Tim opens with a broad question: a few years after ChatGPT hit the public consciousness, where does Shawn stand on what AI is, how it's useful, how it isn't, and what it means for writing and editing? Shawn's answer comes from the three years he spent on Mentoring the Machines with John Vervaeke, author of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Rather than start with AI, he starts with technology itself and builds up from there. The episode is less a list of tips than a map, and by the end it lands on a clear claim: AI is an algorithmic system that simulates the heuristics, principles, and stories of its programmers, and it has zero understanding of myth. Topics covered: Three kinds of technology: external (the shovel), shared or "nomo" technology (the idea of the shovel passed between people), and psychotechnology (the capacity to think up the shovel in the first place)Algorithms, heuristics, and principles, and why each one maps to a human capacity we use every day without noticingWhy a theory is really a limitation, and how innovation (Newton to Einstein) pushes the limit outwardStory as the integration of algorithms, heuristics, and principles, and myth as the larger cycle that story sits insideWhat myth actually means, why Tim got corrected for misusing it in an email, and why "it's just a myth" is a sign the language has been degradedArtifact versus artifice: the recorded thing versus the capacity that made it, and how the two combine into artThe Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis, and why a story whose circumstances never happened can still be a higher form of truth than a recordWhy the "AI will destroy us" story and the "AI will let us drink pina coladas forever" story are both agendas, and what to look for when a story is all chaos or all orderTim's internet-in-the-'90s comparison, and whether AI is fundamentally different from past technologiesComputational versus conscious systems: why speed and scale may never cross the threshold to consciousness, and why the only real test would be an original artifactShawn's definitions of consciousness (attention, awakening, awareness, affordance, attunement, agreement, alignment, at-onement), and why the machines don't careFaith as a practical problem rather than a religious claim, and why you need the artifice of falsity to reach the artifact of truthBooks referenced Mentoring the Machines by Shawn Coyne and John VervaekeAwakening from the Meaning Crisis by John VervaekeThe OdysseyLinks Sign up for the Story Grid newsletter at StoryGrid.comMentoring the Machines
