Tea at Trianon: The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 24, 2022

The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence

From TFP:

The second revealing point is the book’s evolutionary model of history with its attacks on the Church. The authors show little originality by adopting a modern classical narrative of a history without God. Thus, they describe history as periods when people perceived reality through different filters. The polytheistic societies in the ancient world, for example, explained reality through its pantheon of mythological gods. The Middle Ages is reduced to a world where everything “was only to be known through God; theology filtered and ordered individuals’ experiences and the natural phenomenon before them.”
Subsequent periods like the Renaissance, the Protestant Revolution and especially the Enlightenment filtered reality through individualism and reason. The new filter will be AI. The Age of AI fits neatly into this evolutionary, secular and fatalistic vision of history without God. The authors do not “celebrate or bemoan” AI but only announce its inevitable march to change “human thought, knowledge, perception and reality.”
Of course, this vision contrasts with the Church’s non-fatalistic notion of history by which all work out their salvation. The Church is not just another filter among many. Likewise, historical periods are influenced by events, people’s virtue and God’s grace, not determined by evolutionary filters. (Read more.)