Siri is from Apple and is here to help us. We are assured that it doesn’t spy on us like its relatives from Amazon and Alphabet do, so why do we hate it? Maybe being talked to like we were five years old by a machine the size of a grapefruit has something to do with it. Maybe being given answers that are either irrelevant or insane when we ask it a question does also. Artificial intelligence sounds like a fine idea. Being given artificial stupidity instead tends to confirm the contempt that we suspect the management of large corporations have for us. The tech bros fear the singularity. What they should fear is the Butlerian Jihad.
This had me thinking back on my own reading of the Dune books, which I probably ought to dig out and read again given, well, [waves hands about]. On a whim I popped “Butlerian Jihad” into duckduckgo and got this reddit commentary reminding us what Herbert himself had to say about it:
“A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the proscription against thinking machines in Dune is tied to a period 10,000 years before the events of Dune in which machines enslaved humanity in a Matrix/Terminator-esque standard sci-fi scenario.
However, Frank Herbert could really not have been clearer that this wasn’t the case:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” (Dune)
“What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger.” (God Emperor of Dune)”
p.s. How does one do block quotes here? I know I’ve seen you – and MK, IIRC – do them to quote a particular part of a response, but I have no idea how to apply them myself. Thanks!
It’s said that any physical capability that’s disused will atrophy. With muscles this is clearly the case. With the brain, though, it seems more likely that a change in usage patterns triggers a metamorphosis. I’m thinking here about what the rise of literacy did to human culture, about the profound things McLuhan had to say about the effects of television, and more recently the impact of generative AI on our definitions of intelligence in general and language in particular. If I live long enough, I’ll probably write a lot more about that philosophical nexus. Clearly I have thoughts….
As for the blockquote conundrum, I confess I’ve wondered about the absence of HTML capability in the public-facing comments editor myself. The only way I can get them—italics, bolding, strikethrough, blockquotes, etc.—is by switching to the administrative mode editor. It seems to me that previous versions of the WordPress theme I’m using for Canecittà did support HTML formatting in comments, but if so, I don’t remember when that changed. In looking at the possibilities briefly, it appears that I may need to add some custom CSS to my theme to enable HTML support in the public comments editor. I’ll look into it further….
Following up on the blockquote issue:
Rummaging around in the WordPress forums, I found an entry which appears to confirm that WordPress stopped allowing HTML formatting in the public comments editor several versions ago. The forum entry didn’t reveal why, but I’m guessing it probably had something to do with security—HTML has been the vector of some pretty nasty WordPress intrusions in the past, and as we all know, the Internet has been a jungle long enough now to host a variety of increasingly formidable predators. In any case, there doesn’t appear to be anything to be done about this.
On the off chance that this isn’t the case, though, here’s me using the hand-coded blockquote tag. If the raw HTML shows up in the published version, I think we can conclude that we’re out of luck.
PS: Well, waddaya know. The forum post was wrong. So even though style buttons are no longer supported, it appears regular HTML tags can be hand-coded. Do you know the blockquote tags?