Too much of nothing Can make a man feel ill at ease One man’s temper rises While another man’s temper might freeze Now it’s a day of confession And we cannot mock a soul Oh, when there’s too much of nothing No one has control Bob Dylan, Too Much of Nothing
Count the items in your day. What you encounter and engage with. Inside and outside. Things and thoughts. Incidentally or by choice. It’s a lot.
As you count, you might consider the character and value of those items. What is each one adding? What is each one subtracting? More to the point, what is each one adding to or subtracting from what you value?
AI is literally trained on items, ready to process and offer those items. And it is an item itself. So if the volume of items already exploded with the digital access of internet and devices, that is now exponentially larger.
It is certain that 2026 will be another “year of AI”, as will every year in the foreseeable future. More items for us to encounter and engage in, incidentally and by choice, added to the proliferation of items we are already experiencing.
It is also certain that we, as lovely as we are, are not yet equipped to handles all these items in ways that are good for us as individuals and as societies. If we work at it maybe someday, but not yet, though hopefully before it overtakes us and we drown.
Which is why counting and valuing items may be helpful. It is, if you like to think of it this way, just awareness and consciousness of the items, their value, and your values. Once you are aware, you choose.
One person’s drowning is another person’s swimming in a vast ocean. If you understand the ocean and you know how to swim.
“One of the world’s great thinkers…. in the last 20 years of his life he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure. This position obscures the true importance of his contribution.” Guardian obituary of Ivan Illich, 8 December 2002
“The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men.” Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
If you have heard of Ivan Illich or include him in your conversations, you are in a small minority. His published critiques of major institutions—education, medicine, technology—had the establishment and those increasingly dominant institutions treating him as a “troublesome” marginal thinker. When you read Illich today, however, he comes across like a prophet. Prophets are almost always troublemakers.
Ivan Illich, who has died of cancer aged 76, was one of the world’s great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a constant criss-crossing of the globe in the last two decades.
Best known for his polemical writings against western institutions from the 1970s, which were easily caricatured by the right and were, equally, disdained by the left for their attacks on the welfare state, in the last 20 years of his life he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure. This position obscures the true importance of his contribution….
Illich was born in Vienna into a family with Jewish, Dalmatian and Catholic roots. His was an errant life, and he never found a home again after his family had to leave Vienna in 1941. He was educated in that city and then in Florence before reading histology and crystallography at Florence University.
He decided to enter the priesthood and studied theology and philosophy at the Vatican’s Gregorian University from 1943 to 1946. He started work as a priest in an Irish and Puerto Rican parish in New York, popularizing the church through close contact with the Latino community and respect for their traditions. He applied these same methods on a larger scale when, in 1956, he was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and later, in 1961, as founder of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, a broad-based research center which offered courses and briefings for missionaries arriving from North America….
Illich retained a lifelong base in Cuernavaca, but travelled constantly from this point on. His intellectual activity in the 1970s and 1980s focused on major institutions of the industrialized world. In seven concise, non-academic books he addressed education (Deschooling Society, 1971), technological development (Tools For Conviviality, 1973), energy, transport and economic development (Energy And Equity, 1974), medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1976) and work (The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies, 1978, and Shadow Work, 1981). He analyzed the corruption of institutions which, he said, ended up by performing the opposite of their original purpose….
Illich lived frugally, but opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a practically non-stop educational process which was always celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian at his final bases in Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania.
Ivan Illich, thinker, born September 4 1926; died December 2 2002
I have been rereading Tools for Conviviality, especially in light of the overwhelming AI phenomenon, and find it as insightful as anything I’ve read—even though it was written more than fifty years ago and it doesn’t directly address AI. Great thinking from great thinkers always ages well.
The symptoms of accelerated crisis are widely recognized. Multiple attempts have been made to explain them. I believe that this crisis is rooted in a major twofold experiment which has failed, and I claim that the resolution of the crisis begins with a recognition of the failure. For a hundred years we have tried to make machines work for men and to school men for life in their service. Now it turns out that machines do not “work” and that people cannot be schooled for a life at the service of machines. The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.
