ARTHUR C. CLARKE wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of God. The monks buy a computer to do this faster and better, with unfortunate consequences for the rest of us. The story’s last sentence: “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
Marion Fourcade and Henry Farrell, “Large Language Models Will Upend Human Rituals,” The Economist, September 4, 2024.