The Culture Creating A.I. Is Weird. Here’s Why That Matters.

In recent months, we’ve witnessed the rise of chatbots that can pass law and business school exams, artificial companions who’ve become best friends and lovers and music generators that produce remarkably humanlike songs . It’s hard to know how to process it all. But if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s this: The future — shaped by technologies like artificial intelligence — is going to be profoundly weird. It’s going to look, feel and function differently from the world we have grown to recognize. How do we learn to navigate — even embrace — the weirdness of the world we’re entering into? Erik Davis is the author of the books “ High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies ” and “ TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information ” and writes the newsletter “ Burning Shore .” For Davis, “weirdness” isn’t just a quality of things that don’t make sense to us, it’s an interpretive framework that helps us better understand the cultures and technologies that will shape our wondrous, wild future. We discuss how Silicon Valley’s particularly weird culture has altered the trajectory of A.I. development, why programs like ChatGPT can profound…