The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person’s range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that “work” for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves….
I here submit the concept of a multidimensional balance of human life which can serve as a framework for evaluating man’s relation to his tools. In each of several dimensions of this balance it is possible to identify a natural scale. When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These scales must be identified and the parameters of human endeavors within which human life remains viable must be explored.
Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behavior. Corporate endeavors which thus threaten society cannot be tolerated. At this point it becomes irrelevant whether an enterprise is nominally owned by individuals, corporations, or the state, because no form of management can make such fundamental destruction serve a social purpose….
It is now difficult to imagine a modern society in which industrial growth is balanced and kept in check by several complementary, distinct, and equally scientific modes of production. Our vision of the possible and the feasible is so restricted by industrial expectations that any alternative to more mass production sounds like a return to past oppression or like a Utopian design for noble savages. In fact, however, the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals’ claims to an equal range of power and freedom.
To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will call “convivial.”
After many doubts, and against the advice of friends whom I respect, I have chosen “convivial” as a technical term to designate a modern society of responsibly limited tools…. I am aware that in English “convivial” now seeks the company of tipsy jollyness, which is distinct from that indicated by the OED and opposite to the austere meaning of modern “eutrapelia,” which I intend. By applying the term “convivial” to tools rather than to people, I hope to forestall confusion.
“Austerity,” which says something about people, has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle or Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship. In the Summa Theologica, II, II, in the 186th question, article 5, Thomas deals with disciplined and creative playfulness. In his third response he defines “austerity” as a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas “austerity” is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations.
Five years. First Covid. Then AI. Then Trump returns.
Were we ready? Are we ready yet?
It has been a mixed bag.
Ready for Covid? Science worked miracles in quickly developing Covid vaccines, saving countless lives. On the other hand, a number of people refused to comply with the most basic social guidelines, resulting in illness and death for uncounted millions. As an unreadiness bonus, many of those same people are now trying to end all vaccines, so that not only Covid but many other long-controlled diseases can get out of control.
Ready for AI? The vast majority of people don’t understand AI, beyond some applications they find useful or stocks to invest in. AI is a profound phenomenon, with tremendous upside and downside. Some who talk about the possibilities and perils know what they are talking about; many don’t. Meanwhile, AI rolls on, like Covid did, with few ready to address it knowledgeably and intelligently.
Ready for Trump? Monty Python said, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” They were so right. It is confounding that having already experienced ten years of Trump before his return in 2025 (he announced his presidential run in 2015), including four years as president (10,000 certified lies), four more years as an angry and disgruntled loser, hardly anybody seems really ready to effectively respond. Maybe we should ask those same scientists who responded so brilliantly to Covid to create a Trump vaccine. Except that their research funding has been cut and vaccines are disfavored in some quarters.
The big point is that after Covid, AI and Trump, there is something else coming, something else we are not ready for. We don’t need to know exactly what that is, as if we could. We do have to train to be able to resiliently and effectively take on whatever it is. That is the ultimate readiness.
I took the above photo of a nearby mountain at sunrise.
(Digression: “Take” is a curious word for the act of photography. I asked my trusty fake intelligence companion Claude—no offense Claude—why we say “take” for photos. A concise answer:
The phrase “take a photo” likely comes from the early days of photography when the process literally involved “taking” something from the scene.
In early photography, you captured and fixed a unique image from reality onto a physical plate or film. The light from the scene was chemically recorded—you were essentially taking an impression or imprint of that moment. This was a one-time extraction: that specific exposure on that piece of film couldn’t be repeated.
The metaphor stuck even as photography evolved. We continue to say “take” despite now making digital copies rather than capturing something unique, because the sense of actively capturing or seizing a moment from time remains.
Other languages have similar expressions—French uses “prendre” (to take), Spanish “tomar” (to take), though some languages like German use “machen” (to make), reflecting a different metaphor.
This is a fascinating quick explanation, and I’m sure if I asked for extended analysis, I would get much more.
It is interesting that Romance languages go with take, but Germans go with “make”. Extended AI analysis would likely explain this at greater length. But this digression has gone on long enough.)
