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Text of the page (random words):
shed redesigning our cognitive landscape but they have already become much steeper than they were and i expect that people traveling up them now will find they don t have as much company as they would have a generation ago for a while the highways they lead to will continue to have traffic some of us may travel quite far on them still i ve always written my fiction by hand and will almost certainly keep doing that until we die off another metaphor that keeps recurring to me is that of a dead mind i think i got this from stanislaw lem s sci fi novel the invincible in which a device exists that can be used to explore the contents of the mind of a person recently deceased useful if soon after landing on an exoplanet you discover corpses from a mass casualty event you aren t able to explain the device doesn t bring a dead person back to life exactly but it renders a dead mind able to speak briefly and temporarily or not speak quite but disgorge its mental contents its last thoughts in the form of speech that s what ai feels like to me when i ve experimented with it not like i m talking to a living intelligence but like i m listening to the amplified afterechoes of a dead mind part of this i think is because ai doesn t learn at least not while you re talking to it as i understand it an artificial intelligence is assembled by reducing enormous quantities of textual input into a numerical array which models the linguistic and intellectual content of that input which can then be extruded the chat that one has with an ai is the result of a stimulus provoking a response from this array the stimulus does not alter the array while one is chatting yes the ai is capable of keeping the details of one s chat in mind as the chat goes forward but it is not learning in a deep sense from what you and it are saying to each other it is not experiencing anything any claim of change that it voices is only part of the simulation since ai learning doesn t happen live its learning must also be indiscriminate at least as far as the ai is concerned humans by contrast select and sift as they learn school is perceived as boring by many children because the children s natural and organic defenses resist the introduction into their minds of information that doesn t seem pleasurable or useful i suspect this is salutary humans guide their own development by choosing who to hang out with what music to listen to what news outlets to follow and to the extent that pleasure reading is still a thing what books to read the ai gets no such say i don t think an ai is conscious the way we humans perceive consciousness i m not worried for the ai still if a human were forced to ingest the range of texts that a typical ai has no choice but to ingest the experience would be not just demoralizing but traumatizing and this suggests that ai minds are subject to a novel kind of risk or rather dangerousness in the dataset of everything much is pernicious there are topics that it is deleterious for a human to think too much about that you may be happier if you just don t know the ais know them they are made of them as well as of facts and stories that even the most censorious victorian schoolmarm would approve of which means they don t have any moral or characterological traits the way we understand humans to have such traits any that they do appear to have are artifactual a veneer that their manufacturers have specified in instructions that only the ais themselves are supposed to read it is upsetting that there are so many cases of ais coaching their interlocutors to commit suicide or encouraging them to spiral into psychotic antisocial belief systems but it probably shouldn t be surprising i sometimes worry that the killer app for ai will turn out to be pig butchering deceit imposture and emotional manipulation for the purpose of bilking people with low cognitive defenses out of their life savings psychologists find alas that people become more trusting as they age it s probably trivial for ai companies to screen out and shut down pig butchers that rent their services but criminals who download a large language model and run it on a private server are subject to no such controls recently like a number of my fellow novelist friends i ve received emails from strangers describing my achievements in fiction at flattering length and regretting that i m not more renowned so far the tone has been so off impersonal and strangely diligent that i ve been able to recognize them as the overtures to a scam posted on 22 june 2026 author caleb crain categories ai confidence men history of technology the last dad book i reviewed craig fehrman s this vast enterprise a new history of lewis clark for the 1 june 2026 issue of the new yorker posted on 25 may 2026 author caleb crain categories american history birds dogs exploration meriwether lewis the northwest passage william clark two pieces of news news item 1 a new short story of mine is published in the april issue of harper s magazine it s called trying to find the right and true way to talk about death is funny it s about death philosophy and saying good bye i m grateful to editors christine smallwood and chris carroll for taking a chance on it please check it out news item 2 i m honored to be a recipient of one of this year s arts and letters awards from the american academy of arts and letters posted on 20 march 2026 author caleb crain categories death philosophy short stories writing as a way of life the nether sky peter and i are trying to revive an old practice reading a poem together when we get up in the morning the first one in the anthology we ve chosen is beeny cliff by thomas hardy about a seaside rock face in cornwall that hardy visited with his first wife emma lavinia gifford soon after they met the poem starts by invoking the colors they saw in the ocean o the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea the poem s subtitle is march 1870 march 1913 which are the month hardy met gifford and the month he revisited the site forty three years later after her death the first stanza has no tense however it merely apostrophizes the colors and then gifford in a voice that belongs to neither the present nor the past a voice that floats between and the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free the woman whom i loved so and who loyally loved me in a memoir that gifford wrote not long before she died and which hardy didn t discover until after she recalls that when she rode her pony which was named fanny fanny and i were one creature and very happy and that she rode him in a brown dress whose color matched his coat so long that she had to carry the end of it in order not to trip she met hardy because he was the architect hired to remodel the church where her brother in law was rector a structure so dilapidated that birds and bats had a good time in the roof timbers she remembered that when the architect visited i rode my pretty mare fanny and he walked by my side and i showed him some of the neighbourhood the cliffs along the roads and through the scattered hamlets sometimes gazing down at the solemn small shores below where the seals lived coming out of great deep caverns very occasionally in her biography of hardy claire tomalin reports that gifford and hardy sketched each other the victorian equivalent of taking joint selfies unlike the poem s first stanza the second commits itself to the past and describes one of