Status Updates From The Internet Is Not What Yo...

Memorization still matters.
“Until the modern period true knowledge of an object of study involved internalizing that object by committing it to memory. without memorization, all we have left is a distal relationship to that body of knowledge, where it is retrievable from storage (whether in a book, hard drive or in the "cloud") should we need it, but which we cannot really be said to know until we retrieve it.”

“For many, the only available adaptation to this new landscape (social media/internet) is to transform our human identity into a sort of imitation of the decidedly non-human forces that sustain the internet, to trade a personality for an algorithmically plottable profile, in effect, to imitate a bot.”

“The principal charges against the internet, deserving of our attention here, instead have to do with the ways in which it has limited our potential and our capacity for thriving, the ways in which it has distorted our nature and fettered us.”

In a section about how he'd spent the so called pandemic happily 'locked down', wiki-ing various trivialities at 2AM, Smith reports: " I am already fearing... release back into the 'world'... the bare physical reality of commutes, meeting, dinner parties,activities." Such an admission should bar one from membership in the ranks of philosophers that is to say, philo-sophers, 'lovers-of-wisdom'.

" the imminent arrival of strong AI is in many respects in Neo Alchemist idea of no more real interest in our efforts to understand the promises and threats of Technology than any other forces medieval conjurers sought to awaken"

I'm not worried about the arrival of strong AI: I'm worried about the arrival of weak AI and its penetration of every aspect of society.

" remarkably then the internet is simultaneously our greatest Affliction and our greatest hope". Smith, a self admitted social media addict, is no more qualified to pontificate on these matters than the drunk who stumbles into the AA meeting straight from the bar and wants to share his experience strength & hope. Siddown, shaddup & read some Mcluhan & Mumford.

"Significant effects...reducing depression. It is not that the residents have been tricked, but only that having the dolls [AI eldercare droids] there was enough for them to encounter a simulation of empathy that allowed them to experience its positive effects." Depression, not to mention horror and suicidal despair, are healthy response to being left to die in the care of a machine.

" almost nobody today would want to presume a subject lying behind the phenomenal presentations of objects (though in the past Leibniz did just this)" as did Billy Blake, whose shoes none of these philosophers are fit to shine