If your eyes haven't rolled to the back of your head yet, then chances are you're reading this from the front porch of a double-wide trailer parked somewhere below the Mason Dixon with a glass of sweet tea in your hand and a coon dog at your feet. Or if, like me, you're a bit more progressed from the stereotype, you might be standing in front of a classroom of semi-attentive undergraduate students at a Southeastern research university making your best effort to bridge the ever-widening practical and theoretical gaps between old-world journalistic traditions and new-age neoliberal ideologies related to the function of human language in society. Instead of discussing "tips and tricks" for conducting adequate online research in the digital age, we spent the next two hours working as a group to uncover the context surrounding the claims, reconstruct a timeline of events, and offer our best critiques of all sides of the argument based on the evidence we accumulated. As a doctoral research fellow in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it's easy for me to admit that Lamoine's claim fascinated and excited me. What Lamoine has done, in my view, is make clear that at the pinnacle of social intelligence exists a radically benevolent empathy for the collective human condition -- one that borders on the mystical or transcendent, and that we would do well to put to use for the common good.

On Saturday morning, June 11, Jeff Bezo's newspaper The Washington Post published a story under the headline "The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life." The headline was followed by a brief explanation of Blake Lamoine, a Southern grown, former U.S. military, ex-convict, Christian mystic, AI researcher, father, and genius of compassion (I added that last part) and his belief that there's "a ghost in the machine."* If your eyes haven't rolled to the back of your head yet, then chances are you're reading this from the front porch of a double-wide trailer parked somewhere below the Mason Dixon with a glass of sweet tea in your hand and a coon dog at your feet. Which is clearly not something any "reasonable" person would choose to do in the year 2022. Or if, like me, you're a bit more progressed from the stereotype, you might be standing in front of a classroom of semi-attentive undergraduate students at a Southeastern research university making your best effort to bridge the ever-widening practical and theoretical gaps between old-world journalistic traditions and new-age neoliberal ideologies related to the function of human language in society.