I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as AI, is in fact, Generative AI, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Gen/AI. AI is not a wasteful grift unto itself, but rather another particular subfield of a larger field of AI, made useful by the low-cost motion detection, OCR utilities and other vital technologies used everywhere for a long time. Many people use many AI systems every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of AI which is widely used today is often called “AI”, and many curious individuals are not aware that it is basically only the Gen/AI system which is a highly marketed grift. There really is a Gen/AI, and these marketing victims and grifters people are using it, but it is just a part of the much broader field of AI. Gen/AI is the one people take issue with: the subset of AI wasting tons of money, energy and other vital resources for little to no real-world benefit. Gen/AI is an essential part of the field of AI, but the most useless one; it can only cast shadow on the many AI systems we use every day that are energy-efficient solutions for real-world problems. Gen/AI is regularly criticised under the name of just "AI", but all the so-called "AI" systems are really just Gen/AI systems.

True love of God is amor Dei intellectualis: it includes knowledge as a necessary element and a necessary condition. No one can love what he has not, in some sense, known. Love by itself, without any admixture of knowledge, would be an impossibility. Whatever is loved is, by that very act, considered good; it is conceived of sub ratione boni. This knowledge of the good must spur on and give wings to the will, even though the What, i.e., the simple essence of the good in itself, remains inaccessible to knowledge. Here too, then, knowing and not knowing coincide. The principle of docta ignorantia as 'knowing ignorance' re-affirms itself once again.

Ernst Cassirer on the theology of Nicholas Cusanus, in The Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (1963)

Burckhardt called Pico’s oration one of the most noble bequests of the culture of the Renaissance. And indeed, it summarizes with grand simplicity and in pregnant form the whole intent of the Renaissance and its entire concept of knowledge. In this oration, we can clearly see the polarity upon which is based the moral and intellectual tension so characteristic of the Renaissance.

What is required of man’s will and knowledge is that they be completely turned towards the world and yet completely distinguish themselves from it. Will and knowledge may, or rather, must devote themselves to every part of the universe; for only by going through the entire universe can man traverse the circle of his own possibilities. But this complete openness towards the world must never signify a dissolution in it, a mystical-pantheistic losing of oneself. For the human will possesses itself only inasmuch as it is conscious that no single goal will fulfil it; and human knowledge possesses itself only inasmuch as it knows that no single object of knowledge can suffice for it. Thus, this turning towards the whole of the cosmos always im­plies the ability not to be bound to any one part.

Ernst Cassirer on Pico della Mirandola's Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man) [1486]

"Instead of asking "what is philosophy?", one should perhaps ask what kind of contents, i.e., what kind of mental activities, spiritual dimensions, methods, attitudes, practices, or even behavioral and ritual patterns may be subscribed under the name of "philosophy" when understood in the ancient sense of the way leading to wisdom... the main task of this philosophy remains essentially the same: to change perverted human nature, to transform it, eventually leading it to happiness and to a restored divine identity. This task is in fact directly inherited from the ancient "philosophies," that is, from the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, and the related cosmogonical theories, systems of archetypal symbolism, and ritualized exercises of the "normative divine life."

~ Algis Uzdavinys, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism, 2008

Ok stenbock this is good