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a cell underneath Big Ben,
Do you understand? Human beings! He said something no one in Russia had ever said. He said that first of all we are human beings—and only secondly are we bishops, Russians, shopkeepers, Tartars, workers. . . . Chekhov said: let’s put God—and all these grand progressive ideas—to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man.
“This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being.
It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!”
Seems hard to refute
But will machine minds ever acquire anything like our ability to have such thoughts, in all their seriousness and depth?
Jaron Lanier, himself a pioneer of computer technology, warns in You Are Not a Gadget that we are allowing ourselves to become ever more algorithmic and quantifiable, because this makes us easier for computers to deal with.
These days some think that, if humanity ends in disaster, caused by rogue artificial intelligence or environmental collapse or some other blunder, the world would be better off without us anyway.
Posthumanists,”
anti-humanism.
2 percent
allow our minds to be uploaded into other data-based forms, so that we can ditch the need for human embodiment.
What are YOU without your body? What are YOU without your mind?
Every particularity has gone: the atoms of Democritus, Terence’s nosy neighbor, Petrarch’s lack of patience and Boccaccio’s bawdy stories, the Lake Nemi ships and the fishlike Genoese divers, Aldus Manutius and his exuberance (“Aldus is here!”), students floating down rivers, Platina’s recipe for grilled eel à l’orange, Erasmus’s polite farts, the Encyclopédie (all 71,818 articles of it), Hume’s games of backgammon and whist, Dorothy L. Sayers’s comfortable trousers, Frederick Douglass’s magnificently
photographed face and his eloquent words, the priestly and poetic Kawi language, sea squirts, bloomers, the Esperanto plaque by Petrarch’s beloved stream, M. N. Roy’s good soups, ridiculous heraldry, Rabindranath Tagore’s classes under the trees, the windows of Chartres, microfilms, manifestos, meetings, Pugwash, busy New York streets, the yellow line of morning. They have all gone up in the ultimate bonfire of the vanities. To me, this no longer says sublimity; it says, “How disappointing.”
