For delight of bookclubs, picnics, & dinner parties
On being human in a world of AI, The Wind in the Willows, & links!
Rat… after a short interval reappeared staggering under a fat, wicker luncheon-basket.
“Shove that under your feet,” he observed to the Mole, as he passed it down into the boat. Then he untied the painter and took the sculls again.
“What’s inside it?” asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.
“There’s cold chicken inside it,” replied the Rat briefly; “cold tongue cold ham cold beef pickled gherkins salad french rolls cress sandwidges potted meat ginger beer lemonade sodawater—”
“O stop, stop,” cried the Mole in ecstasies’’, “this is too much!”
[When they arrived] The Mole begged as a favor to be allowed to unpack it all by himself; and he Rat was very pleased to indulge him, and to sprawl at full length on the grass and rest, while his excited friend shook out the table cloth and spread it, took out all the mysterious packets one by one and arranged their contents in due order, still gasping, “O my! O my!” at each fresh revelation.”
— The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Pictures by Ken Mckie
A few weeks ago, almost every newsletter I read was talking about the affect the new chatbot GPT3 will have on society. On higher education. On the creative process. On the way we write books and make art and teach 19-year-old’s how to do philosophy or sociology or literature. It’s a very strange world where you can type an essay prompt into a computer and get a coherent, chatty, well-structured essay back in 0.2 seconds.
Of course, there are a million ways to splice this new development. There’s the painful reality that as technology continues to accelerate, the gap between the rich and the poor will accelerate along with it. There’s questions about outdated education systems that are training students for jobs that computers can do better, and more cheaply, and anxiety about the job market 1. We’re not so special. A computer can write this newsletter.
In all of this frenzy, I read the first line of a newsletter2 that caught my attention, something like, “In the age of AI, embrace being an amateur”. Amateur comes from the word, “to love”. You’re not writing poetry because you’re a Pulitzer-prize winning author, you’re writing because you just love it. You’re designing a computer game, not because you’re the expert, but because it’s fun to design computer games.
Loving and enjoying things — is that allowed? I’m reading Aggressively Happy by Joy Clarkson and she has a great chapter about unironic enjoyment. It’s such a human thing to do something because we enjoy it, isn’t it? AI is writing an essay because it has been programmed. I , as a human, get to write this essay because I like it.
Delight was not overly valued in my education system. Even when I got to college, I felt ashamed talking about how I wanted to study Little Women because it didn’t seem scholarly (and boring) enough. I felt like I needed to serious and scholarly and clever things if I was getting a higher education. Doing things just because you like them seemed a bit shallow.
And then, I left university and discovered that actually, there is a way to get a group of people in a room having a fascinating discussion about literature, and not because the syllabus is telling them to do it, but because they like it.
Hello, book clubs. What an absolutely wonderful human invention!
We have been reading The Wind in the Willows lately with the boys, and Mole is someone who is just excessively delightable. He is not bored. He is constantly bowled over by the small things of life — which, when you ponder them, really are so delightful. Picnic baskets stuffed with gingerbeer and cold chicken. Neatly kitted out boats. His old, somewhat musty home, but which he decorated himself. Warm fireplaces and slippers and bacon for breakfast. The way the River seems to talk to itself. The busy projects of getting the boat ready for summer on the River. Company.
I suppose the humanities have always been asking, What does it mean to be human? When technology can do so many things faster than we can, how are human beings just not irritatingly slow computers? What would it look like to lean into being more human, more of the way we were designed by God to function, instead of trying to mimic machines in our productivity, or thinking, or educating, or daily living? In a technological world, how can I be more human?
Perhaps, one way is to be more like Mole. To enjoy being a human, and not a machine. To delight in my limitations, in my senses, in my odd, wonky body. To have more picnics, and book clubs, and dinner parties.
Windhover Diaries
We have had massive amounts of power outages this past while, and I am trying to be more Mole-like and find ways to be delighted about no power - including a charity shop candelabra that I light and drink with my charity shop tea cup and pretend I am a Jane Austen heroine, rather than a person who cannot charge her phone and whose food is decomposing in the fridge.
