I have been trying to deal with matters of greater importance than I fully comprehend. This is all on me. My ignorance has always exceeded my grasp. My problem is that there is no one else to consult on any of this, and I question my ability to grasp it sufficiently to deal with it in my fiction.
I am not glib enough. But I have aged beyond the easy answers of my youth. I know now that the tendency today to fixate on simplistic concepts without contemplation results in a sort of brutalism of thought.
The ready architecture of human society has evolved into boxes, a few spheres, and a pointy triangle or two. Perhaps this was inspiring in a prior age when everything was derivative of a more baroque past, but obviously now, this is more useful for machines than human beings. (Using my architecture simile I imagine Frank Lloyd Wright turning in his grave. He was not happy with all this geometry of the human soul business himself, but he has been used as an icon of modern architecture more as a way of dismissing him. In fact, he was not on board at all. But he did contemplate his role in this disaster.)
Much of human philosophy has gone this way of the machine as well. As if science is all in the numbers. It is not. There is no AI that will ever understand love. Any concept derived by AI will be, by necessity, inherently replicable. Brutalism will endure and the grace of Palladio will be reduced to picture books. Grace is not a concept that fits well with the digital mind.
I worry about my children. And their children, whom I now know. The sterility of the world they face will be little relieved by hiking and camping in proscribed spaces. I would like them to have an awareness of nature beyond the trodden boundaries of a State park. I would like them to be able to think beyond the political correctness of our age.
There was a time when Thoreau roamed the earth. This was after the dinosaurs had far exceeded the short human term of which we are presently a part. It does not appear at the moment that we will be anywhere near as successful a species. But the dinosaurs had a better excuse for their final demise. The meteors were not their doing. We human beings appear to be determined to wipe ourselves out by our own hand.
Even our fears are false. That is my greatest concern. We fixate on political outcomes that can only be determined by authoritarian control. This will not end well.
Thoreau was not my hero when I was young. I looked to others for philosophical inspiration. But I now appreciate the lack of guidelines Thoreau offered. He was not telling anyone else ‘how to do it.’ He was appreciating the awareness that something must be done, and living it himself. Importantly, he lived in a world where he might roam.
I was recently on Cape Code, staying in an old inn which had once been a farm. There are still such places. And the vernacular beauty of things made by the daily need of human being—that is the being of people living by their own sense of life—was all about me. A Roxbury apple tree was dropping its bounty on my head. A fat ancient pear tree, having lived long, prospered, and perfumed the air. A cherry tree still survived despite some terrible disaster that I do not know more about, but Concord grapes grew in a natural arbor into its branches. More than a ghost of the old farm was still there, and made me think about what the place must have been like when Thoreau passed by. I felt privileged to stay there—a total opposite feeling to what you might experience at a local motel.
The making of life, and the making of a life, must be carried on without artificial dictate, obeying the laws of nature as well as of man. If the laws contradict nature, that is a problem we can solve. If nature contradicts our laws, we have a serious problem. And much of this that I refer to is in human nature. I do not presume to fully know or understand nature. I simply want and seek the ability to try to comprehend it.
We are fast reducing our options. Though I sharply disagree with him concerning artificial intelligence, Elon Musk understands this from at least one perspective. The human race is fragile. He wants to go to Mars. The doom of the dinosaur must be avoided. But I think the ‘Mars option’ will not be realized if we human beings forget or ignore our origins and our own nature.
We are greedy, and generous. We are stupid, and brilliant. Our ignorance always exceeds our grasp, but we must be able to grasp, or else we decay. There must be room to roam, but also to build a cabin in the woods. Given the chance, someone will find a way. If such freedom is barred, our species will fail.
Benjamin Franklin’s political saw applies, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” That wisdom in a world of wonders must be remembered and recalled every time we hear the dictate of political answers to human questions. Now, with artificial answers being generated for artificial problems that supersede our human endeavors, we have a new problem. And that is not forgetting about the old ones.