Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts about books from the blog Base and Superstructure. Occasionally I’ll read a book worth talking about, and write some thoughts on it. These cover a wide range of topics from the blog.
We march on to our third entry in this year’s reading list. Hopefully we do so with an eye toward spring. But I suppose we’ll see.
This month’s list is especially eclectic. In it, we’ll see everything from politics and philosophy to literature and medicine. Let’s get to it!
I recently re-read Cal, one of Isaac Asimov’s final short stories. It was published in the 1995 collection Gold, which is a hit-or-miss collection of unpublished Asimov stories sitting around near the end of his life, paired with essays on sci-fi as a genre and writing as a practice.
That’s enough by way of an intro. Here’s the point: In the story, Asimov lays out a scenario involving a robot that learns how to write. As the robot becomes more complex, its writing becomes better than the writing of its master. The master worries that the robot will come to overshadow him. In response, he calls a technician to dumb down the robot’s programming.
This produces a crisis in the first law of robotics.
Sound familiar?
This country feels different than it did just a few years ago. We’ve moved past the ‘Great Awokening’ and into a backlash phase. Many of us – especially liberals, progressives, and/or college graduates – seek answers. How did it happen? Musa al-Gharbi offers answers in his book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
But they might not be the answers folks seek.
Let’s take a closer look at We Have Never Been Woke and find out.
Welcome to the second reading list of the new year! For this darker, winter list, I’ve got a selection of mostly political analysis. Read on, and let me know what you’re reading over the winter.
Near the end of his novel, The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov has a few things to tell us about the use of automation and robots that bears interestingly on our use of AI today. Asimov wrote the book in the 1950s, during an earlier wave of automation. He had no specific knowledge of LLMs, of course. But in reading it, I felt as though the Good Doctor reached into our future.
© 2026 Base and Superstructure
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
