Do Not Resign From Life

The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 3

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. The gaps between posts have been longer than I’d hoped, and, in my experience, writing is a bit like going to the gym: the longer you stay away, the harder it is to get back. Getting yourself back to the gym that first time is the key. Once you overcome that psychological hurdle, then going again is a little easier. So consider this short post something like a psychological trick I’m playing on myself. Just a quick thing I’m writing to get the habit going again. But I do hope it’s encouraging to you on its own terms. Finally, below this brief reflection, you’ll also find links to some recent essays and conversations published elsewhere.

Cheers,

Michael

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For more than three years now, AI has remained a salient topic of public discussion, debate, and controversy. I suspect that this will remain the case for the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, then, I’ve been asked to talk about AI quite a bit in recent months. But I confess that I find it difficult to comment on “AI” in a general or abstract way for the same reason that Joanna Bryson gave more than two years ago: “AI is not a unitary actor. It is not unitary, and it does not act.” “It is a set of software engineering techniques and digital services,” she adds, “Thus it is meaningless to discuss what AI will do, or to look for singular solutions about how to govern it.”

Despite the fact that AI is not one thing, however, there are some discernible patterns in the way that “AI” is marketed, hyped, and otherwise foisted on the public. Much of this amounts to the manufacturing of inevitability that I noted a few months back.¹ But despite these efforts, or perhaps, in part, because of them, anti-AI sentiment continues to build. Viral clips of commencement speakers being loudly booed are one striking manifestation of this trend, but a team led by reporter Karen Hao has recently published a website mapping various more substantive and organized efforts to resist the encroachments of AI. Oddly enough, it turns out that loudly and frequently touting your product as a potential threat of world-historical proportions to human well-being was a bad marketing strategy. Human beings, after all, have no particular obligation to cheerfully cooperate with our own purported immiseration.

This purported immiseration would have both economic and psycho-social dimensions, but it is with the latter that I am mostly concerned right now. My working thesis about the generalized impact of “AI” as it is currently deployed can be summed up in the observation that the arc of AI bends toward demoralization. As a generalization, there are surely exceptions. But it is hard for me to ignore the mounting anecdotal evidence emanating from diverse and varied quarters.

I continue to think, for example, of something Clay Shirky, who I hardly think of as a technological pessimist, wrote about a year ago describing the state of professors and students at NYU, where he serves as a vice-provost:

“Since the arrival of generative AI, I have spent much of the last two years talking with professors and students to try to understand what is going on in their classrooms. In those conversations, faculty have been variously vexed, curious, angry, or excited about AI, but as last year was winding down, for the first time one of the frequently expressed emotions was sadness.”

Shirky goes on to describe the prevalence of sadness among students as well. This sadness is one form of the demoralization I have been encountering and attempting to understand.

I believe that one dimension of this sadness or demoralization can be attributed to the simple fact that we are increasingly invited to outsource a class of activities that grant us a measure of satisfaction, accomplishment, and purpose.² But it is not only the case that we outsource these activities and thus fail to reap their existential rewards, it is also true, as Marc Watkins recently noted, that the demoralization can set in as a function of AI’s ambient presence in a social ecosystem, such as, in Watkins’ case, the university, where he suggests “the true crisis here is purpose.” “The most galling thing,” Watkins argues,

“is that you don’t have to use AI to still question if your skills matter. You see it in advertising, watch your peers do their homework with it, listen to your professors talk about resisting AI or giving you demonstrations about how to use it, all the while you ask the fundamental question about what is the point anymore?”

There is much that one could say in response, and maybe this isn’t the most pertinent of those potential replies, but I think it should be said: If there is some thing that you are meant to do, who the hell cares if there is a machine that can be made to do it just as well or even better? It is still your thing to do.

Perhaps we’ve been too caught up with the question of human exceptionalism: what is it exactly that makes us special as a species? This is not necessarily an unimportant or trivial question, but it may set us off on the wrong course when we’re thinking about AI. If we are focused on the question of human exceptionalism and we stake our sense of dignity or our experience of purpose on assumptions rooted in the idea that we are special as a species because we can do x, y, or z, then, naturally, we put ourselves in existential jeopardy when we discover that something else in the world, a machine no less, can similarly perform x, y, and z.

But this seems misguided. We’ve made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly. Of course it should fly because the point of flying for the kite is not to somehow demonstrate its uniqueness. It is blessedly free from such forms of existential angst, the experience of which might be the thing that does distinguish us as a species!

It seems to me that we would be better off if we were less preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness, if we took for granted that we are creatures of a certain sort making our way in the world with a distinct set of capabilities and potentialities and that we ought to exercise these capabilities and develop these potentialities not because they make us special but because they make us happy.³

I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason or use language in a manner that corresponds to the human use of language, etc. But let us grant for arguments sake that they can. They can certainly generate passable simulations of such things. But why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

The machine cannot make us yield our ground. It is true that other humans can turn the machine against us, but that is a different problem. Here, I simply want to encourage us not to abandon those activities that bring us purpose, meaning, and delight, which are often the very activities that also bring us together.

In his 1921 book, Tragic Sense Life, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno gave us a rallying cry for our age: “I will not resign from life; I must be dismissed.” Do not resign from life. Let us do what it is ours to do because it is good for us to do it.

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I’ve published a couple of pieces recently that might be of interest to some of you. For Inkwell, I wrote on the themes of beauty, wonder, and faith: “Do You Still Look at the Stars?” And for Comment, I wrote a piece about AI, the religion of technology, and how we might find our humanity not in our capabilities but in our distinct capacity to receive the gift of existence: “AI as a Christian Heresy.” I also had the pleasure of joining Sam Pressler of Connective Tissue for a conversation focused on conviviality and Ivan Illich: “Achieving independence for the sake of mutual interdependence.”

1. An example of manufactured inevitability appeared in a recent piece in the New Yorker: “The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: ‘Help me write.’ If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is ‘Help me visualize.’ She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: ‘Help me edit.’ ‘Beautify this slide.’ The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.”

2. To say that we are being “invited” to outsource these activities is, of course, a euphemism. We are in certain cases actively pressured if not, frankly, coerced into delegating our life and work to the very machines that we are told, again and again, are threatening to replace us. When framed benignly, the premise is that we are gaining some nebulous good in return: more time, more leisure, the freedom to do “what really matters,” etc. Framed in less benevolent terms, it amounts to the threat that you’ll be left behind, rendered part of a permanent underclass, or otherwise socially disadvantaged if you fail incorporate AI into your work and personal life.

3. I will grant that this distinction, depending on how it is conceived, is not as stark as my formulation implies. To ask what makes us happy necessarily entails some account of what we are as human beings. But I do think the emphasis on our exceptionalism as a species, especially when our reason for being is anchored exclusively to such exceptionality, is less than helpful.