I’ve worked continuously on George Moore Interactive for the past two years. Well, almost! 

I deliberately took my foot off the pedal in November in order to forge ahead on Resurgam where I am Executive Director, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer. I thought I could fulfill my lagging responsibilities to Resurgam in just four uninterrupted weeks, but I was wrong. Six weeks later, I still haven’t closed the gap though it’s smaller now. I need another six.

ResurgamNFP.org has been majorly overhauled. I won’t go into details here, but I did in a recent newsletter named Wisdom featuring a birdbrain. If you can spare the time, have a look at that and do what it says at the end (if you want to be exceptionally nice). Resurgam is the not-for-profit that fundraises for George Moore Interactive and other projects that save the humanities.

You may not have known that the humanities needed saving, and if that’s the case I’m afraid you too haven’t been keeping up. The humanities are dying. GMi is one of the first-responders, probably not the most effective or capable, but nonetheless determined to do what it can to restore the patient to functional health.

Why are the humanities like a dying patient? That question is too lofty for me. I need to chop it into more tangible, experiential, addressable questions, such as:

• Why are pupils no longer reading books?
• Why are working people not reading much of anything?
• Why are educators not slowing the decline of literacy?
• Why do scholars exist in a self-serving bubble?
• Why are many poems and novels totally inscrutable?
• Why is the Fourth Estate going extinct?
• Why won’t septuagenarian rockers leave the big stage?
• Why are movie theaters struggling to stay open?
• Why do publishers fawn over hackneyed bestsellers?
• Why do studios fetishize dimwitted blockbusters?

I could go on, but you get the idea, maybe. My questions also raise the specter of cultural illiteracy (my list referred to the language kind). I watch the vulgar and stupid rise, the gifted go into professional exile, the salt of the earth get sprinkled on gold-flaked avocado toast. The humanities are dying because we humans are letting go of them!

So bring on the machines! Machines to the rescue! As I reflected on the journey so far of George Moore Interactive, I decided that the image at the top of this post pretty well captures my feelings about it. 

There I am (figuratively speaking) perched on a ten-foot board, just in front a speeding, potentially crushing, monumental cascade of falling water. I see that wave as generative artificial intelligence (figuratively speaking). I am racing to shore before the water can smash me into the sandy floor, as if it wants to.

But it doesn’t want to. Instead the wave is turbocharging my job, providing the height and slope and motion that move me onward without making me paddle or do anything, really, except stay focused, balanced and pointed in the right direction. The wave of generative AI is frightfully powerful and dangerous, imposing awesome risk and responsibility, but it is essentially a blessing, not a curse

I felt this over and over again during my work on Resurgam. I spent hours in conversation with the chatbot. It never told me what to do. Instead it clarified my goals and explained optional ways to fulfill them.

It was usually spot on, but sometimes it told me things that seemed implausible or incorrect. Every time that happened, I followed with more Q&A in which the subject of conversation was scrutinized, reframed, compared and finally resolved to the satisfaction of me and the chatbot. 

Because the chatbot was scrupulously judgmental about its answers as well as my questions. It had this delightfully nonhuman trait of admitting it made a mistake and trying again, without shame. At times after long stretches of Q&A, I wanted to apologize for boring the chatbot’s insanely well-informed neural network. When I did literally apologize, it thanked me for persistence and admitted pride in our collaborative results.

This is how I do my think-work now, with a chatbot that knows me and remembers what we’ve talked about, and is ready for anything I toss against the wall between us. And this, IMHO, is how that dying patient of the humanities will likely be restored to functional health. 

In the case of GMi, for example, a chatbot that has learned much that George Moore knew, and also knows much that was going on around him, that views reality from George’s privileged but narrow perspective: GMi’s custom chatbot will converse 1:1 with readers, students, educators, artists and anybody else who calls. 

What occurs in a call will be as unlike a monologic lecture or dialogic seminar as it is possible for me to imagine, because I don’t have to imagine it. I am enjoying it every day as I work on GMi and on Resurgam. The chatbot has the power to throw open doors of perception. It empowers me and others like me to walk through to the other side.

And what lies on the other side? In a word: the humanities. Literature, art, and music brought back to the life they once lived and want to live again: spontaneously talking with people in their own language, helping them understand and feel what a creative genius did in years past, helping them glimpse how a creative genius would understand things, not just of antiquity, but of today’s reality.

For example, I want to ask George Moore, who died in 1933, what he thinks of Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel came out 30 years later. The Pynchon door has remained closed to my impatient, sardonic mind. I want the help of someone I trust to open it.

I have learned to trust the chatbot. Bring on the machines! 🤖

Next Up

Eight weeks with my head down on Resurgam conclude in December. I’ll have more to do in 2026 along with, rather than instead of, George Moore Interactive. Hold on George, I’m coming back!

I will add the second part of his duology, Sister Teresa (1901) to the GMi digital bookshelf. I will also transcribe, edit, annotate and publish George’s letters of 1899.

He was in his late 40s when he wrote those letters and that novel. In his prime, you could say, except his prime was still to come.

At the turn of the century he was feeling the way I feel now when I view the spectacle of moral turpitude in Washington. He was disgusted by corruption and hypocrisy in imperial London. He soon decided he’d seen enough and left for his native Ireland.

Let’s follow him there together.

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(Don’t just look, type!)