page 588 - if you're like me you know of Michel Serres' commentary on the parallels between child sacrifice to the god Baal in ancient Carthage and the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986 from the translator's note at the end of Michel Serres with Bruno Latour -- Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Roxanne Lapidus, trans.). University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Once you read that the incineration of children and animals inside the enormous brass statue of a largely forgotten god is a form of worship and religion akin to incinerating astronauts inside a metal tube live on TV while it hurtles towards the heavens, you can't unthink it. Go ahead and debate whether the societal roles held by premodern religion and (post?)modern science are at all comparable, Serres and Latour do! The answer: maybe yes maybe no, but those visuals, my GOD. And you have to wonder at the breadth of knowledge on hand to even be able to draw the comparison in the first place.
As our attentions are crushed by technology and we no longer retain things in situ what does that mean for new ideas and the opportunity for synthesis. It's all well and good to offload mental power to your phone, I can look it up as many times as I need to, but if you haven't retained the dual infernos each can enter and exit your conscious and subconscious brain without having the opportunity to collide, spark a connection and burn society to the ground in a productive way.
The worry is that AI will surpass us and turn us all into paperclips but as our brains atrophy and our intellects cramp AI doesn't need to do much to overtake us and win. Using it saps us of strength and stamina and it passes us not with its own ever increasing speed, but because we are collapsing backwards.
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What would Diodorus have made of AI?: "There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire."
