Meditation, Language, and LLMs
I’ve been somewhat facetiously, somewhat seriously, somewhat jokingly, been posing a question to everyone I run into these past few months: Don’t you feel like all meaning is being scrubbed from the world? Like the Langoliers are chomping up purpose, chomping up all the things to which we’ve ascribed purpose these past hundred-thousand years? And that nothing matters? Really, what I’m asking is: Don’t you think our contemporary education system has long needed an overhaul? That our society has long needed to reconfigure itself? That we need to stop ascribing all our meaning and purpose to being a Web Designer, or Coal Miner, or Airplane Engine Factory Foreman, or Accountant, but instead to being A Good Person, Good Parent, Good Friend, Curious Researcher, Poet, Meditator, Facilitator, or any number of other Ways of Being uncoupled from “work” as we’ve defined it since the industrial revolution? Who is safe from the hunger and capabilities of the models? Yoga instructors?