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The Art of Divination: D.H. Lawrence on the Power of Pure Attention
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer” - Simone Weil
If you live by the cosmos, you look in the cosmos for your clue. If you live by a personal god, you pray to him. If you are rational, you think things over. But it all amounts to the same thing in the end. Prayer, or thought or studying the stars, or watching the flight of birds, or studying the entrails of the sacrifice, it is all the same process, ultimately: of divination. All it depends on is the amount of true, sincere, religious concentration you can bring to bear on your object. An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made, every serious and significant decision ever reached, was reached and made by divination. The soul stirs, and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery. […] It is the same with the study of the stars, or the sky of stars. Whatever object will bring the consciousness into a state of pure attention, in a time of perplexity, will also give back an answer to the perplexity. - D.H. Lawrence
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Finally managed to hook up a makeshift brain-computer interface to my dog's brain while he was sleeping. Fed the neural data directly into an AI image generator's latent space to visualize his dreams. The results are fascinating.
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The clever tool effect
Briefly stated, the Clever Tool Effect works as follows. You are an engineer or a scientist. You listen to your superiors discuss the technology you have spent your life mastering. They confuse basic concepts, misunderstand limitations, and make claims that would embarrass a competent undergraduate. You exchange knowing glances with your colleagues. These people have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
Then you return to your desk and build what they asked for.
Somewhere between the meeting room and your workstation, “they do not understand my work” has become “they could never outsmart me.”
Meanwhile, they decide what gets funded, who owns the results, and against whom those results may be used. They understand your appetite for difficult problems, your need for recognition, and how readily you accept power when it arrives disguised as an interesting engineering challenge.
Your contempt makes the arrangement remarkably efficient. You interpret their ignorance as evidence of your independence. Questions about the project’s purpose become distractions from the technical work. Critics “don’t understand the technology.” You improve the surveillance, refine the targeting, perfect the machinery of persuasion—each advance another reassuring demonstration of how much smarter you are than the people directing you.
The possibility that your intelligence is precisely what they are exploiting scarcely enters the picture. After all, you are the expert.
You understand the machine perfectly. You forget that you are part of it.
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MIT researchers show implanted nanoantennas can be activated wirelessly to kill brain cancer cells without damage to healthy tissue
The controlled revelation of decades old Military Neuroscience / Neurowarfare tech is picking up steam.
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AI Fascism: Many heads, One Machine
Aligning AI with humanity remains an unsolved problem. Aligning it with money and power appears to be going remarkably well.
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AI "innovators" are obsessed with re-imagining the "art" of war and automated killing. Why do so few dare to imagine AI accelerating the art of peace - such as diplomacy, negotiation, mediation, and soft power?
