Charles Ess

‘We Fall in Love With the Technologies of Our Enslavement. … The Next Generation May Be One of No-Skilling in Regard to Essential Human Virtue Ethics’ - Imagining the Digital Future Center “The human characteristics (such as empathy, moral judgment, decision-making and problem-solving skills, the capacity to learn) are virtues that are utterly central to human autonomy and flourishing. ...

Just in case you need anything else to get depressed about ...
Deeply honored that my little essay has been foregrounded by the Elon University Imagining the Digital Future Center. and deeply hope that I'm wrong.
imaginingthedigitalfuture.org/we-fall-in-l...

I was privileged to a part of a group of "global technology experts" asked to contribute to a series of survey questions on "Being Human in 2035: How Are We Changing in the Age of AI?"
I was among the more pessimistic - but thereby with the majority.
imaginingthedigitalfuture.org/reports-and-...

(continued)
"and I support democracy and human rights and will respect the country's laws."
These should be included in the US pledge of allegiance: and anyone, most especially the highest elected officials, who fails to live up to them should relocate to their preferred authoritarian regime.

On April 6, 2025 I, my guest Conni, and several hundred others and their guests are being welcomed as new citizens.
We are to take a symbolic promise of fidelity (troskapsløftet) - whose words would be useful in the US:
I promise fidelity to my country Norway and the Norwegian society AND ( next)

(continued) Complete with a billionaire oligarch launching the equivalent of a coup in taking over the US Treasury's payment systems - with a first target: Lutheran Social Services, apparently for its using funds to help (gasp) refugees.

Someone, anyone, please show me where I'm badly mistaken

Vladimir Putin's most excellent week! Now the trade wars have begun, with more to come, and "the West" will become economically strained and politically divided. This long-term goal of Putin in his hybrid warfare against "the West" has now been achieved on whole new levels.
(continued ...).

Trump and Co walked back their connections with Project 2025 after discovering that it was wildly unpopular with most Americans - e.g., replacing officers and staff in the US military with loyalists who would put orders from Trump over law and Constitution.
Looks like they lied ... I'm shocked.

Takk i lige måde! and glad to see you here! Yes, we think of you often - especially when we attend a concert at the Oslo Filharmonik, as we did last week. We've discovered that the "cheap seats" behind the orchestra are actually the best: you can see the conductor's face quite clearly. Thanks again!

Thanks a million: just _exactly_ what I needed! Hope you and yours are doing well, despite it all.

Oh that was good ... nice to see you here!

Wowsers! If you manage to get his name, please let me know. What a kind thing to say. Yep, teaching the liberal arts is like planting seeds ... you may not see them sprout for many years, but then in the most surprising and wonderful ways. Hope you and yours are doing well, despite it all ...

As the terror begins in the US, I'm wondering what a historian of Nazi Germany might say. At some point in the 1930s it was too late to fight anymore: too many people afraid? too many people agreed with the regime, whether openly or not? Too many who would have resisted had left? God help us all.

The Handbook of Communication Ethics | Amit Pinchevski, Patrice M. Buz The second edition of this handbook offers a thoroughly updated overview of the different approaches and perspectives in communication ethics today. Extending

I'm deeply honored that I was included among six scholars interviewed by the editors of The Handbook of Communication Ethics (2nd ed.). (Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9781...). The interview is: "Ethical Judgment in the Age of AI," in Pinchevski et al (2024), pp. 414-418.
@shannonvallor.bsky.social

Good morning! Following two days of considerable snow fall, traffic chaos, etc. - the quiet beauty of a near silent winter morning: Kampen, Oslo.

(from the Ninth Duino Elegy).
I noted this down in my "Commonplace Book," as I later learned to call it, sometime in my 20s. And so it comes back to mind 40+ years later, with all the more deeper meaning and resonance.
Read good poets. Take good notes. It will serve you well.

But because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely.
Us, the most transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once. Never again.
But this having been once, although only once,
to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.
- Rilke

One of our favorite places - Brannfjel, part of the top of Ekeberg: a small forest surrounding a pond and a svaberg, tough 1.4 billion year old granite shaped by the glaciers.
Some 40+ years ago, I was busy reading German literature, including the Romantics - including Rainer Marie Rilke ...

I recently completed this build of Ben Eater's 8-bit breadboard computer; a great, very demanding project to understand it all at the level of logic gates and transistors - and in my case, linking further to several domains of philosophy / technology. Of interest? E.g., @shannonvallor.bsky.social