Micro Monday - June 16, 2025
Peace
Happy Monday, folks! The summer solstice is just around the corner, so I’m looking for all the summer dopamine hits right now. Seafaring epics and horror classics are high on the list, and this week’s story probably came from some combination of the two. I have a few thoughts on this one, which I’ll share after the image below. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy it.
Peace
Drowning, Tom stared up through the waves and watched the stars go out one by one.
He’d been the last crew member to go under. The broken slivers of the hull had long since drifted away. Nothing blocked his view of the darkening sky. Alone in the middle of the sea, he could almost believe that he was the last surviving member of the human race, that he’d somehow made it to the end of the world.
Fear became wonder. Despair gave way to humility.
And as the calm outweighed the pain in his lungs, he finally understood why some men sank their own ships for the privilege of being the last one to drown.
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I’m going to talk about themes and hidden meanings and all that, so if you want to take a few minutes to absorb the story at your own pace, go for it. I’m not claiming that the story is especially deep or anything—just that there’s virtue in letting the tea steep for a few minutes before you add the milk and sugar.
Right, here goes.
There’s a class of thinkers who engage in conversations about artificial superintelligence with a kind of pseudo-optimism that I find annoying. The purpose of humanity, in their eyes, is to pave the way for digital superintelligence, which will presumably do a much better job of managing things than we do. If human extinction is the cost of that enterprise, well, c’est la vie (or, more accurately, the end of it).
Cowardly bullshit, in my opinion. This is suicidal ideation disguised as religion, an excuse to sit back and look at the sky instead of engaging with real problems. Faced with a multitude of difficult crises, it removes our obligation to solve any of them. Just sit back and let the machines do it.
Fear becomes wonder. Despair becomes humility. Half the crew abandons ship, enamored with their personalized view of the stars.
Personally, if the machines are coming to liberate humanity, I’d rather them find me down in the hold with a bucket.
Perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that the individual quoted as Exhibit A has made some of the most laughably incorrect predications of all time--a pathetic man whose every utterance seems to contain little else but downright foolishness (or fraudulence, though I fail to see much of a difference in this case).
Great imagery in this story JKT.