The introduction to my latest, unfinished, attempt to think through what ChatBots will mean for human intellect; largely behind the paywall because, as I said, profoundly unfinished:

Two Rooms

In the evenings five-hundred years ago a man named Niccolò Machiavelli would walk into a small study—a writing room.

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He had just had a very bad year and a half: fired from his longtime senior civil service job, imprisoned, tortured, then released broke and broken, and told to consider himself under house arrest in the countryside where he would be, politically, out of contact and of no account. As he described his routine in a letter to his friend Francesco Vettori:

Niccolò Machiavelli (1513): When evening comes, I return home and go into my study; and at the door I take off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on robes regal and courtly, and in this graver dress I enter the ancient courts of ancient men. I am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass entirely into their world…

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In the evenings these days, almost anywhere, almost any evening this year, young occupant of perhaps fifteen sits or lies in their room. The phone is on. On its screen, in succession, an endless succession of faces speak directly to whoever is holding it. They confide. They joke. They are outraged. They are intimate. Each occupies the screen for fifteen or forty seconds, and then gives way to the next. This occupant, too, has in a sense entered not the ancient courts of ancient men but the modern courts of influencers making short-form video. This occupant, too, is being received with what looks like affection (but is, mostly, a greedy hope that their eyeballs can be rented out to advertisers). This occupant, too, may well spend four hours of an evening in the process.

What is the difference?

It is not that one is “social” and the other “parasocial”. Both are parasocial, profoundly overwhelmingly so. None of the people who matter most to Niccolò Machiavelli that evening are in the writing room in his rural Tuscan Percussina farmhouse, a farmhouse that is so far from luxury that he calls it “the dump”. They are more than a millennium and more dead, with names like Titus Livius Patavinus, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, and Polybios Lykorta Megalopolítes. Similarly none of the people who the fifteen-year-old sees on short-form video are there or are even aware of his existence, even though they are alive. There is a difference in that in one room there are speaking and gesturing faces and bodies on a screen; and in the other room there are simply black marks on a page.

Out of his four-hour nightly séances with the honored dead in the ancient courts of ancient men, Machiavelli thinks deeply and profoundly and writes what he calls the “little work, De principatibus” that we call The Prince. Out of their four-hour nightly video scrolling fests, the fifteen-year-old does—what?

The key difference, I think, is this: in the first room, it is the man, Niccolò Machiavelli, who does all of the talking. either in his principal voice or in his mind’s eye as he uses his own wetware to breathe life into his interlocutor.

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