The Singularity Is Stupid

On Ray Kurzweil and picking low-hanging fruit

This week, I reviewed Ray Kurzweil’s new book. As you might expect, I didn’t like it. The review is here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/06/26/singularity-nearer-ray-kurzweil-review/.

You might wonder: if I strongly suspected I wouldn’t like the book, and if I don’t respect the author’s earlier work, why did I read and review Kurzweil at all?  Often, people who comment on Washington Post articles (I confess that article-commenters are, to me, a very foreign species) ask the same thing. Sometimes, they even go a step further, complaining about any negative review just because it’s negative, suggesting that we should not afford a bad book space in print when there are so many good books in need of boosters. The most extreme version of this position is the grade-school mantra, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Clearly, this is an ethical principle that belongs in the kindergarden classroom, not in the pages of a national newspaper.

But I think there is a good question, one I’m not entirely sure how to answer, in the neighborhood of this more inane demand. And that question is: when is it worth it to pick low-hanging fruit? When is something that is obviously bad also important enough or influential enough or popular enough to merit a bashing?

Before my book was published, I vowed that I wouldn’t read any of the reviews, but of course I’ve read every last one of them, including the deliciously confused comment on Goodreads lamenting that All Things Are Too Small was not in fact a decluttering manual. It’s a fool’s errand—not to mention undignified—to respond to every criticism, or even to give every criticism much thought: much of the mean stuff (like the decluttering comment) is just completely besides the point, and some of the mean stuff is besides the point in only a slightly more sophisticated way. But if you’re going to pat yourself on the back because of good reviews—and I confess I’m not immune to the temptation—it would be inconsistent to assume that none of the haters is onto anything.

A lot of people have converged on irritation over my essay about mindfulness, and i think their frustration warrants consideration. I don’t think it’s true that the essay attacks a strawman—I did read the best-selling books about mindfulness, the ones nominally written by its most qualified defenders, and I did take these people at their word, and I did quote them extensively in the essay*—but I do think there’s something to be said for the smarter objection: maybe it’s a waste of my time to write about this crap at all, given that basically anyone reading my book (decluttering woman excepted) is likely to hate the Headspace app already? Maybe I should be spending more time either objecting to something worthier, or more time developing a positive platform?

Honestly, maybe. I genuinely don’t know. I myself am not exactly sure how to draw the lines here. I’m certainly apt to succumb to the temptations of bloodlust in the face of something I detest, but also, some of the best pieces of critical writing ever are about less-than-incredible objects: Andrew O’Hagan on Fifty Shades of Gray, Pankaj Mishra on Jordan Peterson, Martha Nussbaum on Harvey Mansfield, Dwight MacDonald on midcult or how-to guides. I’m actually curious—and actually unsure— how to think about this, and I want to know what you think! Here’s how I think about it at present. It’s very possible that I’m wrong.

A general principle of public writing is: don’t say something someone else has already said, merely because it’s true. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take up the perennial themes of love, death, and the changing of the seasons, even if all you have to add is a stylistic edge, but it does mean rote repetition of widely articulated (if not widely accepted) talking points does not add anything to “the public discourse.” If the haters claim that mindfulness and Kurzweil have been thoroughly debunked already (for all his faults, Searle has an excellent hatchet job of the latter in the NYRB), then they may be right.

But if the issue is that everyone likely to be reading me already agrees with me about Kurzweil, mindfulness, Marie Kondo, etc, then here are my thoughts:

A. How beholden do you really have to be to the likely audience of your book? Am I not permitted to hope that someone who doesn’t agree already will read it and change his or her mind? 

B. more importantly, even if everyone is already saying that mindfulness is dumb, they might not be saying why. A hatred, even a widely shared one, is still in need of justification. (I’m probably being a little selfish: I myself derive great joy from starting with an inarticulate abhorrence and moving towards clarity about the grounds of my revulsion.)

Curious what you all think!!!!!

 *I also wonder: why seek out the best exemplars of the mindfulness tradition if those aren’t representative of the form in which it’s most popular? There are transhumanists smarter than Kurzweil, but surely it’s significant that he’s the Ted-talking best-selling of the lot?