Henry Kissinger: ‘How The Enlightenment Ends‘
‘AI developers, as inexperienced in politics and philosophy as I am in technology, should ask themselves some of the questions I have raised here in order to build answers into their engineering efforts.’
Perhaps.
There are definitely concerns with AI, and we’ll see if Kissingerian political and social capital can be leveraged into blue-ribbon panels that actually do something more productive than channel fears (necessary and accurate though such fears, at times, are).
My skepticism leads me to think that Peter Thiel is onto something: A major era of freedom and technological innovation may have already passed, or perhaps the innovation was always unevenly distributed and certain silos have rippled outwards to diminishing innovation but increasing consequence for the rest of us.
Maybe once at-large sorts like Henry Kissinger, Congressional-types, rogue bloggers and ‘thought-leaders’ feel compelled to opine, certain green fields and freedom-frontiers are no longer as green nor free as they used to be (space is lookin’ good!).
As for the Enlightenment, Kissinger is reviled by many on the Left as heretical, it seems. Many radicals and utopian Enlightenment ideologues quite downstream of Kant have gone after him with a curiously special hatred.
To Kissinger’s credit, he’s used a lot of philosophy and high-end strategic thinking; deeply enmeshed within the world of American political power, to offer diplomatic solutions other than nuclear confrontation and the logic which was unfolding between the great powers.
Surely, the man had a vision for the second half of the 20th-century.
On this site: Perhaps it’s in the air…or just another trend: Two AI Links And Some Thoughts On Political Philosophy
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Speaking of heretics: Speaking out against radical claims to knowledge, proposed by activists and ideologists (words=violence), is enough to make reasonably independent thinkers in the social sciences heretical these days.
Simply trying to have public discussions of certain biological and evo-bio data…
…has become Verboten!
The new pieties must be protected by all fellow-believing stakeholders in transformative visions of the future (if only much of reality, existing arrangements, laws, traditions, human nature and history could be frozen and held in these post-englightment baubles of radical discontent).
Once you realize this is generally a game you win by not playing, one which will eat itself and its most astute players eventually, then other strategies are necessary.
Managing one-on-one interactions as fairly and humanely as you can is a necessity, even as dealing with pitchfork-logic and radicalism become another cost to living in a free society.
Jordan Peterson has chosen to bear that cost disporpotionately.
As predicted on this blog, the NY Times is arguably backing into Guardianesque ideological joylessness and frequent lunacy (aside from the financial woes of not understanding technology and failing to use capital and reputation to leverage new technology while howling mightily about the end-of-the-world).
A web of religiously-held, secular and radical ideological beliefs with low buy-in and high-costs, constantly organizing against enemies in divine victimhood, is probably what’s fast becoming the norm at the NY Times.
I’d be happily proven wrong.
Some thoughts on Fukuyama and Leo Strauss: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’
Henry Kissinger & George Schulz Via The WSJ: ‘The Iran Deal And Its Consequences’…Inside Everyone Is A Western Individual Waiting To Get Out?-Repost-Roger Sandall At The American Interest: ‘Tribal Realism’
David Thompson keeps an eye on the Guardianistas, particularly, George Monbiot, so you don’t have to:
‘Yes, dear readers. The odds are stacked against us and the situation is grim. Happily, however, “we” – that’s thee and me – now “find the glimmerings of an answer” in, among other things, “the sharing… of cars and appliances.” While yearning, as we are, for an “empathy revolution.” What, you didn’t know?’