Instructions for making your very own lamellae will be released soon. If, that is, everything goes according to plan. You never know when working in the lamella realm. I started writing an introduction yesterday, which entailed revisiting a conversation I had with an AI chat bot. Much of the conversation is punctuated with warnings and hedges from the AI , reminding me that “[pretty much everything to do with] AI raises many questions and challenges, and it is an area of ongoing debate and discussion within the field of AI ethics and philosophy.” Oh and that “this [whole project] is purely speculative and there is currently no established way to implement such a concept in an AI system.” Yes, yes, yes, I replied. But, what if…
Those who saw my previous post will recall, I downloaded Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, originally published in 1930, for the princely sum of £0.8p. Hard to deny it was a bargain, although being just £0.8p, we should not be surprised to find that it is riddled with typos and duplicate pages, which can make things confusing at times. I was sure I would not have time to read to it, but as it’s on my device, I can tell you with tremendous accuracy, I have already read 49% of it – and that was over coffee this morning! Out of all Freud’s writing, this is perhaps the most digestible I have picked up, and so relevant. Of course, there are things in there which Freud’s [or rather – the] Super Ego might never have allowed if he were writing today, but I am so glad to have been directed towards it for the following:
Today […Man…] has almost become a god himself./
/Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs [My Kindle being one of them, for sure] he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they all give him much trouble at times./
/Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilisation and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.
Sigmund Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents (p. 40). Kindle Edition.
Perhaps that’s the crux of my unfolding project – man does not feel very happy in his Godlike character. No, indeed, he doesn’t. Will this be clear in end result? Does it matter? Will the ethical questions emerge? Who knows? Maybe the AI does? In the meantime, you can visit a holding page at