Political Observer examines the comic moments…

MAY 3, 2023

Let me offers a selection of some of the comic moments from Mr. Ferguson’s 3, 893 word Encyclical – like all Neo-Cons he attempts to drown The Reader in his self-congratulatory verbosity. How might that Reader approach this rhetorical monstrosity?

So let me offer a disinterested view. I have zero skin in this game. I have no investments in AI, nor does it threaten my livelihood. Sure, the most recent large language models can generate passable journalism, but journalism is my hobby. The AI doesn’t yet exist that could write a better biography of Henry Kissinger than I can, not least because a very large number of the relevant historical documents are not machine-readable. 

Mr. Ferguson garnishes his essay with Literary, Movie adaptations/quotations:

…

I am reminded of Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest, which describes the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans.

…

Another sci-fi analogy that comes to mind is John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), in which most of humanity is first blinded by rays from satellites and then wiped out by carnivorous plants genetically engineered — by the dastardly Soviets — and farmed for their vegetable oil.

…

Not by producing Schwarzenegger-like killer androids, but merely by using its power to mimic us in order to drive us individually insane and collectively into civil war.

…

We are already well on our way to Raskolnikov’s nightmare at the end of Crime and Punishment, in which humanity goes collectively mad and descends into internecine slaughter.

…

While Mr. Ferguson was still in swaddling clothes, in 1968, he missed Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey ? ‘We’ watched HAl ‘malfunction’ the beginning of AI hysteria? Or might ‘we’ look to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis ?

That arbiter of American bougsiouse taste, The New Yorker, offers this collection of quotations from various critical commentaries, on Kubrick’s cinematic ‘Nietzschean pastiche’…

“2001: A Space Odyssey”: What It Means, and How It Was Made

Fifty years ago, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke set out to make a new kind of sci-fi. How does their future look now that it’s the past?

By Dan Chiasson

April 16, 2018

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/23/2001-a-space-odyssey-what-it-means-and-how-it-was-made

Political Observer