The Weekly Reading List - May 26

Dating an AI, treating children as peers, King Gizzard, and more.

Welcome to The Weekly Reading List, in which I share links you might want to take the time to read. This is the beginning of a conversation — feel free to post your links, thoughts, questions, and more down in the comments.

But first, some housekeeping.

I will be publishing five more short essays about Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, each one on Monday. Going forward, all read-along essays will be on Mondays. They will remain free, as I want anyone interested to be able to read them.

By the end of June, we’ll be done with the Meditations. I’ve learned a lot through this prolonged read-along about what works and what doesn’t for a series like this. Given the manner in which the Meditations is written, it is difficult to write systematically about it. Yet that also allows me to narrow in on just a few sentences in order to unpack their meaning. The form of the Meditations has both virtues and vices.

The next read-along, starting the first Monday of July, will be on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The structure of this book makes it easier to plan ahead and to see just how long the series might take. I anticipate this lasting three months: July, August, September. If you want to read along with me, get the edition published from the University of Chicago in the next month.

Around mid-August, I’ll start thinking about the next read-along. Suggestions are welcome down in the comments.

In addition to the free read-along posts, I’ll continue to regularly publish essays, quick reviews, and more for paying subscribers. I think we can aim for at least 2 additional posts per week. Now that I’m back in the swing of writing regularly, I’m finding myself with a lot to say.

I’m brainstorming other things to do, mostly for paying subscribers, but I’ll hold off on any announcements until I have all the details sorted.

Thank you for your support. Now, let’s get started with The Weekly Reading List.

Don’t Let AI Do Your Dating For You

At The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper writes about the potential rise of AI-assisted dating and what we lose when we offload so many our tasks. He writes:

The new AI products coming to market are gate-crashing spheres of activity that were previously the sole province of human beings. Responding to these often disturbing developments requires a principled way of disentangling uses of AI that are legitimately beneficial and prosocial from those that threaten to atrophy our life skills and independence. And that requires us to have a clear idea of what makes human beings human in the first place.

I think this is exactly the right question to be asking about AI. Not just what we gain, or what AI could do for us, but what we lose by uncritically adopting it.

In the case motivating Harper’s piece, the CEO of Bumble wants AI dating ‘concierges’ to engage in small talk for us, sifting through the masses of people on dating profiles to find a compatible match. Only then does the real courting (or whatever it is that happens on and off those apps is) begin.

We use technology to shape the world around us. But the technologies that we employ also shape us. We become different sorts of people based on the tools that we have in common use. The calculator app on your iPhone has probably made you worse at arithmetic; the computer you use to write changes the way you view the writing process; the AI we uncritically deploy dramatically reshapes what it means to be creative — or in the case of Bumble, intimate.

Suggested further reading: ‘Why I am not going to buy a computer’ by Wendell Berry (NB: link is to a PDF)

What Do Exceptional People Have in Common?

That’s the question asked over at by Henrik Karlsson over at Escaping Flatland, with particular attention being paid to the childhoods of those people.

Childhoods of exceptional people

I’ll let you read the full piece for the big lessons, but I wanted to highlight Karlsson’s conclusion, which turns to the question of raising children in the model of their exceptional forebears: