Philip Sugg | Blog

László Földényi:

In Venice, in an of the out-of-the-way corner of the Piazzetta located at the corner of the basilica of Saint Mark, there is a statuary group depicting the Four Tetrarchs. Carved out of the hardest granite, the sculpture, dating from the beginning of the fourth century, depicts Diocletian with three of his chosen co-sovereigns. They huddle together as if ready to brave the in- cipient end of the world.

– Dostoevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears

Continuing:

Each draws our gaze; nonetheless, they are so uniform that no matter which one we begin to look at, we see the others as well. It does not matter with what small detail we commence our examination, we always perceive, involuntarily, the whole of the sculpture. Their shoes and their garments are uniform, their swords, crowns, and belts are uniform, the fabric on them is draped in a similar fashion, their foreheads are wrinkled in a similar manner, their gazes are uniformly careworn. There are four of them, and yet they appear to be one single living being.

Földényi identifies the sculptures with the “mass” in two ways. First, mass is what unites all things, a universal materiality that could be the divine. If matter as a whole is a divine unity, then being part of the whole elevates the individual, lightening the burden of individuation:

Human beings are themselves the crystallization of this cosmic “mass,” this fundament which can neither be enclosed nor bounded; our souls are nothing other than the “condensation” of the divine mass. We cannot step out of this mass-like existence, nor can we “state anything” about it, as every conjecture or declaration is made possible only by the mass. No matter what we might say about the mass, that statement would only be yet a further manifestation of the universal mass itself. And this universal mass does not recognize any difference between soul and body, between the dead and the living, between the material and the immaterial. Yet there is something divine within it—and human beings will have a connection to the divine for as long as we are able to vividly preserve within ourselves the experience of the cosmic roots of our own existence.

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Sometime around 1993 in North America–and a little later, maybe 1995, for much of the rest of the world–the number of people who used the internet began to accelerate. More people put more stuff (today this stuff is often called “content”) online: at first mostly text, then images, finally video and all the rest of media. That makes about 30 years in which large numbers of people have been creating for the internet: information that is now used to train huge textual datasets like the language model behind ChatGPT.

I had a vision, really more of a sci-fi premise, about where this goes in another 30 years. It seems reasonable to assume that the next 30 years of the popular internet will involve more AI-generated media than the first. In the time between now and 2053, bots generate so much content that the media from the first, human era of the internet becomes impossibly obscure, far more rare than the handful of known cave paintings from the earliest Homo sapien pre-history. The bot era will a be derivative byproduct of the internet’s human era, but the bots have–for a while–kicked the ladder out from underneath them. The old human internet rots away under piles of bot trash. Humans still “produce content” (maybe–because it seems there is more at stake–they go back to calling it “writing” again), but even the most advanced search engines will be too overwhelmed to find it. The human data source for the bot era still exists, somewhere, online, but it goes darker than anything on the dark web today.

There is so much talk lately of machine intelligence, and what it has or will accomplish. I am impressed and even a little surprised by some of what I have seen, but the biggest effect that the current ChatGPT boom has had on me is that it has led me to seek out more trusted opinions by people who really know how to think. I’ve spent more time than normal seeking out both familiar and novel commentary about what is going on. The cliche has proven true for now: handing more work over to automation has cast me further onto deeper and more essential human capacities: to understand, to analyze, and to reconfigure the world into a new synthesis.

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A few days ago I had to take my son somewhere during the day, and I walked by this excavator tearing down an old residential building near the university’s medical center. I don’t know anything about the history of this block, but the buildings were the only buildings in a wide area that appeared to have a residential purpose. They were adjacent to an empty lot, like they’d once been part of a residential area of which they were now the last holdouts. Next time I go by, I expect they’ll be gone.

I’d noticed these buildings before, and thought they looked out of place, like their walls were unclothed, meant to be hidden behind a jumble of similar buildings, zebra-like. Instead, in the last phase of life, they’ve been singled out, home to no one.

Most municipalities in the U.S. have land records about what stood on a piece of property. It would be difficult for any individual to review them on a large scale, and to understand the trends behind the factual archive. For the most part, the building is the archive. Once it is gone, even the people who lived there would have trouble locating the spot anymore. A memory of a physically uprooted place is an orphaned memory–a person can never go back and refresh it.