Thank you for sharing this essay. It occasioned many thoughts, but here is one.
The late, great Albert Borgmann, my mentor throughout my master's program, would often invoke what he called The Churchill Principle*, the basic idea of which is this: once you shape your environment a certain way, your environment proceeds to shape you, so take care in, and think carefully about, how you shape your environment.
The significance of this principle, and the truth lying in it, rest on the hard-nosed recognition that human beings have limited thought- and will-power. It is unrealistic (perhaps a little sadistic) to expect us to think and deliberate constantly about what we are doing.
The Churchill Principle bids us to use our cooler, reflective moments to think and deliberate about what a good life would look like. It then bids us to shape our environments as best we can to conduce toward that good life, instituting the affordances and effordances that would subliminally or unconsciously create the relevant habits and elicit the relevant decisions. In this way, we are not unrelentingly called upon to "make the better choice" or to exercise our willpower in the face of incentives drawing us away from the good life we envisioned for ourselves. This is the truth in Whitehead's idea.
But the Churchill Principle also meets Arendt's call for "knowing what we are doing." We know what we are doing not in the sense that we are constantly thinking about what we're doing but in the sense that our environment-elicited doings are intelligible in light of the reflection we undertook before shaping our environment to elicit those doings.
Like smartphones, touchscreens in cars, and self-checkout have been, nurtured in the conditions of a deformed political economy, LLMs are now being inserted, by private firms insulated from democratic contestation, into our environments in utter indifference to whether we want them there. Without our say, they are becoming a fixture, channeling us toward modes of acting, perceiving, and attending few of us would endorse or choose on reflection.
The Churchill Principle, with its synthesis of Whitehead and Arendt, assumes we enjoy both a capacity for thinking and a measure of sovereignty in shaping the environment. Insofar as tech firms are eroding that capacity by usurping that sovereignty, they are assuming an ever greater role in forming the unconscious, sub-conscious, or sub-liminal background that shapes our lives. This makes our own decisions less intelligible to ourselves.
I know this isn't exactly the notion of the unconscious you had in mind, but I think it's related.
*The British House of Commons was destroyed in The Blitz, and in 1943 plans for its rebuilding were debated. Should it be built with its original arrangement, the two parties set facing each other, or with a less adversarial semicircular pattern, such as we see in the House Chamber in Washington, D.C.? Observing that “we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us,” Winston Churchill argued for the original pattern, seeing it as having influenced the structure of the two-party system, which he regarded as the essence of parliamentary democracy.
The main issue with the Ulmer idea of the internet as a prothesis of our collective unconscious is, of course, that it is digital and therefore by nature a small and filtered subset of human experience and prone to the influences and flaws of that medium.
We are taking the fullness of experience and compressing it into a model that is selective and flawed. With LLMs we are then building 'intelligence' from that point.
Of course human experience is also a flawed model of reality so that is why, adding to Arendt, we should not just 'think what we are doing' but be mindful of how and where the thinking is done. All models are wrong, some models are useful.
Someone once said the answers to most of the worlds problems are probably buried in a pdf somewhere. LLMs are potentially an 'ordinary language interface' to help solve this but only if you buy into quite a reductive version of the problem set and definition.
I agree and I appreciate this, thank you! I think about AI, and capitalism, a whole lot. It's fascinating to track the trajectory of modern American living and the dynamic we have with technology. To me, it feels like AI is a solution the tech companies are selling us to address the problems they created by unleashing social media on us.
Outrage generates much more profit than pleasant engagement such as likes (supported by research), and social media companies figured that out a long time ago. There’s a reason the algorithms give us trolls and fear mongering rather than an endless supply of adorable kittens and puppies. If we got a few nice videos on our social feeds, we’d cheer up and log off; if we’re fed trolls and outrage, we doomscroll. Engagement goes through the roof, and stocks go with it.
That being said, there are already signs showing that outrage engagement on social media is dropping, likely due to the fatigue. That’s why the tech companies moved on years ago to sycophantic chatbots. The tech industry is already assuming social media is the old thing, and the new thing creating a new internet that’s a personalized echo chamber. So now we have AI chatbots that tell you you’re a genius and yes of course they can do that work for you, no problem.
It’s the tech industry cure for the social disease they created, and the resulting burnout and malaise we are all living. That’s a huge part of why I think this implementation of AI is a gross and a terrible idea. As you're noting, it's a machine that will think for us, and do our homework for us, something people are tempted by because of how much of modern living (heavily influenced by social media) has resulted in us being overwhelmed and burned out.
More and more, I think the overall discussion needs to highlight what it means for us to be human, the differences between technologies and tools that facilitate us being our best selves, and which are encouraging us to outsource our humanity.
Thank you for sharing this essay. It occasioned many thoughts, but here is one.
