• An essay by Zadie Smith about writing essays.
“I developed a different sense of what an essay could be. I understood all three men to be ‘personal essayists’ in the sense that they cared passionately about their subjects, but they themselves were rarely figures in any particular piece; their energies were directed elsewhere. And I followed their example, channelling my furies into coolly expressed explication, description, analysis.”
“So artificial intelligence promises to do what an authoritarian regime does: take our place. They’re two sides of the same coin—one political, the other technological—both forfeitures of human possibility. We’re surrendering our ability to act as free agents of a democracy at the same moment we’re building machines that take away our ability to think and feel.”
“We are not a hundred percent made for so much input. We’re realizing that something is clashing here right now. That our lives and how what we want and how we want to do things are not necessarily [helped] anymore by the technology.”
“As with any form of magic, its psychological power lies in what we don’t know but what we choose to believe. To perceive in A.I. either atomic-bomb-like significance or world-altering positivity, we’re inventing possibilities that don’t yet and may never exist — ghosts in the machine.”
“There is a difference between what [A.I.s] can actually do and how a culture chooses to conceive of their abilities. That bridge is where we find the magical thinking.
“…if we focus on its supposed mystical aspects — if we come to believe we might love it like a person, replace our creativity with it, or bow to its alleged potential as though it were a nuclear bomb — then we not only dupe ourselves but also waste its strengths, locking ourselves once more into the historical cycle of magical thinking.”
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