Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
You know how we’ve been in endless reboots and franchise/universe extensions of old tv and movies for a couple of decades now? What if AI is that but for all human thought 😬 What if we’re done thinking and this is all just endless recycling from here on out 😖🫣
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Eh I embrace my AI enabled content spin cycle. From my robo-butler: This is a fun (and slightly terrifying) thought, but it also feels like a very modern anxiety—one that assumes linear progress as the default and fears a kind of historical entropic heat death where we just remix ourselves forever. But if you take a more cyclical view, this isn’t new at all. The ancients didn’t expect endless novelty; they saw history as a series of repeating ages—gold, silver, bronze, decay, rebirth. The Stoics had ekpyrosis, the cosmic fire that consumes and resets everything. Hindu philosophy has kalpas—vast cycles of creation and destruction. Even Vico’s corsi e ricorsi saw history as spiraling through the same patterns of rise, decline, and renewal.
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Moar And then there’s Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, which basically argues that modernity’s whole project—this idea that we’ve broken free from the past and are always moving forward—is kind of a self-deception. We’re always entangled in our history, always remixing, always looping back. AI just makes that more obvious. Maybe the fear isn’t that we’re done thinking. Maybe it’s that we’re realizing we’ve never really thought in isolation—just reconfigured the same deep structures over and over. Maybe that’s not the end of thought, but just its actual nature.
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