The late, great Albert Borgmann, my mentor throughout my master's program, would often invoke what he called The Churchill Principle*, the basic idea of which is this: once you shape your environment a certain way, your environment proceeds to shape you, so take care in, and think carefully about, how you shape your environment.
The significance of this principle, and the truth lying in it, rest on the hard-nosed recognition that human beings have limited thought- and will-power. It is unrealistic (perhaps a little sadistic) to expect us to think and deliberate constantly about what we are doing.
The Churchill Principle bids us to use our cooler, reflective moments to think and deliberate about what a good life would look like. It then bids us to shape our environments as best we can to conduce toward that good life, instituting the affordances and effordances that would subliminally or unconsciously create the relevant habits and elicit the relevant decisions. In this way, we are not unrelentingly called upon to "make the better choice" or to exercise our willpower in the face of incentives drawing us away from the good life we envisioned for ourselves. This is the truth in Whitehead's idea.
But the Churchill Principle also meets Arendt's call for "knowing what we are doing." We know what we are doing not in the sense that we are constantly thinking about what we're doing but in the sense that our environment-elicited doings are intelligible in light of the reflection we undertook before shaping our environment to elicit those doings.
Like smartphones, touchscreens in cars, and self-checkout have been, nurtured in the conditions of a deformed political economy, LLMs are now being inserted, by private firms insulated from democratic contestation, into our environments in utter indifference to whether we want them there. Without our say, they are becoming a fixture, channeling us toward modes of acting, perceiving, and attending few of us would endorse or choose on reflection.
The Churchill Principle, with its synthesis of Whitehead and Arendt, assumes we enjoy both a capacity for thinking and a measure of sovereignty in shaping the environment. Insofar as tech firms are eroding that capacity by usurping that sovereignty, they are assuming an ever greater role in forming the unconscious, sub-conscious, or sub-liminal background that shapes our lives. This makes our own decisions less intelligible to ourselves.
I know this isn't exactly the notion of the unconscious you had in mind, but I think it's related.
*The British House of Commons was destroyed in The Blitz, and in 1943 plans for its rebuilding were debated. Should it be built with its original arrangement, the two parties set facing each other, or with a less adversarial semicircular pattern, such as we see in the House Chamber in Washington, D.C.? Observing that “we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us,” Winston Churchill argued for the original pattern, seeing it as having influenced the structure of the two-party system, which he regarded as the essence of parliamentary democracy.
It seems to me there's a third term missing between the two* and that is intuition.
As modes of thinking go, we need less cerebration and more intuition.
Cerebration blots out the world, intuition penetrates it.
With our intellect often all we're seeing is our own ideas, which have taken on a life of their own.
With intuition ("the eye in the gut") we perceive what is there.
*Full disclosure: I haven't finished reading the article yet so maybe it isn't missing.
The main issue with the Ulmer idea of the internet as a prothesis of our collective unconscious is, of course, that it is digital and therefore by nature a small and filtered subset of human experience and prone to the influences and flaws of that medium.
We are taking the fullness of experience and compressing it into a model that is selective and flawed. With LLMs we are then building 'intelligence' from that point.
Of course human experience is also a flawed model of reality so that is why, adding to Arendt, we should not just 'think what we are doing' but be mindful of how and where the thinking is done. All models are wrong, some models are useful.
Someone once said the answers to most of the worlds problems are probably buried in a pdf somewhere. LLMs are potentially an 'ordinary language interface' to help solve this but only if you buy into quite a reductive version of the problem set and definition.
I agree and I appreciate this, thank you! I think about AI, and capitalism, a whole lot. It's fascinating to track the trajectory of modern American living and the dynamic we have with technology. To me, it feels like AI is a solution the tech companies are selling us to address the problems they created by unleashing social media on us.
Outrage generates much more profit than pleasant engagement such as likes (supported by research), and social media companies figured that out a long time ago. There’s a reason the algorithms give us trolls and fear mongering rather than an endless supply of adorable kittens and puppies. If we got a few nice videos on our social feeds, we’d cheer up and log off; if we’re fed trolls and outrage, we doomscroll. Engagement goes through the roof, and stocks go with it.
That being said, there are already signs showing that outrage engagement on social media is dropping, likely due to the fatigue. That’s why the tech companies moved on years ago to sycophantic chatbots. The tech industry is already assuming social media is the old thing, and the new thing creating a new internet that’s a personalized echo chamber. So now we have AI chatbots that tell you you’re a genius and yes of course they can do that work for you, no problem.
It’s the tech industry cure for the social disease they created, and the resulting burnout and malaise we are all living. That’s a huge part of why I think this implementation of AI is a gross and a terrible idea. As you're noting, it's a machine that will think for us, and do our homework for us, something people are tempted by because of how much of modern living (heavily influenced by social media) has resulted in us being overwhelmed and burned out.
More and more, I think the overall discussion needs to highlight what it means for us to be human, the differences between technologies and tools that facilitate us being our best selves, and which are encouraging us to outsource our humanity.