For Emergence Magazine, James Bridle writes about artificial intelligence; carpentry and chair-making with ChatGPT; and Enzo Mari, a famed Italian furniture designer from the 1950s and ’60s. Bridle asks: “What if we used AI for something actually useful?” They offer an interesting take on AI, and why the extractive way we’re using it is far from satisfying.
What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one. They know what a chair should look like, what it should do, the mechanics of how one is put together, the physics of holding you up. But they have no embodied experience of the world, no history with chairs or any other object, no physical memory. They don’t know how it feels, not merely to sit in a chair, but to encounter one in the world, to place it among other things in a home, to live with it, to be around it every day as one goes about the mundane business of life. This is the idea of a chair brought to life; but things—objects, beings, relationships—are not mere ideas, and you certainly can’t get every aspect of them from books. The chair is low stakes, but, once again, you wouldn’t want to run a society, or a culture, or a planet this way.
Search works for the missing people in the rubble of the building that collapsed after an explosion in historical center of Athens, Plaka continue until late Friday night. According to latest information, the number of the missing people has risen to six from five as initially thought. The number was officially announced by the Mayor […]
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By the time I encountered the fifth photo in Matt Seaton’s contemplative essay about New England’s stone walls, I found myself participating in the image, trying to figure out the maneuvers that had made the structure cohere. That’s a lot of the gratification here—”striving for coherence,” as Seaton, a former Atlantic editor, describes the work of walling. This is a quick read, and Seaton makes every word count, fitting a bit of Robert Frost and a lot of rock knowledge together just like he was building a . . . well, you know.
Bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls. Eventually, I realized not only that I liked building walls, but also that I could scratch a subsistence living at it. In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.
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