Words&Dirt

“We mustn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where’s the joy in these final hours that they ought to be making the most of? They’re spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn’t forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you’re twenty and the next day you’re eighty. Colombe thinks you can ‘hurry up and forget’ because it all seems so very far away to her, the prospect of old age, as if it were never going to happen to her. But just by observing the adults around me I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they’re always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now that they needn’t think about tomorrow…But if you dread tomorrow, it’s because you don’t know how to build the present, and when you don’t know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it’s a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don’t you see?

So, we mustn’t forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we’ll get old and that it won’t look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it’s now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there’s a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.

That’s what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.”

––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. 128-9

“There was an alarmed back-and-forth inside the tiny community researchers about the impact of commercialization of AI on the culture of the academic research community. It was, however, too late to turn back. The field has moved on from the intellectual quarrels in the 1950s and 1960s over the feasibility of AI and the question of the correct path. Today, a series of probabilistic mathematical techniques have reinvented the field and transformed it from an academic curiosity into a force that is altering many aspects of the modern world.

It has also created an increasingly clear choice for designers. It is now possible to design humans into or out of the computerized systems that are being created to grow our food, transport us, manufacture our goods and services, and entertain us. It has become a philosophical and ethical choice, rather than simply a technical one.”

––Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, by John Markoff, pg. 157