The Route to the Root
Nicholas Carr’s SUPERBLOOM and people walking on my street.
“Even the most ineffable experiences are quickly translated into words by the mind. Moment by moment, we speak ourselves into being. And then, turning our voices outward, we join with others in common pursuits. We use words to coordinate thought, feeling, and action. Together, we speak our world into being.“
Probably not a great idea to have an argument with a book you are reading when you are only on page 18, better to see how the thesis plays out. The book in question is Superbloom by Nicholas Carr, and it’s not so much an argument with the text, but an insight that this passage sparked. The primacy of words for communication is what has gotten us into this mess with social media, political polarization, and the new religion of AI. I mean words as data, stripped of their flesh and blood. The books subhead is How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, so I suspect Carr may have sympathy with my belief that the word people—the academics, entrepreneurs, hucksters, and scientists have carved off communication from expressing the full humanness of people through a replicant and repellent technology. What we speak and write is an abstraction of who we are, it is not the whole thing—-because it lacks the thingness of us.
I finished reading Superbloom since I wrote the first paragraph. I highly recommend it, and his final chapter is so damn good, he inspired me to draw in response. The fashioning of words, voice, and imagery into Art is the truly ineffable essence that Nicholas Carr is building towards in his final chapters in Superbloom. The Sidewalk Drawings are my record of some of the people walking, riding, or driving by my house. I have a few seconds to watch each person, and just a flash with someone driving, so my drawings continue on with the memory of them and the gaps—typically the hair needs to be filled in. By the 3rd day of doing these drawings I think I had a better handle on seeing more quickly, also less sunglasses as the day was overcast. The drawings were a great exercise to bring me back to looking and caring about how I look. I wanted to be driving the seeing not just watching it happen.
I love words and as an illustrator reading and being inspired by the text is the job. But, I am not a writer, because when I experience the ineffable or I hope to express it——responding through making an image is my only answer. In Superbloom, Carr spends two thirds of the book laying out the history of communication and the terrible lessons and unintended consequences of the Promethean ego’s that just keep telling us how great our lives will be. Judge the visual experience you have when you go to your phone rather than a blank page welcoming your vision.
Just as I finished the book I watched a recent debate on the subject of truth—Will truth survive artificial intelligence? Yes or No. Watch here. Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier were on the NO side and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and Fei-Fei Li, computer scientist at Stanford, were on the YES side. The audience—-in San Francisco were asked to vote before the debate and 68% said YES and 32% said NO.
The argument that Srinivas begins with is that he used a Chatbot to determine a strategy to win against Carr and Lanier. His read his final statement from his Chatbot helper and it was no where near engaging with the actual arguments made during the debate by Lanier and Carr, and if you needed further proof of the death of critical thinking through reliance on AI…
The final 2 minute statements from both Lanier and Carr are so worth seeing. Jaron Lanier was incredible in this debate, and he is definitely not someone you can say is a Luddite, or doesn’t understand AI. He’s a lead computer scientist at Microsoft.
Nicholas Carr adds a completely new argument in his final statement, that for me is the ultimate mic drop…
…we’ve talked about scientists and billionaires this evening, and those are all important—- but we haven’t talked about one group of people that are absolutely essential to the pursuit of truth and the realization of truth—artists. You are more likely to discover truth through art than anything else.
He calls Art, one of the best routes to the truth available to us. Amen.
I watched this debate and had the same takeaway. The AI-generated closing statement was so lifeless and failed to respond to the actual arguments of the opposing side. This, of course, proved the other side's point. It was gratifying to see the audience shift at the end. And I loved Carr's closing statement! I'll have to check out Superbloom.