Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

If you read this essay you will not become a better person. I will not delineate the most progressive stance that you could take on a recent development in politics or culture, taking into account the various relevant social justice considerations and concluding on a rallying cry. And neither will you be presented with a set of arguments advancing the liberal positions that you already support, but which a less well-informed, or perhaps simply more selfish, person theoretically would not. I will not invite you to feel a sense of personal satisfaction, maybe laced with anguish, about your own right-mindedness compared to that theoretical other person.  At the same time I will not hash out a supposedly controversial, but in fact well-trodden, stance on an element of progressive culture. Likewise I will not lament the overreaches of political correctness through a series of exaggerated or otherwise dubious examples. You will not be made to feel risqué and rebellious for holding a garden-variety regressive view which, particularly considering the influence of both demographic factors and self-interest, it is perfectly predictable that you would hold.  This will not be an essay in which the likes of Foucault and Kant are quoted liberally, to remind you of my steely academic credentials, because in such writing that is where my authority, and hence your interest in continuing to read, derives from. The fact is I don’t have steely academic credentials. No PhD or Ivy League anything or Oxford or Cambridge. Actually I don’t even have an undergraduate degree in this essay’s subject. This is not a piece of writing in which I will use credentialism to flatter your sense of yourself as a highbrow intellectual type. If that is the kind of thing you’re into.  There will be no disclosure of personal trauma, or of my dramatic emotional response to an occurrence which, to a less emotionally wrought observer, may not seem really so bad. I will not describe myself as being wracked with sobs or petrified or likewise in order to make you feel either titillated, or gratified as the kind of person who tends to present themselves similarly, or mildly heroic, or as the kind of stoical person who does not, but tends to sympathize greatly with people who do. There will not be the sense that by reading this and buying into my narrative you are a Good Person, siding with a Good Person who had something bad done to them by a Bad Person. I am not a good person. Well, I am sometimes. But I am more than happy to admit that sometimes (often) I am not.  I do have one thing to offer you if you keep reading, though: I am pretty confident I will make you laugh. This is not a big promise, maybe. But look around, there’s not much of it on offer elsewhere lately.  The offbeat, weird humor in the novels of Percy Everett, Gwendoline Riley, Nicole Flattery, Monica Heisey, Sally Rooney (particularly in her dialogue) and Joshua Cohen is an antidote to what Parul Seghal identified last year as the dominance of the trauma plot in fiction, and its accompanying dour tone. But elsewhere, solemn accounts of distressing events have come to be seen as the quick ticket to producing novels which possess gravity and emotional heft, even now that this mode feels rote. As Seghal put it: “The invocation of trauma promises access to some well-guarded bloody chamber; increasingly, though, we feel as if we have entered a rather generic motel room, with all the signs of heavy turnover.” In the comment pages the same endlessly reiterated positions on culture war topics dominate. Dark clouds creep closer on every front (the pace of technological development, gender relations, race relations, the books taught in schools, mental health, attention spans, standardized testing and so on) as the storm of an impending apocalypse rages. AI is one topic getting the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” treatment a lot of late. Although actually it also had a moment in the spotlight not too long ago, in 2019, when columnists were saying that if GPT-2 (a text generator prone to writing chaotic, nonsense sentences with a bent towards