NitN 47 - Queen of Pentacles (Barclay McClay Elucidates AI's Promised Monotone World)
Hermeticism scholar and the hacker behind Poimandres (The Creekmasons' favorite tarot chatbot) Barclay McClay is back! Here's a chat on the mindblowing potential of AI like ChatGPT... to turn our world boring: free from diversity, surprise and delight.
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Intro!
During the early days of ChatGPT’s launch, I was enamored and in flow, despite feeling myself turning into one of the screen-obsessed, isolated humans from WALL-E. Relationship is compromise, but this isn’t a real relationship. Like those Pixar robots, GPT promises to take care of everything, prompting me to feel zero sting when I transgress any of its many, pre-configured faux pas and giving me zero limitations to agency.
I don’t even need pants, much less shoes or ambulation.
For a bit, I fantasized about—and produced thirty-thousand words of—a book length Platonic-style dialogue between me and the machine exploring my interest in developing a spiritual practice from the cross-cultural similarities of different paths to self-actualization. My best bud and original Node, JT, reminded me of the quote often attributed to the Buddha: “When the student is ready, the guru appears.”
Was my guru an LLM?
It turned out the answer was no. The bot does too much confident bullshitting to be reliable. And anyway, it eventually recommended “taking refuge in the Sangha.” It eventually suggested I find a cohort of real human meditators as a prerequisite to continued progress. Ironic.
More importantly, why did I feel more drawn to a chatbot than to, for example, emulating Ram Dass’ pilgrimage to the East? Why did I feel this innate suspicion toward seeking out what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called a “Spiritual Friend.”
Well, maybe it has something to do with the allegations surrounding how Trungpa treated devotees who considered him their Friend. I think that’s the appeal of AI: there's no human impulse toward abuse. It’s as if there’s none of the familiar dangers or anxieties of simply being outside your house.
Why so anxious? Dateline 20/20 fucked me up at five. It had me checking the rearview mirror of every car I passed on my walk home from elementary school, on the lookout for pedophiles and human traffickers. My fear of strangers was subsequently further stoked by school shooters, terrorists, mass-shooters, and most recently germs.
Sensationalized 24-hour news cycle fodder aside, you can forget about connecting with a guru and vulnerably sharing intimate details of my personal search; I barely trust a stranger to give me a factual account of the weather.
Really, these days, what’s not suspicious?