Went to a talk where Richard Dawkins was giving Sam Harris an award. Some things stuck.
Harris’s argument on morality: if you define it as the pursuit of well-being for sentient creatures, it becomes a solvable navigation problem. Just as science helps us understand health, reason can help us understand which social arrangements lead to flourishing and which lead to misery. The worry he raised is that we might scale up the capacity for suffering in digital environments before our moral philosophy catches up to our technical ability to do so.
On the current political climate, Harris described what he called the “Fat Jesus” phenomenon. A leader who offers moral absolution for selfishness bypasses the usual expectation of hypocrisy entirely. People don’t need to pretend to be better than they are. The stability of a liberal society, it turns out, rests less on written law than on the fragile norms of decency and shame. Take those away and even sophisticated democracies turn out to be more vulnerable to tribalism than most people want to believe.
The more optimistic note: Harris thinks we are heading toward a revenge of the humanities. As machines absorb the cognitive labour of coding and data analysis, human provenance will matter more. We will always care more about a novel written by a person, or a race run by a human athlete, because we value the shared struggle of our own species. Whether that’s consoling or just wishful thinking is an open question. I’m skeptical.
Loss of curiosity · AI sycophancy as digital priesthood · The Useful Instability of the West