William Fear has published an insightful piece in The Critic this week entitled "Orwell, Camus and truth" (Hat tip again to ALDaily). The article tells the story of a missed moment in history when two of the 20th century's great writers might have met. And the anecdote is full of irony, verisimilitude and pathos as we onlookers speculate on what might have been had these two great friends ever actually met.
Orwell sat and waited, and waited, for Camus to arrive. He never turned up: he was laid up with an exacerbation of tuberculosis. They would never get the chance to meet again, and Orwell would die five years later, having lost his own battle with the same disease
For friends they were according to Camus, though they never did meet or correspond, as far as William Fear can determine. What they shared was a deep seated need to pursue the unknowable truth and the wisdom to know that the essence of truth was that it was unknowable.
Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas
This observation caught my eye because it reverberates with similar cadences and concerns to those we grapple with now in the 21st century pursuing truth in the face of Chat BOTs, Large Language Models (LLM) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). These warriors of the 20th century sound uncannily familiar to Emily M Bender dueling with the proponents of the singularity, trying to reassert the grounding of language and meaning in real sensory human experience, rather than in the mere "distributional semantics" of LLMs inside Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs).
This endless hard fought battle for the truth does have very deep roots in human culture. Can this latest apocalyptic battle for the truth with BOTs, OpenAI and Skynet, be just the latest iteration of humanity's eternal fight to find truth, whilst never conceding that it is findable or has been found?
Or could this latest battle be the last one of the war? There is also a curious chord of similarity in observing that we can never know when we have found the truth with the notion that we cannot know when we have reached the singularity. Maybe the cosmic ambiguity of our journey to truth is now finally reaching an endgame as humans cede responsibility for the need to search for truth to the machine.
Are humans truly going to give up the fight for truth to these BOTs?
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