What’s a new world worth if Mrs. Brown herself never appears, whole and trembling, on the page? Today’s Mrs. Brown But what does it really mean, in a world obsessed with invention and speed, to “see” the subject? What does it cost, psychologically, structurally, to resist the economic and technological pressure to build for universality, scale, and abstraction?
AI’s “personality” emerges from constraints — the boundaries that shape how it responds. Alignment engineers determine these banks, deciding how the system channels ideas and where it flows. The metaphor: they’re not designing the river itself but the landscape that guides it. The deeper assumption: that ideas can be safely shaped by pre-determined boundaries without losing their significance.“The digital world is a world without smell, without taste, without touch, without pain. It is a world without ritual, without event, without memory. It is a world without friction.” This frictionlessness, Han claims, leads to a “crisis of presence,” a flattening of experience into sameness.
Frictionless digital systems flatten experience into sameness by removing ritual, event, and memory. The design challenge: build for presence and ritual even when these qualities resist measurement. What makes experience meaningful often can’t be captured in metrics.Herbert delved for years into arid biomes, raising his edifice grain by grain. Arrakis’s intrigues circle eternally around water: its dearth, dominion, ceremony, sorrow. Imperial vastness invariably circles back to the particular and palpable.
was curious about the actual human in the loop: a worker in Manila, eyes straining at cheap monitors, improvising fixes for a dataset full of contradictions. Who, in the sleekly designed deck, is Mrs. Brown?