Anyone might wonder whether my taking the photo and the circumstances I described are true. I haven’t, but if I provided enough detail, an AI photo could be generated that would look something like this. Not exact, but something much like this.
Except the sun is real, the sun was really rising, the mountain is real, the sun was really casting light and dark on the mountain, I am real, and I really took the photo. I should also mention that AI is real too.
Or. A subtle Buddhist concept is to learn to treat everything as an illusion, a dream. Not that all of that, all of this, is not real, just as if it is an illusion, a dream. Which it is.
Believe me, don’t believe me, when I say that I really took the above photo of a nearby mountain at sunrise. It doesn’t matter to the mountain, or the sun, or me.
Sometimes our discussions these days sound less like analysis by scientists and philosophers and more like a bunch of people sitting around stoned and asking “What is reality, man?”
In this case, that is the moon and those are clouds and the sun was setting (though the moon was not rising and the sun was not setting; the earth was turning). The light fell on a camera sensor and the data was recorded on a memory card. I know all this because I was there and experienced it.
And yet if you or I asked an AI image generator to create this exact picture, or something close, it could. In fact, if you thought the cloud formations were not quite right or if you wanted more and different colors than the sunset created, you could get that.
A Lego orchid and a blooming organic orchid sit a few feet apart in my office.
I wondered what they would say to each other—or are saying to each other. Leading to the question:
What do you think a Lego orchid would say to an organic orchid?
I am most interested in what readers think. For the AI-curious, I asked the same thing of Claude.
Claude: I think a Lego orchid might say something like:
“Hello there, cousin! I admire your delicate petals and natural grace. While you need water, soil, and sunlight, I’m perfectly content sitting on this shelf for years without maintenance. You may change with the seasons, but I’ll stay in perpetual bloom! Though I must admit, I’m a bit jealous of how you can grow and change on your own. My blocks may never wilt, but they also won’t ever surprise anyone with a new bud or subtle shift in color. Perhaps we each have our own kind of beauty—yours ephemeral and alive, mine crafted and enduring.”
The Chinese restaurant dinner for two arrived with four individual sealed fortune cookie packs. Three had a fortune cookie inside. One, pictured above, did not have a fortune cookie. It contained just a few scraps of a cookie and no fortune.
Obviously something went wrong at the fortune cookie factory. Not very interesting. Much more interesting is the meaning of it.
While I worked on my own interpretation, I asked my AI sidekick Claude to weigh in.
Bob: Here is what I am looking at. It is a sealed fortune cookie pack from a Chinese restaurant, a pack that normally contains a fortune cookie. This sealed pack contains only a few small scraps of fortune cookie, but no whole fortune cookie and no fortune. What do you make of this?
Claude:
This sounds quite disappointing! You’ve essentially received a sealed package containing just broken pieces of the cookie without the main attraction – both the intact cookie and the fortune itself. This seems like a manufacturing or packaging error where either:
The cookie was broken during the packaging/shipping process
The fortune was accidentally omitted during manufacturing
The cookie might have been crushed during handling/transport
This is a quality control issue that the restaurant and/or fortune cookie manufacturer would probably want to know about. While it might seem minor, it affects both the experience and the fundamental purpose of a fortune cookie – you can’t even read your fortune!
If this happened at a restaurant, you might want to politely let them know so they can:
Provide you with a proper fortune cookie
Check their other fortune cookie packages for similar issues
Report it to their supplier if it’s a widespread problem
Did you let the restaurant know about this?
Bob: No, I did not let the restaurant know. I am more interested in knowing what this means for my fortune. What do you think?
Claude:
Ah, I see where you’re going with this! If we’re looking at this from a superstitious or symbolic perspective, receiving a broken fortune cookie with no fortune is quite intriguing. Let me play with this idea:
One poetic interpretation might be that your future isn’t predetermined or written – it’s literally an “empty fortune,” suggesting you’re truly free to write your own destiny. There’s something rather empowering about that! Instead of being handed a pre-written path, you’ve received a blank canvas.
