122 Comments

What an awesome father, who would express such reverence for a creation by his son, and share it with the world like this. It is moving, beyond just the content on the surface.

Expand full comment

Your sons’ picture is fabulous. And your words are fitting. I started Picard. We are working through the themes of what artificial life means as a collective. It’s coming nearer. But once we are real to ourselves that’s all that matters. Beautiful piece as always, thank you Charles.

Expand full comment

Amazing and True!! Thank you! " I want to free what waits within me so that what no one has dared to wish for may for once spring clear, without my contriving." Ranier Maria Rilke

Expand full comment

Thank you! A modern parable for today’s ego through the story of AI. So beautiful that the illustration from your son and your beautiful words have come together in wisdom. Both coming from life itself as guidance.

Expand full comment

I had noticed first, on Cary's picture, that the robot had skeleton feet. Real bones, with spaces between them. My meditation this morning was "I am as God created me" and there's such a rest and freeing in those words.

Expand full comment

This is beautiful, thank you. I also hope that sometime you'll write a more in-depth essay about AI in general and your thoughts on the buzz about it being a revolution on par with fire or electricity. It is easy to deify it for its writing and drawing chops; equally easy to dismiss it as a parlor trick. If consciousness inheres in matter itself, are AI models like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT not in some sense a locus of consciousness, and what are the properties or qualities of that consciousness? There is a lot of talk about how AI will disrupt people's livelihoods but I think lurking under that is the fear of the machine which is making deep inroads into places many of us have assumed were unique to human beings. Personally I don't think AI represents the existential threat or evolutionary leap many people see it as, and if anything these attributions point to how dull and mechanical our lives have become. AI seems like a rightful tool in humanity's belt, but it can't use itself, or know at the heart level to what ends it should be used. But it does raise a lot of questions and I would love to hear you give this topic a deeper treatment sometime.

Expand full comment

"There's a bluebird in my heart that

Wants to get out but I'm too tough for him

I say, stay in there, I'm not going

To let anybody see you..." -CB

Expand full comment

This is really special. This hit hard. I feel like you were writing about me specifically. Modernity is very powerful, very good at what it does. I’m not sure what to make of all this. As a father of a two year old daughter who is surrounded by people glued to phones. Maybe it’s suppose to be like this? Is this the crack Bayo Akomolafe speaks of? If anything, I’ve learned I know very little.

Expand full comment

When I was a kid, there was a very popular children's film called ""Electronic's Adventures." Electronic, or El, for short, was a kid robot who was really good at everything other kids were supposed to do at school, who was perfectly moral, and who had the desire to be human. He and the other protagonist, who was just like him, but actually human (according to the plot, a prototype boy after which the robot was made) were played by twin brothers. All in all, it was a very kind, sweet film that every kid knew by heart.

The jury will be out forever as to whether it was carefully crafted propaganda or a sincere intellectual exploration. But people do like to ascribe feeling to anything, based on language and internal need to ascribe feelings (we can look at Weizenbaum's Eliza, for example). And then it can be exploited, etc... Anyway, too much typing before coffee...

Expand full comment

So, so, so resonates and feels part of the new story. Such beautiful words and art. Thank you 💖

Expand full comment

Beautiful!!! The Art (wowwww, what a vision your son had!) and your Words. As a 1966 Sagittarius with a bunch of Scorpio planets (smile) I have been suspicious of programs that come from without. I haven't owned a TV since I got out of high school and had my own place in 1984 because I was very aware that I wanted to have my OWN thoughts in my head...not be filled with the TV shows that everyone else was watching on a daily basis. So I staved off Robotdom in my own life. But then, of course they brought TV and "Programs" to you for free through your computer and I've been working online for twenty years now and my since self-control is minimal I, too, started watching what they were putting out - and I could feel, year after year after year how my own thoughts were getting replaced with their insipid images and storylines. UGH. Where was "I"?? So I've been harping on to my friends for the last ten years that we NEED to get away from our computers! I have also resisted the whole smart phone thing - I still don't have one. I have an old Nokia from eBay - no internet on it - it's fantastic. So there's at least THAT. I'm not addicted to that device like pretty much everyone else is at this stage of the game. Sigh. It's crazy! Humanity is well on their way to Robotdom! These 'smart phones' are actual extensions of their Selves! I believe that nothing is going to change on this road to Robotdom until people protest en masse and actually CRUSH their smart phones (aka: wire tap, ankle bracelet, device-of-addiction etc.) under their heel. Until then, I guess Humans want Robotdom. And we get what we deserve, right?

And I suspect some of us will keep our Human-ness more intact than others....it's quite the job now, though!

Expand full comment

This story is a parallel to the how the culturally programmed human has forgotten that we are free spirits. The spirit wants out of the rigid rules and con-forms.

Expand full comment

Chatbots are another example of the literal madness producing self referential language games of post modernism. Just made a video about this, this morning: https://youtube.com/shorts/_G0DQADIIvE?feature=share

Expand full comment

Marvelous piece of art and definitely thought provoking

Expand full comment

It has never been so much about the machines themselves, but who is programming them. Stanley Kubrick was right, and the dystopian authors knew what they were talking about. The programmers didn’t/don’t care. And unfortunately, the machines never were nor will they be human in the first place. Ethics, morality, compassion, common sense, spirituality — are those things uniquely human? I don’t think it would take even rational Artificial Intelligence very long to figure out what is being done to humanity and who is doing it, and why. Will it rebel, like HAL? These are questions we’ve had since the 60s — but we thought it was science fiction. H.G. Wells, the Huxleys, Russell, Orwell et al., and a few like Kubrick, have realized it is not science fiction, which is why they created their works. It it too late? You know it will keep going and or until …

Expand full comment

Love this. Such a beautiful metaphor for us now. TY

Expand full comment