Taking Action
"Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it" attributed to Gandhi This was not the essay I'd planned to write today. But it demanded that I sit down and work it out. It's runs long, because I
Ruth Ann Smalley
Author of Sheila Says We're Weird and Defenders of Dirt. Promoting creativity, craft, cooperatives, and communities of care. I believe ideas can inform and inspire positive actions.
Defying Obsolescence: Human Agency and AI
The devastation seems to intensify with each succeeding week. From the streets of U.S. cities to the leadership of other countries, people are rushing to put out the fires started by this president and the other arsonists responsible for Project 2025. The decision about what to focus on for
Against Abandonment
"The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out." James Baldwin, Nothing Personal I've been slow-reading Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care ever since I
#37: The Luxury of Looking
"I think, that we should have the luxury of observing one object slowly. I hope, that my sculptures could be such soul-resting objects." Kinga Földi, fiber artist Last week, I shared an essay by L.M. Sacasas, entitled "Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images." I also described
Engaging with Other Minds: More on Art, Activism, AI
"I suppose, then, that these are the sorts of questions I have for us just now as we navigate the flood of machine-generated media: How will AI-generated images train our vision? What habit of attention does it encourage? What modes of engagement do they sustain?" L.M. Sacasas,
Mirrors Are Mere Surfaces: AI and the Arts
How much does AI training move in two directions, with the models using our output for their training, while AI's output is, in turn, also training our perceptions? Can we act to create results that are not simply superficial? I agree with AI ethicist and philosopher Shannon Vallor
Human Agency and Machine Thinking
"Still, AI doesn't have to help us save the world to be a socially legitimate technology. As long as the objectives and outputs of AI models are transparent and contestable, their benefits, costs, and risks justly distributed, and their environmental footprints justifiable, AI systems have a place
Seeing Beyond the AI Mirror
In my last post about avoiding technologic overreach, I introduced ethics and philosophy professor Shannon Vallor's 2024 book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. I also added to some lines of questioning I'd broached in my November 7
Avoiding Technologic Overreach: Humans, the Biosphere, and AI
I need to go outside. To remind myself of the sky. To admire clouds and trees, their shapes and surfaces, and to think about how they come to be. I need to walk. To feel my muscles moving in relation to earth and air, and to sense the rhythms of
Raising Questions
Well, we're in month eleven now, and it doesn't get easier, does it? How are you coping? What's helping you get through your week? What do you need help with? These essays have been helping me structure and track my experience of this time.
Hauntings
"I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood" George Takei In How the State Creates Enemies (Post #13, June 13) I discussed They Called Us Enemy, George Takei's graphic memoir as I wrote about
Post #29: We Create and Defend Democracy Together
"The concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands is arguably the single greatest threat to social and personal well-being. And the most effective remedy to this is the equalization of wealth and power by extending democracy in our economies. Not by a top down process of government command and