In the run-up to my 60th birthday, we stayed in a hobbit house in Maine, found on Airbnb. The place, largely covered with foliage and adorned with murals of ferns inside, impressed even my wife, an architectural lighting designer who casts a critical eye on architecture, design and, above all, lighting. The sprawling property included other abodes, such as a treehouse, as well as a pond on which one could canoe. I was reminded of the idyllic time when Sméagol and Déagol went fishing, before the Finding of the Ring.
Michiko Kakutani, whose book The Death of Truth was the subject of my first Splice Today article, in 2018, had an essay in The New York Times in May on “Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits.” Looking at Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other tech admirers of J.R.R. Tolkien, Kakutani pointed out the disconnect between their megalomaniacal aspirations and that author’s ethos: “Many prominent readers of ‘Lord of the Rings’ no longer identify with the hobbits in Middle-earth but crave more magical powers (of the very sort that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price).”
Those tech overlords might be overlooking some critical difference between the natural intelligence of living beings, and artificial intelligence. Anil Seth, a neuroscientist, recently speculated in an essay at Big Think that such a difference may lie in disparate relationships with time. “Time in our bodies, brains, and minds is rich, dynamic, multidimensional, and deeply interdependent at all levels, from biochemistry to personal identity,” he writes. “Our entire way of being is inescapably embedded in physical time, and physical time itself is, many physicists believe, anchored in the second law of thermodynamics.”
By contrast: “For a digital computer, time is thin, unidimensional, and abstracted away from its thermodynamic arrow. Computation is all about state transitions: A leads to B, zero to one.” An AI doesn’t know or care how long a process is taking or will take, Seth argues. “There could be a microsecond or a million years between two steps in an algorithm — between A and B — and it would still be the same algorithm, the same computation.”
The Hobbits live in the Shire, a place that doesn’t seem to change much, and yet they grasp the moment in bringing the Ring to the fires of Mount Doom. The Eye of Sauron sweeps over Mordor’s desolate landscape without noticing that Frodo and Sam have entered, dubiously disguised as Orcs. Tolkien, who had a life-long aversion to the industrialization of the English countryside, an attitude stemming from his World War I encounters with industrial-strength weapons, also thought that the forces of evil are at a disadvantage, lacking creative power and able only to mimic and corrupt others’ works.
That strikes me as a prescient summation of the current political era. The “successes” of the second Trump administration are in destroying constitutional, legal and normative safeguards against abuse of presidential and governmental power, through pressuring and extorting academic and scientific institutions, law firms, and media outlets, as well as undermining co-equal branches of the federal government and the independence of state governments. The result will be damaged institutions that will enable further abuses of power in the post-Trump decades, whether by politicians of right or left. Over time, though, there’ll also be efforts to build better safeguards to replace the ones that failed.
Back in 2018, my second Splice Today article argued against the idea, then touted by the president, of war with Venezuela, a prospect that’s re-emerged lately with the destruction of a boatload of alleged Tren de Aragua drug traffickers; and which should serve as mockery of anyone who voted for Trump because they’re “anti-war.” Seven years later, as I start my seventh decade with some 270 Splice Today articles completed, the state of our country and world are worse than I’d expected. But I believe the powers-that-be don’t have a strong handle on what’s to come, and green shoots will sprout up where they’re not anticipated.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky