I'm waiting for the term "fun house mirror" to make more inroads into AI-speak. Those who angst about phony intelligence (PI) chat machines aren't using the "mirror" image much, yet that's one way to see all this monkey screeching. Upon seeing our own groupthink mirrored, in a phony way, we go ape.
OMG, we won't be called upon to think in the near future! Yet if groupthink is your thing, how much thinking are you doing anyway? If your idea of thinking is to retweet and repost what grips you in the moment, then consider the notion you've yet to think much at all.
That PI (phony intelligence) is able to reflect our thinking back at us, and synthesize believable-sounding chatter on the fly, grammatically correct, structured, is what brings out the inferiority complex lurking since our great dumbing down, however that happened, usually through schooling and mindless television. Poet Gene Fowler called it "de-geniusing" hence his "re-geniusing" project. He was a graduate of San Quentin at the far end of the school-to-prison pipeline.
I treasure Quakerism as a thinking persons religion less because it encourages the recitation of theological dogmas in Meeting (it doesn't) and more because it encourages journaling, in this day and age blogging. Making your thinking world readable, in principle, helps provide traction by raising the stakes.
Quakers who don't blog are maybe not that interested in the thinking side of things. They don't want to rock the boat or endanger future job prospects. That's why a lot of people quit thinking, out of fearfulness. I found out when working with Friends that a great many are reluctant to make their religious affiliation public.
