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People, there is no such thing as “the New York literary scene”; no actual writers under the age of 75 can afford to live in New York City, nor do they have any desire to live there. The secret of real achievement in the arts, as someone wise once told me in my youth, is low overhead.
Fiction is everywhere — and therefore, in a certain sense, eliminated as a specific category. Where once Reagan’s own role as actor-president seemed “novel”, his subsequent career, in which moments from film history become montaged — in Reagan’s own hazy memory and in media accounts — with Reagan’s role in particular movies, the ludic becomes the ludicrous.
Machine learning’s optimizations are a kind of abstract utilitarianism, a mode of calculative ordering that results in particular ways of structuring systems. The logic of optimization, which has deep Cold War roots, already underpins our systems of logistics and planning, and the combination of granular data and machine learning opens up the opportunity for it to be used for social problems.
Resisting AI
Dan McQuillan
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