I've always associated equanimity with stillness. This essay reframes it entirely. It's a mobility of the mind, says the author, not stillness.

Equanimity is best recognised by its inherent mobility of perspective-taking. As a mode of perception, equanimity is on the move, looking over things (internal and external) with hovering attention. Equanimity is not about serenely settling. It is not averse to the presence of judgments, just to their rigidifying. It ranges over whatever may appear, fluidly noticing, for example, both the disturbing and the tranquil with the awareness that one depends on the other for its meaning.

Why does it matter? Because, in our polarized landscape, anything that helps dissolve hardened dogmatism is a gift.

I appreciate this "mobility of the mind" perspective even more after reading Paul Ford’s piece, Accepting All the AI Opinions. We're missing empathy in the AI debate. We're too quick to pick sides when we should be trying to imagine other people's corners:

“AI” is not just one big thing, but a set of intense, wild, overlapping reactions to a technology that humans created. As I’ve learned more, I’ve come to realize that I, too, can only see my little corner of the weird new world.

An OSINT analyst piece pointing to a Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon paper begins with a troubling scene of how we might work:

I’ve seen it firsthand, analysts running solid investigations, then slowly shifting more and more of the thinking to GenAI tools. At first, it’s small. You use ChatGPT to summarise a document or translate a foreign post. Then it’s helping draft your reports. Then it’s generating leads. And eventually, you’re not thinking as critically as you used to. You’re verifying less, questioning less, relying more. We tell ourselves we’re “working smarter.” But somewhere along the way, we stop noticing how much of the actual thinking is being offloaded.

Like any other anxious white-collar worker, I'm no stranger to what an AI-augmented workday could look like. But what drove me to the original research was this:

Confidence in AI replaces confidence in self and with it, the thinking disappears.

John Herrman, New York Magazine:

AGI, like G-less AI, automation, and even mechanization, are indeed stories, but they’re also sequels: This time, the technology isn’t just inconceivable and inevitable; it’s anthropomorphized and given a will of its own. If mechanization conjured images of factories, automation conjured images of factories without people, and AI conjured humanoid machine assistants, AGI and ASI conjure an economy, and a wider world, in which humans are either made limitlessly rich and powerful by superhuman machines or dominated and subjugated (or perhaps even killed) by them (Industrial Revolution 3: The Robot Awakens). In imagining centralized machine authoritarianism in the future, AGI creates a sort of authoritarian, exclusionary discourse now. A narrative emerges in which the decisions of AGI stakeholders — AI firms, their investors, and maybe a few government leaders — are all that matter. The rest of us inhabit the roles of subject and audience but not author.