Begin forwarded message:
From: david ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Marchese's interview of Stephen Fry
Date: May 3, 2021 at 9:09:50 PM PDT
To: Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
I’ve now read this and what catches my eye is the moment when Gore
Vidal responds to the sex worker who complains that he doesn’t do “that,”
saying “of course you do.” Now there’s what people now call power and
privilege but John Rechy described more vividly; no choice involved, only a
matter of who pays how much for what.
Fry is bipolar; he’s a very bright man who is often in the grip of
something. Liike Christopher Hitchens, he’s furiously atheist. How then,
absent a divine guiding hand, to describe the fact that some actions and
thoughts don’t seem very willed? His answer to me sounds less like Jung’s
collective unconscious, more the “wisdom of the hive”; ask enough people and
you’ll find out what general direction people wish to travel. You’ll also
find that the collective not only guides the hive, it polices it; step out of
line and we’ll tell you tales about what we believe good behavior is. Maybe
even try to enforce our ideas of right behavior. Free will is constrained by
social and cultural guidelines. Yes, you may claim you were born that way,
but remember the M’naughten rule.
I find it sad that Daniel M’Naghten didn’t even quite get into the
spelling of the rule that was named after him.
As for the stuff about AI. Everyone talks about it. I play tennis
with a guy who is helping to make the stuff. I understand very little about
how and why we fear what algorithms will do. I still fear humans more than
that stuff.
David Ritchie,
about as enigmatic as a gnat in
Portland, Oregon
