Substack latest. With a tip of the sweat-stained hat to Elliot Crozat and Brian Bosse for stimulating discussion.
Philosophy from the Twilight Zone: “The Lonely”
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4 responses to “Philosophy from the Twilight Zone: “The Lonely””
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A stimulating essay, Bill, but I confess I’m not as interested in such analysis as I once was. Serling’s Corry comes to regard a semblance of a created image-bearer (CIB) (Genesis 1:28) as an actual CIB (whether or not he subscribed to that theological concept); a CIB can have no moral obligation toward a semblance of one. Absent obligations, there are no corresponding entities we call “rights,” although such convenient reifying language seems beyond our ability to avoid. (I certainly cannot.)
AI unnerves me. You and I may not have grown up to be cartoon animators, but at some young age, we knew now they did it. We may even have had flipbooks that created the semblance of motion. And then we learned about movie special effects. Yesterday I received, unbidden, from Academia.edu a very well-composed evaluation of my review of Murrell’s Aptheker biography. Again, “unnerving” comes to mind. I don’t think I can come to believe that a machine understands what I write, but it can fool me into thinking it does (the way the first ATMs I encountered fifty years ago—”How may I help you?”—never could). From my biblicist perspective, what makes us CIB’s, like life itself, is not analyzable into elements we can find in nature and recombine into intelligence or life.
AI is moving too fast for my either intelligence or peace of mind. I think we’re past the tipping point, because we cannot untether ourselves from the goodies it’s providing.
For years, “Ai” symbolized a city that the Israelites conquered (Joshua 8). It seems that it’s about to get its revenge. (:^D) -
It’s hard not to believe that we are at the beginning of a transformation, a dividing line, as consequential as any in all of human history. And what we’ve seen so far, as startling and unnerving as it is, is just the very beginning.
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Malcolm,
I am reading, and will blog, Richard Susskind, HOW TO THINK ABOUT AI (Oxford UP, 2025). I strongly recommend this book. Cheap, via Amazon. It covers all the topics that concern you. -
The episode also works as a story of the human condition and the need for Divine grace.
It’s reasonable enough for Corry to develop some sort of attachment to the robot, but it gets out of hand, and when he is offered a chance at real happiness, he is almost unable to take it up because of the strength of that attachment. He needs something outside of himself to effect a dramatic insight that goes beyond the intellectual and transforms his desires and affections.
Like Corry, we live in exile from our true home. We are prone to become far too attached to such comforts as we can find in this vale of tears, to the point that they hold us back from beatitude. We need Divine grace to reorient us.
But of course, we can be resistant to grace. An episode of “The Family Guy” spoofs the climactic scene, with Peter Griffin (standing in for Corry in this case) just looking at the ruined robot and reflecting, “isn’t is incredible that that’s what we all look like on the inside?”
Anyway, I am a huge fan of The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling was indeed one of the great moral teachers of the postwar era. On my second date with my wife, she mentioned that her late father had been a big Twilight Zone fan. I took this as a good sign: she might not share my affection for philosophically rich science fiction (or philosophy generally, or science fiction generally), but she’d see it as a normal thing for men to be interested in and would not resent it or find it off-putting. This turned out to be correct.
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