Do Not Resign From Life

I’ve been reading the work of L.M. Sacasas for a very long time, certainly since before he moved his writing to “a Substack.” He is a modern philosopher who I sometimes agree with, and also often vehemently disagree with—but never in a way that made me kick him out of my RSS feed. I say all this because I haven’t linked to him in a while, and when I say “I think you should read this article by a philosophy dude” I don’t want you to dismiss it out of hand. In Do Not Resign From Life he takes on what we now all know as “the AI revolution”, and argues that even though there is plenty to complain about, one thing it shouldn’t do is make us think that we don’t matter as humans any more. I don’t want to say much more about this essay, I just really hope you decide to read it. If you’re intrigued enough, stop here and click the link. If you’re not there yet, here’s a taste of the argument: I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason…