10 Things (I Think) I Think About the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

Untested Hypothesis #3: In other words: TS Eliot was right.

Factoid: I am a poet.

I’m inclined, then, to honor the wisdom of poets. (More on this to come.)

There’s a poet called TS Eliot. Or was one. He is dead.¹⁷ He was also a Modernist, and Modernism¹⁸ is pretty dead too. (Alas.) But he wrote this essay called “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”¹⁹  It’s about AI. Sort of.

No, really what it’s about is the idea (problem?) of personality in writing.

There are lots of ways Eliot’s assertions come off as conservative, Eurocentric, and just generally elitist/stuffy. Fair enough. But I’m not sure that’s the only valid reading of the essay.

Here’s how he dismounts:

There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

This is fundamentally an argument for the importance of context in making meaning. And it is a clear invitation for poets (humans) to take an active role in broadening the contexts of their understanding. The essential Computer Science principle of the GIGO²⁰ effect is not at all limited to Computer Science. GIGO has always been at work on the human brain. All Eliot is saying is that “the quality of the input determines the quality of the output.” All of us must take responsibility for what goes into us — and for what we feed our AI siblings/co-conspirators.²¹ We are what we consume.  

NEXT: Untested Hypothesis #4: A search engine isn’t an engine.