“Oh, Mary!” begins at a fever pitch – loud, over the top, brassy – and stays that way. Imagine Mary Todd Lincoln as a frustrated cabaret dancer and her husband as a frustrated gay man, each part played to comic perfection. What could possibly go wrong when she plots a return to the stage before the war ends? I’ve never seen an audience leave a Broadway show happier, with laughter and eye contact all around. We were practically holding hands.
It was the perfect antidote to my existential fear. I’d been reading about the future of AI – and humanity (if we survive). I needed a joyful distraction.
I’ve been prepping for my conversation with Bruce Holsinger at the Southern Festival of Books next weekend – Saturday, October 18th, at 2 pm in the Tennessee State Museum (Wolf Room). Please join us!
Holsinger’s new novel, Culpability, imagines a family in crisis in the brave new world of AI – not the world of tomorrow, but the world of today.
Some of the questions raised by the book are: can we train AI to be good? Can we control it? Will AI help us be better – or worse – humans?
Here’s an excerpt from a fictional book on AI (“Silicon Souls”) within the book Culpability…
“The myth of Venus and Adonis is a story of vulnerability, hubris, and fear. Venus, in love with the strapping young hunter, has a dream of his violent death. Upon waking, she begs him not to go out on his next hunt. But Adonis, impatient and fearless, believes himself invulnerable. He leaves the goddess behind, goes into the forest with his dogs, and dies, impaled on the tusks of a wild boar.
In the face of Artificial Intelligence, we are all in something like the position of Adonis, confident in our invulnerability and oblivious to peril. Yet we are also Venus, whose role in the myth is to voice a kind of maternal protectiveness and fear.
The real danger is that we will let our fear overwhelm our judgment and outpace our strategies to control the forces imperiling our future. Perhaps, then, we need to learn better ways to fear.
Because the boar waits coldly in the woods, an alien creature contriving unfathomable threats.”
* * *
Culpability isn’t all doom and gloom! One of the funniest lines in the books comes from daughter Alice, when she’s asked what her mother fears. “Literally everything,” she replies.
* * *
Here are links to a few informative articles on AI…
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/16/ai-doom-risk-anthropic-openai-google
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03222-1
Are AI existential risks real—and what should we do about them?
***
And here are a few things I noticed in the city….
A large rat appeared near Bryant Park. Very large. The largest rat ever to have been spotted by man or beast, in Bryant Park. It appeared, then disappeared as quickly as it came.
Ho hum, said the begonias (bored, unbothered).
Well now, chirped the mums (“what’s this all about?”)
Fabulous! Trilled the fountain (everything is fabulous to the fountain)
While the sycamores, as always, looked up, up and away (except for the one who whispered to the wind: run for your life)
* * *
Even in the face of a giant inflatable rat, it seems to me, we are who we are.
Or possibly a donut