Artificial Intelligence vs. Woke?

Where are we gonna go with AI?

We have had a lot of discussion and more than a few laughs over AI in the past couple of years, but things are starting to get serious. Tucquer Carlson recently raked an investor in a huge data center campus and energy infrastructure in Box Elder County, Utah over the coals. Kevin O'Leary, a Canadian, does not have a sterling background.

But Tucquer sort of suggested that investors like him should know what kinds of jobs AI would lead to in the future, and perhaps even have those jobs ready for new graduates from college. That seems sort of unrealistic. On the other hand, new graduates in certain fields face some real problems. Anybody see these students booing?

At UCF's graduation last week, a room full of arts and humanities students booed a speaker for mentioning AI.

Someone yelled "AI sucks."

I get it. I genuinely do.

They're still wrong. Here's why:

These weren't CS students.

Journalism. Creative writing. Film production. Advertising.

People who spent 4 years and serious money training to write, produce, and publish.

The floor on junior creative work is collapsing in real time. Their anger is legitimate. Their response is the problem.

Photography didn't kill painting.

It killed portrait painters who refused to evolve.

The internet didn't kill journalism. It killed the business model that paid reporters to rewrite press releases.

Every wave does this. Technology bifurcates the room. Adapters move up. Resisters get displaced. . .

Who told these kids that a degree would guarantee a good job for them?

Here's a voice from yesteryear:

Eric Hoffer:

“Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status…The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes…Obviously, a high ratio between the supervisory and the productive force spells economic inefficiency. Yet where social stability is an overriding need the economic waste involved in providing suitable positions for the educated might be an element of social efficiency.

It has often been stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability…For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them. This requires, first, an abundance of opportunities for purposeful action and self-advancement. Secondly, a wide diffusion of technical and social skills so that people will be able to work and manage their affairs with a minimum of tutelage. The scribe mentality is best neutralized by canalizing energies into purposeful and useful pursuits, and by raising the cultural level of the whole population so as to blur the dividing line between the educated and the uneducated…We do not know enough to suit a social pattern to the realization of all the creative potentialities inherent in a population. But we do know that a scribe-dominated society is not optimal for the full unfolding of the creative mind.”

OTOH, here's Elizabeth Scalia, with a Catholic perspective, from last summer:

Of course, eliminating human beings from media outlets also means losing human brains and the interesting ways that their firing synapses, loaded memories, passions and prejudices and even personal quirks can take the “basic information” on offer and fine-tune it to a particular issue, bringing nuance to a headline or making a vital connection to historical trivia that can change the conversation on some hot topic about which too many are “feeling” and too few are seeking clarity and depth.

Only the human brain, coupled to human spirit, human emotion and development can take the headline, the social notion, the conversation and -– with an assist from the God-spark that resides in all of us — send it careening off into something else — even something altogether new and enlightening.

Without that God-spark, all that is left of thought becomes non-thinking: commonplace, empty, dull and sterile.

Two years ago my friends chuckled at me for my instinctive distrust of AI, my wary refusal to experiment with emerging tools, and my worry that ChatGPT had the potential to make parents expendable. They chided me for being paranoid, teasing that I sounded like Kathy Bates in “Waterboy,” mindlessly crowing “AI is the devil!”

Recently, a very level-headed friend confessed that she too was becoming concerned; she wondered whether AI might be a sort of antichrist, or a forerunner — a contributor to the sort of chaos (or “chaos magick”) that might usher in precisely such a dark energy.

As extreme as that sounds, I didn’t shrug it off. It’s too apparent that while some advances in Artificial Intelligence can clearly benefit civilization, it has already begun to warp our understanding of human relationships, inducing a corrupt funhouse distortion to the complex realities of love, or the mysteries of love when it is present and unconditional, and not at all connected to one’s image of oneself.

Distortion at that level, minute and personal and all about love, is what can break us completely, individually and as a society, because being created in the image and likeness of the triune God (who is 100% Love), means our brains are a triune wholeism involving body, mind, and spirit and rooted in that love.

Through our human brokenness we carry our imperfect comprehensions into every part of that wholeism. So, if we permit our understanding of authentic love to be messed with, we will participate in the shattering of our own foundations.

“Foundations once destroyed,” the psalmist asked, “what can the just do” (Ps 11:3)?
Nothing will be left standing.

AI cannot pray. It can compose but lacks that broken human element -– and the God-spark — that connects the words to the Word, in whom things all hang together. . .

So, what do you think? We don't want to give up the human voice, do we?

Here's a non-scribe use of AI:

This is awesome.

These guys used AI to discover a new molecule for treating MRSA and then instead of just going 'Look, we found a potentially helpful molecule' they went and tested it.

It actually worked at suppressing bacterial growth. Nowadays, you can just cure things. https://t.co/wzr0nO7aHu pic.twitter.com/ULwL2nWeIM

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) May 19, 2025

Setting the Stage for Alternate Voices:
Would we know this if Elon Must hadn't bought Twitter?

“But several rellable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded.”

- NY Times, 1922 with previous “deeply reported” opinion pic.twitter.com/Ey01dC9UYb

— Claire (@Claire_V0ltaire) May 15, 2026

AI vs. Woke?
Should we consider a past French Connection?

Elon Musk re-tweeted a couple of threads by a French guy which are kind of interesting in both English and French. The first one apologizes for three French philosophers, plus 1968:

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).

Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons…

— Brivael Le Pogam (@brivael) May 15, 2026

I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).

We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.

We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.

Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.

For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism. . .

read the rest by clicking translate on the tweet above.

The second thread picked up by Musk discusses socialism:

Le socialisme n'est pas une théorie économique.

C'est une structure morale qui a besoin de trois choses pour exister :

1. De la rareté à redistribuer
2. Des victimes à défendre
3. Une classe d'intermédiaires pour orchestrer le tout

Retirez un seul de ces trois piliers… https://t.co/uXLFYrxyD9

— Brivael Le Pogam (@brivael) May 14, 2026

Socialism is not an economic theory.

It is a moral structure that needs three things to exist:

1. Scarcity to redistribute
2. Victims to defend
3. A class of intermediaries to orchestrate the whole thing

Remove just one of these three pillars and the edifice collapses.

AI is in the process of removing all three at the same time.

True? Your thoughts?

WEEKEND

The Week In Pictures: Viral Meme Edition

It was a busy week in the news, although, to be honest, a relatively quiet one in meme-world. Trump went to China, the New York Times sank to what could be a new low even for that despicable rag, the Spencer Pratt campaign took Los Angeles by storm, a Hollywood director unveiled a new adaptation of The Odyssey in which Helen is black and Achilles is a woman, the Democrats’ redistricting scheme blew up, for the most part, in their face. But meme-makers responded most to another story, the appearance of the dreaded hantavirus. Here, as someone once said, we go again.

Music

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, May 9, At what point do conspiracy theories go too far?

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway. Here's a video (see comment 100) with Buzz Aldrin talking about almost not making it off the moon.

posted by K.T. at 11:12 AM

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