If you’ve never seen The Sorcerer’s Apprentice scene from Fantasia (1940!) then you’re missing something. Click on the photo for a link to this 9 minute wonder.
I was reminded of it by this great conversation between Ezra Klein and Erik Davis:
The date confuses me. I think Ezra must have mentioned Davis in April, before the episode aired, because it was because of Ezra’s praise for High Weirdness that I read it. And then followed that with six or seven of Jeff Kripal’s books, since he was one of Davis’s teachers. And that was before my first trip to Brazil in mid-April. So it’s all Ezra’s fault. But I never got around to listening to the episode until this morning. It is of course really good, and well worth your time. It’s about the strange state of California, AI, and even hermeneutics (although they avoid the word). You will find this frightening, fascinating and well worth your time. CLICK THE IMAGE for the link.
Here is the show description:
In recent months, we’ve witnessed the rise of chatbots that can pass law and business school exams, artificial companions who’ve become best friends and lovers and music generators that produce remarkably humanlike songs. It’s hard to know how to process it all. But if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s this: The future — shaped by technologies like artificial intelligence — is going to be profoundly weird. It’s going to look, feel and function differently from the world we have grown to recognize.
How do we learn to navigate — even embrace — the weirdness of the world we’re entering into?
Erik Davis is the author of the books “High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies” and “TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information” and writes the newsletter “Burning Shore.” For Davis, “weirdness” isn’t just a quality of things that don’t make sense to us, it’s an interpretive framework that helps us better understand the cultures and technologies that will shape our wondrous, wild future.
We discuss how Silicon Valley’s particularly weird culture has altered the trajectory of A.I. development, why programs like ChatGPT can profoundly unsettle our sense of reality and our own humanity, how the behaviors of A.I. systems reveal far more about humanity than we like to admit, why we might be in a “sorcerer’s apprentice moment” for artificial intelligence, why we often turn to myth and science fiction to explain technologies whose implications we don’t yet grasp, why A.I. developers are willing to keep designing technologies that they think may destroy humanity and more.