A short note on Vampires
Thoughts from a ditch of tulips.
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Artificial Intelligence is tiresome to speak about nowadays. The every-where-ness of it feels like an inevitability cloak. A cloak promising invincibility but one weighing down on mankind with invisible stones sewn in along the hem-line. Sleep fell fitful last night and so I began thinking on this subject matter again.
Birthing a paragraph, a line of a song, a child, a picture from a box of crayons or even stacking turf in handsome lines along the bog bank are all acts of creation. In one form or another. It may seem odd to equate a child to four sentences in a digital book but there is a connection. An important one.
Is there anything truer, more creative, innocent or wonder-filling than the arrival of a new-born baby into your arms?
Can you remember the moment it happened?
My response was “Wow”
Then, holy fuck.
In olden days, this bundle of new wonder announced its imminent arrival by inviting his or her mother to suffer for her new joint creation. Rarely, do we congratulate new mothers or new parents by saying:
“Congratulations, on your new creation”
or to extend an olive branch to the seed planting Dad,
“ What a beautiful baby you created together “
Instead, we say they had a baby rather than created one. Yet, it is the most creative act imaginable. We often think of creativity in artistic form only—an artist, a poet, a lyricist, a writer, a musician. It is a mistake to do so and childbirth is a good reminder of one of the most important characteristics of powerful, inevitability-cloak-piercing types of creativity.
The ability to suffer.
Most often, the truest, most long-lasting creations and outputs boil down to the creator’s capacity to suffer for them.
Now, if we layer Artificial Intelligence into this bubble-stream we might say the following:
Artificial Intelligence thieves creative suffering through digital seduction. It is an invitation to not agonise. An offer to bypass anguish. A temptation to avoid soaking in uncertainty for too long. The seduction is alluring, though, as many can be and not without obvious plus points. But, in the end, not dissimilar to the distractive pleasure of a quick roll in the hay over the tedium of walking through shadowlands into something closer to hay-making. Artificial Intelligence knows not of truth or love—and you can even ask it the reasons why. Only of facts and patterns and probabilities and the introduction of creeping self-doubt. Truth is always a surprise of some sort, often messy and the best ones are the exception to every known rule. In my experience, at any rate.
The effect of all this lack of suffering is to minimise the transmutation of natural energy which occurs when the ugly caterpillar suffers just long enough to embody the beauty of the new butterfly. A new truth, a new creation.
A new world too.
If Artificial intelligence was able to fear, it would be the fear of us creating a new world without it. We just need to suffer a little for the creation. But, suffering requires energy. And what we’re dealing with is an energy vampire and not just one of the electrical variety.
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Read this three times Gerry. You are correct, this is an energy vampire, but more accurately, a spiritual vampire. You were bringing up images of Imbolc, we are on the cusp of Bealtaine. So that's subversive on its face. Suffering is part of life. Pregnancy is magical, the word "had" is another subversive word, I don't buy that anymore. AI is a redundant system. It only builds upon a closed system, never innovating or caring. If I saw correctly, the caterpillar munches and eats its way through life. The butterfly exists only to Imbolc. Bealtaine shona!
I remember when my daughter was born i was completely overwhelmed with awe .I couldn't believe the rest of the world was just carrying on as if nothing amazing had happened..and then when we started to go out into the world I couldn't believe that for every person such a miraculous event had happened and being astounded that we could forget we are walking miracles..every single one of us .. I wonder if AI would even have been invented if we had all remembered just that.