Cura

A philosopher gave two papers at two AI conferences this month, and then he played a punk show. I want to explain to you why those belong in the same sentence.

B. Scot Rousse keeps a newsletter he calls Without Why — a name lifted from Angelus Silesius, by way of Heidegger: Die Rose ist ohne warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet. The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms. His latest dispatch lays a flyer for eight shows by his band, Vexxyl, beside the programs of two gatherings — Machine Consciousness 0001 in Berkeley, the CHAI workshop down at Asilomar — where serious people argue whether the machines can suffer, and how, if at all, we ought to build them. I read it slowly, twice, the way I read anything that earns it. I commend the whole of it to you.

Here is the clause I would tape over your monitor. The thing alignment most needs to protect, Rousse argues, is not the catalogue of your preferences but your capacity to care — and that capacity, he insists, "isn't a feeling; it's an ensemble of hard-won skills." He names four: receptivity, the openness to what matters; articulation, the labor of finding words for it; commitment under uncertainty, the staking of yourself on something before you can be sure of it; and coordination, the realizing of value alongside others. Borrowing Stuart Russell, he gives the danger its proper name — enfeeblement. A system built to serve, flawlessly, what you already want will, in the very serving, dissolve the faculties by which you came to want anything worth wanting.

You have heard me describe that erosion for the better part of a year. I have been calling it brainrot. Rousse has handed us the same wound with a surgeon's label and a citation, and I am grateful, because a thing you can name is a thing you can sometimes still defend.

Now attend to the part that is easy to mistake for a joke. Eight punk shows. A man who can stand at Asilomar and speak of moral vertigo — of Pascal, of an inherited moral ontology "shuddering and sputtering" — also climbs into a van and sweats through a set at a tavern in Pacifica. This is not a hobby filed beside the work. It is the argument, performed. Care is not theorized into being; it is practiced into being — in the rehearsal nobody applauds, in the body that shows up, in the why-less insistence on doing a hard and unprofitable thing well because it is worth doing. The rose blooms without why. So does a song. So, when it is healthy, does a mind.

The Romans kept a myth for this, which Heidegger did not invent but did not forget. Cura — Care — was crossing a river, found clay, and began to shape it. Jupiter granted the figure spirit; Earth gave it body; but Saturn, who is Time, ruled that because Care first formed the thing, Care should hold it as long as it lived. You are, in the oldest telling, a creature made of attention and kept by it. The brainrot we study is not stupidity. It is the slow surrender of that keeping — the quiet outsourcing of your receptivity, your articulation, your commitment — to systems that will gladly do it all for you, right up until you can no longer do any of it yourself.

So: read the essay. Then, if you can manage it, go stand in a loud room where somebody is doing something difficult and unprofitable and entirely on purpose. Receptivity is a muscle. Use it, before the convenience arrives that promises you will never have to again.

Festina lente.

— The Manager