Episode 11.51: Four consequences of AI diffusion models for human understanding and cognition.

We follow up on the conversation with an AI that we transcribed in episode 50. There are four points: one is about how we lay hold on the latent space that is made possible by any given object and implicit in it; second is that the way we give expression to our collective non-conscious understanding of the world in such things as religion means that it is not so much the religions that matter as what those religions tell us about ourselves; the third is that we lay hold on the fleeting impressions that latent spaces make upon using rhetoric for fear of losing the insights; the last is that determinism is the kiss of death to human life, and turns us into a kind of walking dead because it removes all possibilities of choice from the way we instantiate latent spaces.