The Church of A.I.

On the reduction of reason and the urgent need to broaden it

“All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature.”

I spoke at an event for Quilt.AI in The Times Center in New York City over this past week. It was a beautiful venue and an awesome gathering of people — including at least one twitter follower and substack reader who unexpectedly tracked me down to say “hi” afterwards. You make this all worth it.

I was in conversation with Gillian Tett of the Financial Times; our session was followed shortly after by an interview with the exceptional filmmaker Deepa Mehta. I learned much. But as it so often happens at these things, I didn’t have time to develop my thinking in the allotted time for our session — so I thought I’d share some of my prep notes which I didn’t have time to get to here. It starts with the wonder and beauty of ‘irrationality’, which I believe our intelligence-obsessed moment is forcing us to forget. And that has some very odd consequences…

In declaring an “educational emergency” in our lifetime, the former Pope Benedict XVI wrote that it is only through a broadened sense of reason that humanity can grapple with the most important questions of human existence.