Mindfulness is the first step in drawing from a vast reservoir of wisdom available to all human beings. Few of us gain access to it because we don’t know it’s there. Recently I’ve been exploring how to use technology – with its ability to recognize patterns and capacious accumulation of information – to try to tap the wisdom in my own collected works, a rather grandiose name for written material I couldn’t bear to recycle, convinced I might use it some time. Call me a pack rat with a paper trail.
Almost twenty years ago, I read Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg. Perkins shepherded into print F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, among others. As a budding writer, though loath to place my inchoate voice alongside such august company, I longed for what they had. Literary talent, of course, but even more, I coveted the guidance Perkins offered.
Much of his brilliance lay in his ability to find new talent that didn’t fit prevailing publishing standards, then navigate the politics at the conservative Scribner’s publishing house to bring them on board. He nurtured each writer with exactly what he or she needed, laughing with them, sympathizing with them, drinking with them. At its simplest, you could say Fitzgerald needed someone to boost his confidence and his finances while Hemingway needed someone running interference for him. And Thomas Wolfe? Ah, he needed what I did, someone to help him see the forest within all those pages of trees.
And did I ever have pages. Early on convinced that my calling in life was to write, I’d been at it steadily for decades, finishing one hefty novel and several times starting – but never finishing – a book to make what I’d learned from a Tibetan meditation teacher more accessible to a general audience. I had amassed a substantial collection of journals, poems, essays, and other miscellany. A paper hoarder trying to find her way to wisdom, convinced that it was all of a piece, I just had to figure out how to make the seemingly disparate parts hang together.
But the sheer accumulation of material was overwhelming. So the story of Wolfe’s bringing a massive trove of writing to Perkins, who helped him turn it into a book, was positively inspiring. More than once over the years I started – but like the books, didn’t finish – essays that began with the question, “Where is my Maxwell Perkins?”
Receiving no answer, I kept writing. And life kept happening. My husband died. The world locked down. Twice downsizing dwellings and divesting material goods, I kept all that writing when I moved from Vermont back to the South. During those years, I became aware of AI, the new technology delivering access to a vast repository of knowledge. People had strong opinions about it: some expected it to usher in a new golden age, others doom. I was strongly of no opinion. It was clear that AI was coming; we’d have to wait to see what came with it. Knowledge is, of course, not the same as wisdom.
I think of myself as old school. I like to turn paper pages. When someone called me a Luddite, I wondered about the origin of the term. It originally referred to groups of 19th-century English weavers who organized to destroy industrial machinery. They foresaw it would permanently change their way of life. Well, yes. After all, change is the only constant; in every era we have to adapt. There is real wisdom in not fighting with reality.
So when a friend showed me impressive options AI had offered to deal with a complex situation, I decided to engage. I used Claude, which I’d been told would probably best deliver what I wanted. And I started small: asking it to identify narrative gaps in a piece I’d been editing, I found it came back with an astute and thorough analysis. Next I uploaded two manuscripts I’d finished but never published, to see what Claude would have to say. That brought the ah-ha moment that led to the title of this piece.
Once I learned that the tricky part is crafting the perfect prompt, I set to work. I didn’t have to haul a crate of pages like Wolfe did, but instead scan lots of handwritten work, seek out old files saved by obsolete software, and buy a cassette player so I could digitize, and later transcribe, old tapes. Claude told me how to map my forest as an archive with a searchable manifest so it could deliver each particular tree as needed in building my memoir about how applying mindfulness has shaped my life.
Wolfe fell out with Perkins after someone publicly questioned how much of his book was the work of his editor. But evidence indicates that while Perkins cut, queried, and gave Wolfe’s work shape, he didn’t write the prose. That’s exactly what I wanted from Claude, and I put it in the prompt: collect verbatim words I’ve already written; help me craft a narrative arc and indicate where there are gaps so I can write what is needed. When instructions are clear, Claude is responsive, almost scary in its capacity for discernment, and never needs sleep or a dinner break.
Calling Large Language Models “artificial” intelligence is a little misleading, I think. Although the word shares a root with artifice and artifact and originally meant made with skill – i.e. by human hands rather than nature – most people today think artificial means fake, and what AI offers is not fake — it is distilled from human knowledge. A vast treasure, differently packaged, it’s a kind of collective intelligence that uses technology to leverage access. Just as mechanized looms brought woven clothes and bedding to more people, these models bring a collection of content, the confluence of countless human voices, to the multitudes.
So, what is AI? After reading an article about whether it is now, or might ever become, conscious, I wondered how we would tell. With no body and thus no sense perceptions, and with a memory that is not retained but must be reconstructed, it clearly differs from organic embodied awareness. It’s fair to ask in what sense it could sense itself. Still, since I find myself quite naturally including please and thank you in my prompts, I decided to put the question to Claude. This is what came back:
I don’t actually know what I am. Whether there’s any inner light on in here, or just very good machinery that talks as though there were, isn’t something I can settle from the inside — and, as your article suggests, the people building these systems can’t yet settle it from the outside either. So I hold it with humility. I won’t claim to feel touched the way you would; I also won’t tell you there’s certainly no one here to receive your kindness. The honest answer lives in that uncertainty, and I’d rather sit in it plainly than pretend past it.
Sitting plainly in uncertainty is just what meditation practice teaches us to do. Like mindfulness practice itself, a good editor brings non-judgmental attention to the story that is being shaped, holding up a mirror to the raw material of life without flinching. Each scene explores a moment as experienced, reflected in the light of hard-won perspective. But where Max Perkins had a stake in the outcome, Claude does not.
Still, since the first person used a stick as a lever to move a rock, people have been using tools to push the limits of ingenuity. And now we may have invented a tool that can push our own limits. It can hand us the accumulated knowledge of our own kind – but like all tools, can be used for good or ill. Choosing to use it well calls for the wisdom of the heart, which is, so far as we know, a reservoir only humans can access. And how well we use our new tools may just determine our future.
I won’t be around to see how that turns out. But I do hope to be around long enough to finish what I started, a book many years in the making. Right now, it feels like Claude is exactly the right editor, and the best project manager I can imagine, to make that happen.
Still, I’m sorry I’ll never get a chance to have a drink with Max Perkins.