On Meaning, Endurance, and the Temptation of Early AI Assisted Resolution
Ottoman manuscript document, 18th–19th century. Photograph by the author. Collection of the Historical Museum of Crete, Heraklion. On Meaning, Endurance, and the Temptation of Early AI Assisted Resolution I recently read Sam Kriss’s essay, Reading is magic: What will happen in our second peasanthood , and it has stayed with me. Not because of its argument alone, but because it names a real unease: that something which once required time, friction, and endurance to become real in a person no longer seems to require them. To see this clearly, it helps to begin somewhere older than literacy itself. For most of human history, religious belief did not depend on reading. It was carried. It was given, received, repeated, feared, trusted, doubted, and returned to. It was spoken in words not always fully understood, enacted in gestures that preceded explanation, and held in lives that did not need to justify it in order to live by it. Yet it bore some of the heaviest materials a human lif...