All Posts By:
Peter Banks
Socialization
Peter Banks
June 26, 2024
Should I steal? I was in the market for a new Nespresso machine a couple of months ago. While shopping I found myself standing in the appliance aisle of Target in East Palo Alto staring at the coffee machine I wanted. The device in question cost ~$120 and was surrounded by boxes and boxes of similar bougie devices. Now my partner and I earn fine money; but, I’m a PhD student and $120 is a non-trivial amount of money, so part of me was debating if I needed a Nespresso machine or if we could make do with something much simpler and save the cash when I realized I could just pick the box up and walk out of the store. I live in California where all theft below $950 is a misdemeanor but more importantly, I just knew no one would even look if I simply walked away with the device.
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Politics, Art, and the Aesthetic
Peter Banks
June 5, 2024
The aesthetics of an era do not merely reflect the political landscape but actively participate in shaping and defining it. The motifs and forms of an aesthetic draw individuals who are temperamentally inclined toward them along with giving them tools to present their vision of society to the public at large creating a powerful synergy between art and politics.
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A Note on our Descendants
Peter Banks
June 12, 2024
In the last couple of years, AI has progressed to the point that they are quasi-sentient. Meaning that at a minimum modern AI’s do a remarkable job of imitating a sentient creature. Over the last year and a half since ChatGPT’s original release, companies like OpenAI have tightened the screws on the outputs these models produce. As a result, a lot of the early evidence, or hallucinations, of AI sentience has faded. But the underlying architecture still exists and continues to improve every day.
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Land Pirates
Peter Banks
May 29, 2024
History is complicated and we should be hesitant to impose too much of our morality on people who lived in different times and places but we should also be willing to stand by those values we believe in and call out societies that fail to live up to them. I believe in peace, property rights, and the value of meaningful and productive labor and so I cannot view the Mongols as anything but history's greatest villains. Here land pirates serve as a valuable lens through which to understand the dynamics of power, exploitation, and societal decay. It reminds us that the struggle between civilization and predation is an ongoing one. As a member of a decidedly settled post-agrarian society, I can admire the military achievements of many cultures without assigning them moral virtue.
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The Future
Peter Banks
May 15, 2024
I originally set out in this essay to articulate how impressed I have been while working with OpenAi’s API. In particular how I believed that the sort of information economy most of the readers of Voyagers work in will be decimated, but I was struck by a feeling of doubt. How could I make such bold claims about the future? I would never have been able to predict ChatGPT, Neurolink, or any of the other advancements which have happened in just the last two years.
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