| | | | | (Glenn Harvey for The Washington Post) | | We're on the cusp of technology that will at last let you live forever. You'll be more beautiful, too, and stay young. It will make you kinder, if you prefer. And would you like to speak Finnish, as well? Of course, you won't be you, really, but an AI version. Sorry, it'll just be friends and family enjoying those eternal good looks. Columnist Bina Venkataraman knows this is coming because it's already here, at least for deepfake performances from long-dead celebrities. But the tech is getting better every day, and soon it will be reanimating Grandpa alongside Elvis. So, Bina writes, we should prepare: "At a minimum, consider putting your wishes regarding an AI avatar into your will." Step back and marvel at that sentence — but then don't stop there. Bina raises plenty more concern, from the wisdom of your AI apparition showing up mid-grief to the ethics of, yes, making your ghost really, really hot. If this is all too much and you need to hit the brakes on AI ability for a minute, look no further than former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels's latest op-ed. He put ChatGPT to the test of solving our national debt problem; the bot failed just about as spectacularly as our politicians. In fact, it was uncanny how much its diplomatic answers mirrored public discourse, Daniels writes: "Don't like the question? Duck and address the one you wanted to be asked." Perhaps ChatGPT just knows the debt is a problem for the long run, and in the long run, we're all dead. | | Then again … are we? Chaser: Or maybe we are all dead — like, very dead. Last year, existential risk philosopher Émile P. Torres explained how AI could accidentally extinguish humankind. | Belonging, but for how long? | | Two op-eds today got me thinking about belonging. What does it mean to want so badly to be part of a community? To get in? And perhaps to realize it's not everything you had dreamed? First, college professor Jennifer Finney Boylan feels a kinship with the sorority girls of the University of Alabama. She recently watched the "Bama Rush" documentary streaming on Max, and in it saw a beautiful little allegory for being queer. Boylan, who is trans, writes that LGBTQ+ people and would-be Tri Delts alike are chasing "the hope of belonging" — and are often caught off guard by its price. It's hard not to think along these lines, Boylan writes, during a Pride month that feels unsettled — "a time to celebrate, yes, but also a time to be aware that LGBTQ+ people, and trans people in particular, are at serious risk of losing much of the progress we have made." Next, minister and author Rick Warren reflects on how his Southern Baptist church recognized as pastors three women who have long served the congregation. But instead of celebrating this milestone, the larger Southern Baptist denomination expelled the entire church. Warren calls it a "self-inflicted wound" that will only hasten the denomination's decline. It hurts him to watch the denomination go this way, but he knows it hurts its women even more. Chaser: In 2021, contributing columnist Kate Cohen took a provocative stance on college fraternities: Abolish them. | |  | | From adventure travel writer Brandon Presser's op-ed on the utter immensity and ruthlessness of the ocean. Its floor is "the closest thing we have to an alien world," he writes in an essay that plumbs the depths — and why they fascinate us. Presser followed the rescue attempt for the submersible that set off to see the Titanic with as much unease as the rest of us, and perhaps even a bit more. His op-ed describes his own scuba-diving brush with the merciless force of multiple atmospheres of pressure. And like all of us, he had hoped for an unlikely happy ending. But the Titanic's sea-floor wreckage, and now the Titan's as well, confirm that's something the deep ocean rarely grants. | | | (Ann Telnaes/The Washington Post) | | Associate editor Ruth Marcus knows she's starting to sound like a broken record: "Another justice, another luxury trip, all expenses paid by conservative activists with ideological or financial interests before the Supreme Court." But don't take that up with Ruth! Take it up with the court! This time, it's Justice Samuel Alito and a fishing boondoggle back in 2008, but it's the same entitlement, Ruth writes, the same hubris. And — surprise — her column dismantles the same sorry sort of defenses. | | It's a goodbye. It's a haiku. It's … The Bye-Ku. Communing with kin In ecto-plasma display — "Hadn't he gone gray?" *** Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow! | | | | | | | | | |
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