In Convivium I warn that AI threatens our humanity almost as much if it does work as it threatens humanity if it runs amok.
“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.”
G.K. Chesterton in the introduction to The Defendant
“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.”
Goethe, quoted on the flyleaf of Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy.
“The dark night of the soul was not discovered by Freud; it was at the heart of the experience of faith.”
Charles J. Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character
“‘I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism. – Roberto Rossellini; 1906-1977”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2238066-i-am-not-a-pessimist-to-perceive-evil-where-it
“If this physical world is all, then it is a closed hell in which we are confined like prisoners in chains, condemned to watch the other prisoners being slain.”
John Updike quoted in Huston Smith Why Religion Matters
“Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.”
Novalis, quoted in George Macdonald Lilith
In my latest National Post column I say that acts of evil, including the mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques, result from deliberate cultivating of evil thoughts.