“If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things...”

- Daniel C Dennett

“Space travel nowadays was an escape from the problems of Earth. That is, one took off for the stars in the hope that the worst would happen and be done with in one’s absence. And indeed I couldn’t deny that more than once I had peered anxiously out the porthole – especially when returning from a long voyage – to see whether or not our planet resembled a burnt potato.”

- Stanislaw Lem, The Futurological Congress

“In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there—that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”

- William James

Like a lot of people, there are times when I worry about what other people will think of the work that I do. I worry about whether my participants will find my workshops utterly transformative, I worry that those few brave souls who read my blog will like what I write and think I’m both very clever and exceptionally funny, and I worry about whether the partners and clients I work with will think my work is dazzling and brilliant. Simple aspirations.

“We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.”

- Neil Postman

In the discussion around generative AI a lot of the debate has focused around this same binary - truth and falsehood. Many are worried that the ability of generative AI tools to produce images, audio, video, and text may be used, or is already being used, to produce lies. Fake images, fake video, fake audio. That these powerful AI systems are a means of obscuring the truth or outright lying. We need, then, to clarify just what a lie might be, and why there is something more worrying hiding in plain sight.

No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own buttocks.

- Michel de Montaigne

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

- Douglas Adams

Quite early on in Dune, we’re given this encapsulation of the power dynamics at play in the universe. There’s the Imperial Household, headed by the Padishah Emperor, the Great Houses of the Landsraad, the major political body, and the Spacing Guild, the entity that controls all interstellar travel. The Emperor’s power is grounded in status and the strength of his feared Sardaukar army, the Landsraad holds power through the political structures it wields and the treaties and conventions it defends, and the Spacing Guild maintains its power by exerting a monopoly on space travel. Three simple pillars of power.