Another interpretation could be more zen-like: perhaps it’s a reminder that seeking to know the future is less important than being present in the moment. The broken cookie without a fortune could be saying “stop looking for external guidance and trust your own intuition.”
Of course, if you’re feeling more playful about it, you could say this is the universe’s version of a “404 Error: Fortune Not Found” – maybe the cosmic printer was running low on ink that day!
What’s your take on it? Do you feel there’s any particular meaning in receiving a fortune-less cookie?
Bob: Your perspectives are knowledgeable, insightful and witty. I am still working on possible meanings of this Chinese restaurant anomaly. I will get back to you when I have more thoughts and questions. Thank you.
Claude:
Thank you for the kind words! Your openness to contemplating the deeper meaning of what might seem like a simple manufacturing defect is quite refreshing. It’s these small, unexpected moments that can sometimes offer the most interesting opportunities for reflection. I look forward to hearing your thoughts when you’ve had more time to consider the possibilities. Feel free to return to this discussion whenever you’d like!
Despite this lighthearted use of Claude, be aware that among many of those who know, this powerful platform is regarded as the best in the exploding AI-sphere. If you are not already using Claude, visit Anthropic and experience it now.
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was one of the most innovative and beloved twentieth century lyric poets. The poems are uniquely and unmistakably his, with an idiosyncratic use of words, punctuation and form that served his love of language, life and love.
One of his most quoted lines, one that I’ve repeated often is not from a poem. It is from the Introduction to his book New Poems (1938):
“Always a beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question”
It is rarely quoted in context (see the complete Introduction below).
Cummings did not live to see AI. Though he did experience World War I firsthand, as a medic in France (he was a pacifist) and as a prisoner. Since World War I was as significant as AI in changing the world forever, he and other artists of his time were profoundly affected and incorporated the experience into their art.
Generative AI operates by instructions and queries. But what does that have to do with beautiful questions leading to beautiful answers?
First we should determine exactly what a beautiful question is. Not surprisingly, and very meta, I turned to my preferred AI partner Claude:
Q: What is a beautiful question?
A: A beautiful question is a thought-provoking inquiry that encourages deep reflection, challenges assumptions, and opens up new possibilities for understanding and exploration…. Ultimately, a beautiful question is one that engages our minds, touches our hearts, and inspires us to explore the depths of our own understanding and the world around us.
If you do ask that sort of question of AI, then yes, there is a chance that the answer will approach the depth, engagement and inspiration intended. To put this in extreme perspective, the reported prank question to Google AI “How many rocks should I eat?” is not a beautiful question, nor is the advice to eat one small rock a day a beautiful answer.
Do ask AI to do things for you or to increase your knowledge. Always keep in mind the possibility and opportunity for beauty.
Leading up to the famous quote in the Introduction, Cummings wrote this:
“We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves.”
E. E. Cummings Introduction to New Poems (1938)
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople– it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying–
you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now’and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.
Life,for mostpeople,simply isn’t. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain’s a mammal. Mostpeople’s wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.
-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is a king,hasn’t a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus,would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn’t a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcedentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogenous,citizen of immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth of breathing,insults perfected inframortally milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”–
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneaous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are amoung the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow,mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)—widely known as Bucky—was a world-changing architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He was a genius and prophet of generalism. He believed that over-specialization narrows us and stands in the way of solving problems and envisioning the future.
When Stewart Brand began publishing the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s, he put Fuller’s books on the very first page. “The insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this catalog,” he wrote. As a mission for the holistic all-encompassing general reach of the catalog Brand said, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
Fuller attributed his big-picture holistic perspective to his service as a naval officer in the early 20th century. At the time, and in some ways still, ships at sea were almost entirely self-sufficient. Those on board had to know about everything and be able to do anything. That is reflected in one of his most famous books, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
Claude and other AI resources can help us become better generalists. The World Wide Web (thank you Tim Berners-Lee) was a major step in that direction. AI is the next step. It is not that Claude can access trillions of words while even the best of us only know thousands. It is that when we are motivated to know more about lots of things—which as gods we should want—we have a new resource to help us be the generalists that we need to be. Now more than ever.
Bob Schwartz 