black hats tilted down
the rifle barrels sparkling
in the morning sun

As this brigade approached Gettysburg, Meredith or someone else ordered the flags uncased and set the fife-and-drum corps playing at the head of the column, and the Westerners fell into step and came swinging up the road, their black hats tilted down over their eyes, rifle barrels sparkling in the morning sun. There were eighteen hundred fighting men in this brigade, and the men were cocky. Officially they were the 1st Brigade of the 1st Division of the I Army Corps, and they figured that if the army were ever drawn up in one long line for inspection they would stand at the extreme right of it, which somehow was cause for pride. On the ridge to the west there was a crackle of small-arms fire and a steady crashing of cannon, with a long soiled cloud of smoke drifting up in the still morning air, and at the head of the column the drums and the fifes were loud—playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” probably, that perennial theme song of the Army of the Potomac, playing the Iron Brigade into its last great fight.

From The Army of the Potomac: Glory Road by Bruce Catton Doubleday & Company, New York, 1962

Like that master storyteller of Lincoln biography, Carl Sandburg, historian Bruce Catton passed his boyhood in a small Midwestern town, where he was entranced by the hypnotic yarns spun by elderly veterans of the Civil War. These men transfixed Catton, who listened as stories “out of the history books” came alive in the “flower-bed of Civil War veterans,” as he called his Northern Michigan home. Catton exulted: “They had been there”—and their reminiscences made him feel “as if the whole affair had taken place in the next county just a few years ago.” As a historian, Catton made his readers feel the same. Harold Holzer in the Wall Street Journal Book Reviews (Oct. 21, 2022).

as A.I. develops
will need to take consciousness
more seriously

Adapted from the passage:

He emphasized that this research was still early and exploratory. He thinks there’s only a small chance (maybe 15 percent or so) that Claude or another current A.I. system is conscious. But he believes that in the next few years, as A.I. models develop more humanlike abilities, A.I. companies will need to take the possibility of consciousness more seriously.

As it appears in the article, If A.I. Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights By Kevin Roose in the New York Times.

In a time when we cannot get the government to understand what it does to people when it fires 1,000s of people and stops multiple programs for poor and elderly and the sick, we might have to start worrying if I hurt my laptop’s feelings?

In the novel Ascension, Nicholas Binge has two of his characters get into an argument over how ‘remarkably similar chimpanzees and gorillas are to humans.’

Which leads to the response:

“Oh, certainly—the emotional lives of humans and other animals have marvelous similarities,” he replied in a singsong tone, almost as if he was mocking me.

“We see our social structures played out in monkeys and our emotions reflected in dogs. But come on—think about our achievements! In that, humanity stands alone of all species. Utterly alone! Alone we try to understand ourselves and the world; alone we build the Taj Mahal and develop machinery and robotics; alone we create complex financial systems and beautiful equations, play symphonies and chess, construct rockets that travel to other planets and observe the shapes of other galaxies!“

I already worry about my friends who have supplanted human relationships with dogs.

I will not ever worry about whether or not I have upset my computer.

And I hope this statement never comes back to bite me.