78, chances are that the cashier will not know how to count back change from a $20 bill. These are all things that most people could do just a few decades ago. It’s not unreasonable to think that reading and writing could become the next archaic skills.
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You have probably seen this headline or some variation thereof: “Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tells CNN's Anderson Cooper that "we do need to raise the alarm" on the rise of AI and how it could cause mass unemployment” (CNN.com). Anthropic, the company of which Mr. Amodei is the CEO, is an AI startup. Gosh, if only he had some kind of influence. If only he were in a position to, you know, DO SOMETHING about possible mass unemployment arising from the technology that he is making and selling.
I saw a few seconds of an interview with this guy, who sat in front of a TV camera and claimed with a straight face that “This will affect me, too.” How, exactly? By “affect,” do you mean “benefit?” This man is 42 years old, with a PhD from Princeton. According to Beyonce’s internet, his net worth is $1.2 billion. Call me obtuse (and you would not be the first person to do so) but I can’t see how an established highly educated billionaire executive entrepreneur will be “affected” by AI displacing actual humans the way that a 23-year-old working class recent graduate - like my son and lots of his friends - will be “affected.” Dario Amodei made his money, God bless him, and he will be just fine. His family will be just fine. All of his friends in the Finance and Tech Billionaire Bro Club will be just fine. And we all know that that’s all that matters.
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It’s not for nothing that Trump keeps reminiscing about the late 19th century, which he considers America’s “golden age.” Before the meddling progressive social reformers started interfering, ruthless rich men could exploit the poor and powerless with absolute impunity. The rules were made and enforced to keep most people poor and to allow the rich to grab and hoard as much as they possibly could. Trump and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and all of the other MAGA henchpeople would very much like to restore that system, and they’re doing a fine job. Their plan is coming together, and I pity the fool who thinks that Project 2025 and DOGE have anything to do with anything except turning America back into a vassal state. At least we got some libraries and parks and museums out of the last gang of robber barons. This krusty krew is giving us nothing except Twitter* memes and rocket ships full of pop stars and talk show hosts.
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If you saw Sen Joni Ernst’s glib little “we’re all going to die” response to constituents who expressed worry about losing Medicare and Medicaid and then also saw her infamous non-apology filmed in a graveyard no less and you thought “Wow, she’s abysmally stupid,” then you might have missed the point. Even if she was the most brilliant political mind in America, she could still roll her eyes at her constituents at a 7:30 AM “town hall,” and mock their fears, and then dial the callous sarcasm up to 11 on TikTok, and her prospects for reelection would not be affected one tiny bit. Even if everyone in Iowa is furious at her, Sen. Ernst knows that she is accountable to no one except Donald Trump and Elon Musk (he’s not going anywhere and I’m not falling for his pretend outrage over the “Big Beautiful Bill”) and Stephen Miller and Russell Vought and maybe Mike Johnson. These are the people who are going to make it very difficult to unseat Republicans in future elections, and as long as Senator Ernst and her Republican colleagues vote the MAGA party line, then they can mock their constituents or ignore them altogether. They don’t even have to pretend to care about “the people” anymore.
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This is all getting out of control, and by “this” I mean this rambling little blog post. It’s time to wrap it up. So I’ll finish where I started - with Dickens, Japanese pottery, and malaise. I’m almost finished with Little Dorrit. Mr. Dorrit’s fortunes, having reversed, are about to reverse again, and he won’t be the only one heading back to debtors’ prison, a thing that is due to make a comeback any day now. Meanwhile, Soetsu Yanagi was absolutely poetic on the subject of useful and beautiful artisanal objects, and blithely dismissive of the hopes and aspirations of the humble craftspeople who make them. And if we’d all listened to Jimmy Carter (and if he had picked anyone at all other than Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman) then we’d all probably be a lot better off today. Three books that have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and yet they are all strangely relevant to the Year of Our Lord 2025. Welcome to the Thunderdome. This place sucks.
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*I know that Twitter is officially X now. But I’ll call it whatever I want.