Tea at Trianon: Trees of Knowledge

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, October 16, 2023

Trees of Knowledge

And the Tree of Life. From The Catholic Writers Guild:

Human use of mechanical intelligence probably began when the first caveman picked up a piece of metal to mark a rock. Tools that provide information have been employed by human intelligence to guide us across oceans, and into outer space. But computers are now so much a part of our mentality that we rarely stop to think, before embarking on the next learning curve to take advantage of the latest innovation.

We’ve forgotten warnings by early 20th-century writers like Benson, E.M. Forster, and Isaac Asimov. Contemporary Canadian Catholic novelist Michael D. O’Brien continues to explore the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, among other threats, in his dystopian novels today. Many of the tools we use routinely as authors incorporate limited versions of AI, for example, Word document formatting, Google searches, and editing tools like ProWritingAid. But the explosion of LLM and GPT technology that has erupted into publishing over the past twelve months represents a seismic shift. We ignore that reconfiguration of tectonic plates at our own peril. (Read more.)