In the spirit of the Wind in the Willows we have been having lots of picnics and outings lately, enjoying the end of summer.
Just Beautiful Links
In a spirit of delight, I am in fact part of TWO bookclubs this year, one online and one in person. Our in-person book club is reading The Buried Giant, and I just finished Piranesi for my online book club. Both really good! Piranesi is asking some really good questions about what it means to be human, and to live in the broken (but beautiful) world we live in.
I’m part of a quarterly dinner club this year where we are discussing liturgical living within the Southern Hemisphere! A million good resources were shared at our last meeting getting us all ready for lent. A playlist by the Rabbit Room and Sacred Ordinary Days, as well as this great introductory podcast to practicing Lent with your family by Tsh Oxenrider, and this email Lent devotional from Biola.
I’m beyond thrilled that my internet friend Bethany is starting a Substack newsletter exploring Home and Hospitality. She is someone who has shaped my thinking so much (and sign all your friends up because I want her book one day!) Read this one, “What’s a home for anyway? (The Homeless man said) for a taste:
“Hey, you’ve got an apartment, right?” he would ask, as though having a lease was a novelty. “Maybe we could hang out there sometime? Watch a movie or something?”
I was twenty-two years old, living alone in a 400-square-foot studio. Here was a man–twice my age, fighting a tremendous addiction, homeless–asking if he could come over. The imprudence of saying yes seemed so clear. And yet, while my head was trying to compose a diplomatic way to say, “I don’t think we should,” my heart was trembling in the presence of his pain. His request lacked insight and social graces, but fundamentally, Michael was simply saying, “I’m made in God’s image, and that means I’m not supposed to be alone. But I’m so alone. Can you help?”
Thinking about effective altruism, and how we combine that with the real bodies we have, and the fact that while a monthly debit order to effective charities is extremely important (I say this having worked for one!) - how do we embody generosity with our families?
Our church is reading the Tech-wise Family by Andy Crouch, and it’s pretty timely.
All Creatures Great and Small …finally watching season 3 and it is UTTERLY delightful. Also, the soundtrack makes great background music.
I have no recipes to relate this month. We’ve been living on popsicles and pesto pasta and hot dogs.
Alright! I do believe that is all for this month, friends. I hope you find something really delightful this week!
X Steph
I keep thinking about the book Range by David Epstien at times like this. (The book Range, is of course, every Liberal Arts degree’s favorite book, I’m sure). But he makes the case that in a world of advanced machines, successful people (like— people who make money to live the way they want and are relatively happy), are people who act more like humans, and less like machines. We can’t accumulate 10 000 hours of expertise as fast as a computer can. In a race to be as good as a machine, we will lose. But it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. We can let machines be machines and spend more of our time being human. We can write college essays because it’s a way of helping us decide what we believe and training our brains to think, not because our finished product deserves an A. We can do LOTS of things, a little bit, and spend our time doing things humans are good at - making connections, solving problems by responding to other humans, all that stuff. The world is extremely complicated. There’s plenty for humans and machines to do together. But, yes, good luck training your 3 year old to beat a machine at chess, the days of that are long gone.
I have scrolled through my inbox about 10 times now and cannot find this article. If you know what I am talking about because we all read in an echo chamber, please let me know!
I love that question: how can I be more human? The first thing that comes to me is immersing myself in my senses. Thanks for these beautiful words!
"What would it look like to lean into being more human, more of the way we were designed by God to function, instead of trying to mimic machines in our productivity, or thinking, or educating, or daily living? In a technological world, how can I be more human?" - that bit about instead of trying to mimic machines. Maybe God is trying to tell ME something as it feels like everything I run across lately is about how we badly we need to tend to our bio-rhythms and not try to mimic the machine-rhythms. I love these questions (said the girl who just signed up for a class on how chatgpt might help me finish my book proposal lol).