Should We Fear AI?
I retired from college teaching three years ago, and not a moment too soon. All the current debates about higher education involve serious disruptions that have upset the enterprise. Most of the focus has been on the role of ideology and how it has disrupted higher ed. I would not gainsay the significance of this, and while we live in a deeply ideological age I’d hesitate to call it a defining feature. Economic instability and demographic decline have also disrupted the prospects of higher ed, especially for schools without ten or eleven figure endowments.
Schools do not operate independently of the culture; rather, they are carriers of it. You will find on campuses not a refuge from cultural trends but rather concentrated forms of them. For all the yattering concerning “critical thinking” (and I’m still not convinced that’s an improvement on “thinking”) very little of it gets exercised on college campuses. About the highest compliment you can give the schools is that they claim a place of privilege by being the tip of the spear of apparent cultural change. That change is not only apparent but in some sense real, but to what degree does it change that world where the fundamental things apply?
Institutions of higher learning have a gift for digging their own graves. Marketing themselves as tickets to the upper middle class, with all that entails, inevitably resulted in skepticism and blowback, just as intentionally embracing political radicalism would. If digging your own grave, however, why use a shovel if a backhoe will do? Nothing has altered the character and complexion of the academy near to the degree that “technology” has; for that matter, nothing has determined the course of our culture and civilization like technology has. It is the defining aspect of the world we live in. We live, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger realized three quarters of a century ago, in a technological epoch. It sets the parameters for our willing, thinking, and doing.
Thinking about Technology
The most consequential challenge for philosophers is to bring to language the pressing issues and the genuine nature of the age. Just as political philosophers must see more broadly and deeply than the parties, so philosophers, if well-trained, will see more broadly and deeply than the interests of the moment allow. They often seem out of touch, but only because they desire to touch something deeper than current obsessions. As Saint Augustine wrote, in studying creature we should not devote ourselves to vain and perishing curiosities but ascend toward something much higher, toward “what is immortal and everlasting.”
We live in a time where we often think there is nothing greater than our vain and perishing curiosities, and this too is an essential feature of living in a technological epoch. The most essential feature of such living reflects our inability to think outside the parameters that technology itself sets for us.
One such feature is the fact that technologies change the way we think about things, and in the process changes who we think we are. Indeed, we don’t even think carefully about what is assumed in the use of the word “technology.” The Greek word techne refers to a “skill” or “art” while logos, from the word for reason or words, designates the systematic study of something. In the word “technology” is implied a whole way of speaking not only about how we know things but also what is worth knowing. Thoreau observed that “our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to unimproved ends.”
Technology is more than what Eliot called a distraction from a distraction by a distraction. It narrows our field of vision, rendering the question about appropriate ends and purposes increasingly moot. Among those questions is the simple and complex question of what human beings are and what they are for.
The Background and the Consequence
At the beginning of the technological epoch those questions were enthusiastically answered: man occupies a place nearly divine, lords of all creation, and masters of the world. The central point of the new sciences was to express such mastery through control, first of nature and then ultimately of human nature. Dividing the world between “mind” and “everything else,” early modern thinkers saw anything that was not part of the mind as an object, a thing to be mastered and used as the demands of the mind dictated.
We don’t think enough about how technologies change the very meaning of things, nor how they divide the world into a whole new set of winners and losers. Those who create and control the technology enrich themselves and employ the technologies as a mode of social control on those on the outside. This is what was really behind the controversies around COVID, the yard signs proclaiming “In this house we believe in science” instead of the more honest “in this house we benefit from science as it is currently practiced” notwithstanding.
COVID, one of the great technological disruptions to higher ed, also revealed how difficult it is for us to think outside of technology. Problems produced by technology, we believe, can only be addressed by more technology. Gain of function research creates a global pandemic? Let’s rush vaccines to market. It’s a microcosm of all problems unleashed by technology: we just need better technology.
