I’ve been reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition recently and it is truly a fascinating book. It distinguishes work, labour and action from one another – Something that you might think is trivial or unimportant, but that as it turns out is really quite important for understanding how human beings but that’s not what I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about is this idea of the violence we do to the world through the work of our hands.

Here Arendt’s definition of work is relevant; work is what we do, homo faber as we are, to create a world that lasts beyond us, something distinct from our labor, something durable.

When Arendt describes work, she doesn’t just describe it as a process of creating things ex nihilo – the way that a god might – out of nothing; rather, human beings create things out of that which was already given to the world we take timber and ore as resources from earth’s natural growth process and from within its bowels transform it through our efforts into something that was not on earth before and in so doing take the finitude of the world and fashion it for our own ends in an act of rebellion an act of violence, some might say.

I think about the industries we have, and how often we work purely for the sake of our biological needs, yet how because we conflate work with labor, work becomes our highest ideal in few other places.

I see this most saliently in the global AI consumption situation, where thousands of us are casually using tokens on a massive scale to power artificial intelligence models that are run on carbon-consuming computers that produce true simulated machine intelligence computations that stretch beyond the limit of any individual’s human capacity – a form of violence that we are doing to the world.

I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, but I can see that this is a form of violence that I had not seen so clearly before. There are many things that I have to say about this and plenty of thoughts, but I can already feel myself returning to the life process that is sleep. One of those things I’ve become a little more in touch with as I began reading this book. Well, until tomorrow then.

One of the most fascinating sports I’ve ever seen in my life is the sport of professional slapping. My first exposure to this wonderful art, travesty, or disaster (whatever you like) came when I first saw Charles White Jr’s slapping playlist on YouTube.

Ever since, I’ve watched the odd slap master episode with a mix of strange fascination and slap happy joy.

It is with that collection of feelings that I am pleased to introduce you to Slap Mania, a little game that I moseyed up to train those of you who seek the high points of slapping and the holy grail of the title of Slap Emperor.

You’ll find it here!

Feel free to let me know what you think and share it with your friends.

It is likely that you have heard from an early age that “seeing is believing.” 

As life goes on, it becomes clear that that advice is only partly effective. There are many things in this world that can be true even if we cannot see that they are true. That human beings need air to breathe is just one example of the entire tantalizing set of possibilities out there, though it is a trivial one.

What is not trivial, though, is what I discovered today, which is that AI could very well, in a serious way, end up replacing us, the human race. 

It started with my first trial of core work. Now I had an awareness that AI could do something that human beings might want to do, but I’d always thought of myself as being there to prompt things. This is understandable, and it is par for the course when we use ChatGPT or any sort of bot. You still have to write the prompt, and you still have to get everything done.

Today I experienced a sea change as Claude not just wrote things for me but literally did some of the following actions (non-exhaustively):

1. First, it navigated Google Docs, opened up multiple sub-tabs, followed the results of delivering on a prompt which I had created across twelve separate tabs, navigating, screenshotting, and ultimately completing a task of creating a compilation of pieces, ensuring that every single one of them followed the required formatting that I had set out for it.

2. Next, it proceeded to navigate into my WordPress dashboard and then, upon having populated all of the information correctly in the applications Docs connector, proceeded to then copy that all out into a set of pages, titling everything correctly as per my instructions to create 12 separate page posts that followed my instructions, before copying the URLs that I needed as part of a sequence of actions that I could not imagine having taken so quickly.

If it was just that, it would have already been impressive, but this also helped me in another way. It helped me assemble a full DJ set compiling tracks that I would want to play.

Not only that, it even autonomously searched SoundCloud on my behalf before locating links to mixes that were explicitly downloadable. It went through every single one of the gateways on its own by clicking through the whole sea of different actions that SoundCloud creators always want you to take part in. Whether to like their song, follow them on SoundCloud, follow them on Spotify, or any number of other actions necessary to finally get to the end of the wall. Claude did every single one of those things and proceeded to download the tracks to my computer.

Now it might seem that this is very seemingly mundane, but really it explains how I am able to just be out and about right now, completely secure in the awareness that my time is actually being bought back in a very real way that I could never have imagined. Even that was just the beginning. 

Truly, seeing is believing, and now I see, and now I believe. What I once imagined as just a mere possibility suddenly and drastically came into reality. Before I knew it, I realized, perhaps a little later than others, that I was living in a new world, filled now with knowledge of that new world that I cannot liberate for myself anymore.

It’s fascinating to see, but frankly, it is also a little terrifying to see it all in action, to genuinely see complex and non-trivial actions get carried out in this way. Where exactly all of this is going is hard to say, but what’s clear to me is that it appears that the universe has showed me something new and unexpected, and it has done so for a reason. It will not behoove me, nor would it be coming of me, to ignore that change and allow things to just be business as usual.