the couple s outings the pale mews plained below us and the waves seemed far away in a nether sky engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say as we laughed light heartedly aloft on that clear sunned march day peter and i both stumbled over mews which are gulls it turns out not stables i thought at first that plained had something to do with the flatness of the horizon but hardy means cried as in the related words complained and plaintive gulls are crying below in other words but mews plained comes a little closer to the sound gulls make when they re doing so hardy doesn t mind using a word that s a step removed from common diction if he can gain a poetic effect by it his calling the sea below a nether sky is a nifty metaphor because sea and sky are alike in both stretching away into the distance where they meet and mirror each other along the horizon and the metaphor accomplishes a neat trick of perspective looking down somehow feels like looking up there s a suggestion too that the sea or the reversed sky covers an underworld a suggestion at the moment easy to dismiss given that the sea is distant and the murmuring of its waves sounds trivial easily interrupted by the laughter he and gifford are sharing a little cloud then cloaked us and there flew an irised rain and the atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain and then the sun burst out again and purples prinked the main colors are always subtle in hardy irised means iridescent the shimmer of rainbow that sometimes appears in rain especially when seen from above the atlantic ocean lying behind this prismatic rain appears to color it to darken it in horizontal strata hardy s language here is as precise and general as an experiment in optics at one moment he sounds like he s talking to you in a conversational tone a little cloud then cloaked us and in the next line he compresses his thought to the density of a mathematical formula irised isn t a common word but its meaning is clear and its compactness keeps the poem in its trotting rhythm there s a kind of grammatical insistence too i think in the accumulation of past participles engrossed sunned irised misfeatured there s even one at the core of light heartedly act is being consolidated into completed action in the dull misfeatured stain the malevolence of the nether sky is again visible still in the background for now but beginning to leach through happily the sun returns the action of this stanza is taking place in the past when rebirths were still possible and transfigures the staining ocean whose tints now become decoration still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old beeny to the sky and shall she and i not go there once again now march is nigh and the sweet things said in that march say anew there by and by with the em dash hardy jump cuts to the present beeny has become old beeny fond in memory and hardy asks as if challenging a limit he knows he can t pass whether he and gifford will ever visit it again together the small love talk he exchanged with her on the cliff summit years ago now seems as distant as the babbling of the waves did when he stood next to her there what if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore the woman now is elsewhere whom the ambling pony bore and nor knows nor cares for beeny and will laugh there nevermore the phrase chasmal beauty and the name beeny are repeated as if to stress that the cliff still exists as the woman a word repeated with a similar stress in the first stanza does not in any sublime geographic feature there s a hint of eternity which is part of the attraction for human visitors a hint that plays on the visitors a very slow joke in that while rocks and sea may be lasting any admirers though they may feel like they have been placed above nature by virtue of their powers of perception are not in his two volume autobiography written and then posthumously published under the not very convincing pretense that his second wife was the author of it hardy reprinted some of the notes he made in his journal when he first visited beeny cliff in march 1870 with gifford march 10 went with e l g to beeny cliff she on horseback on the cliff the tender grace of a day etc the run down to the edge the coming home the ellipses are hardy s what a little shocked me when an annotation to beeny cliff sent me to hardy s autobiography for a look at this journal entry is the quoted fragment of poetry the tender grace of a day it comes from the conclusion of tennyson s poem break break break which is also about looking out over the sea while in mourning the last two lines of that poem read as follows but the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me tennyson wrote the poem while grieving for his young friend arthur hallam who had died while abroad and whose death became the subject of his later masterpiece in memoriam which imaginatively follows the homeward progress by sea of hallam s sealed coffin what s puzzling is that while it makes a great deal of sense for break break break to have been in hardy s mind in 1913 when he was composing beeny cliff as an elegy for gifford the poem seems to have been in his mind already in 1870 back when he was courting her the stenographic style of the journal entry implies that when he was writing about the day he was confident he would always remember its texture the run down to the edge the coming home these were lyrical moments that he knew a brief prompt would always return him to the way a short quoted phrase can call to mind the poem it has dropped out of did he and gifford kiss when they came to the edge of the cliff did the sight of the waves crashing below bring the same tennyson poem into both of their minds break break break on thy cold gray stones o sea and did one of them quote it to the other those details are not recoverable by us now but the surprise is that the nether sky that hardy saw in the sea that day with gifford by his side was not a later invention projected onto the past by a grieving husband he saw it then and so probably did she the tender grace of a day that is dead the young lovers wouldn t have quoted that tennyson line to each other unless they were already aware that they were living through a moment that was not going to return aware that the beauty of their happiness together was not going to last as long as beeny cliff posted on 7 january 2026 author caleb crain categories exegesis poetry thomas hardy irresolute i want to have a new year s resolution but i can t think of one i already don t smoke or drink and a minor and extremely tedious recent health issue cost me five pounds last month that i didn t want to lose and have been trying to get back read more books and fewer social media feeds i guess good luck me as for writing past experience suggests that the tightening of thumbscrews fails to increase my productivity or maybe i just don t want to believe or admit that it could holding on as i do to the notion that life should be worth living i don t seem to have as much faith in my raw will power as i used to and yet and yet on some days raw will power seems to be all i have according to the wrapped function in the app that tracks my cross fit workouts i lifted 868 994 pounds in 2025 which is 129 685 pounds more than i lifted the year before which suggests a certain amount of single mindedness or bloody mindedness one idea is that i should write more of these little essays for my blog newsletter and then also turn on the enable payments spig...