I mentioned that technological innovation creates winners and losers, often new sets of innovators that replace the old guard. The dynamic also divides society into the great majority of technophiles, those who both believe in and love technological “advances,” and technophobes, those who worry about and fear the consequences of so-called advances. The mutual contempt drives our politics both at its heart and at its margins.
The technophiles have the upper hand in no small part because most of us enjoy the benefits of success: longer life spans, greater mobility, better health, greater opportunity. Only a crank would protest that. Technophiles love calling technophobes Luddites, as if that is an insult. Readers may recall that the Luddites destroyed machines that were disrupting their lives and taking their jobs. History may treat them as quixotic losers, but many of us understand and respect the impulse behind what they were doing. After all, the current winners in the technological sweepstakes showed no concern for jobs being taken until the logic of the enterprise came for theirs. Those who complain about being DOGEd didn’t seem too concerned when robots replaced auto workers or McDonalds employees. Recent reports that AI is gutting the labor market for computer coders bring a smile to the lips of the so-called Luddites.
How to Respond?
Some of the technophobes may seek to get off the grid completely, whereupon they become a curiosity, a feature piece in The Atlantic demonstrating the silliness of such opting out. Most others will lead a double-life, riding the technological wave but assuaging their conscience by opting out of using particular devices, such as cell phones. This, too, was what Heidegger meant when he said we lived in a technological epoch: there really was no way out; it’s an iron cage.
There’s a more sober view I suppose, one that recognizes that technological development brings with it both gain and loss. One of my main objections is when people tally only benefits and give no full and honest accounting of costs. The early developers of a new technology will typically only trumpet the benefits while intentionally hiding costs. Nor will the benefits ever meet their bold predictions.
In his great work Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud raised a question that has bothered many researchers in our contemporary world: if we have achieved such tremendous levels of material advance why aren’t we any happier? The most obvious reason is because not only have we not become clearer about ends, we have treated the question, as Thoreau saw, as largely irrelevant. In a rather lengthy passage Freud gave us a rather adept approach to the paradox:
In the last generations man has made extraordinary strides in knowledge of the natural sciences and technical application of them, and has established his dominion over nature in a way never before imagined. The details of this forward progress are universally known : it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Mankind is proud of its exploits and has a right to be. But men are beginning to perceive that all this newly won power over space and time, this conquest of the forces of nature, this fulfilment of age-old longings, has not increased the amount of pleasure they can obtain in life, has not made them feel any happier. The valid conclusion from this is merely that power over nature is not the only condition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of civilization's efforts, and there is no ground for inferring that its technical progress is worthless from the standpoint of happiness. It prompts one to exclaim : is it not then a positive pleasure, an unequivocal gain in happiness, to be able to hear, whenever I like, the voice of a child living hundreds of miles away, or to know directly a friend of mine arrives at his destination that he has come well and safely through the long and troublesome voyage ? And is it nothing that medical science has succeeded in enormously reducing the mortality of young children, the dangers of infection for women in childbirth, indeed, in very considerably prolonging the average length of human life?
Then the rub:
If there were no railway to make light of distances my child would never have left home and I should not need the telephone to hear his voice. If there were no vessels crossing the ocean my friend would never have embarked on his voyage and I should not need the telegraph to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing the mortality of children when it is precisely this reduction which imposes the greatest moderation on us in begetting them, so that taken all round we do not rear more children than in the day before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for sexual life in marriage and probably counteracted the beneficial effects of natural selection? And what do we gain by a long life when it is full of hardship and starved of joys and so wretched that we can only welcome death as our deliverer?
Over the next months (but not weekly) I will be writing a series of essays on technology. I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that I got out of higher ed at the right time. I lived through the great COVID disruption, but not happily so; I got out before the AI disruption achieved velocity. I’m glad not to have dealt with ChatGPT, which according to a recent report some 90% of students use to do their “work” for them.
The term “artificial intelligence” necessarily creates confusion, just as does “virtual reality.” Anything “artificial” is, in the nature of the thing, not real. But is it even intelligence? More importantly, does it change our whole way of thinking about intelligence, what it is and how it operates? It would seem so.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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