"Indeed, it is a curious fact that some of the very people who are ostensibly convinced of the inevitability of AI nonetheless lack the confidence you would think accompanied such conviction and instead seem bent on exerting their power and wealth to make certain that AI is imposed on society."
Yes! This reminds me of John Stuart Mill's argument in The Subjection of Women that the only rational basis to exclude women from public life and the professions would be the view that they were naturally superior to men, since if they were inferior (as most men of the time thought) or simply equal in talent to men (as Mill thought was more likely), fair competition would handle the rest.
Likewise, we are not allowed to have AI as simply one tool among many, which, if it proves useful for a task (and not too costly or inefficient to use), could be taken up just for such tasks. Rather, it is being imposed in every aspect of life on the grounds that AI is, categorically, "better", a claim that is all-but-meaningless for a technology.
I would add that courage may also involve, depending on your circumstances, going against everyone you love: parents family, relatives, friends, mentors and so on. That, I think, is the electric fence for some people I know. I'm not particularly observant but I am reminded of Christ speaking of turning sons against fathers etc.
The manufactured inevitability of TECHNOCRACY has been a running theme my entire life.
I feel a little courage well up every time I hear or read someone else talk about it. Thanks for the reminder. The failure of technocrats due to ignorance of their own blind spots is also inevitable, the only question is when.
While I fully support your call for courage, and most certainly recognise what you are referring to as 'technological inevitability', I feel that your assessment of the 'Borg Complex' only captures the style of direct communication, and misses the symptom that might be the most important means for propagating the phenomena of 'manufactured inevitability': the non-citation of anyone who expresses any alternative perspective.
Babette Babich has written extensively on how the continental tradition in philosophy has been expunged in academia by the analytic tradition through the non-citation and non-hiring of continental philosophers, and the accompanying assimilation (the Borg again...) of continental philosophers into the analytic tradition by converting them (Borg) through analytic assumptions.
The analytic tradition has no means of resistance to your 'technological inevitability'. Its practitioners believe it would be wrong to even get involved. As a sign of this, you will notice that everyone who has written about robot ethics *and attained traction in the public sphere on the topic* has taken a position of political neutrality, and refused to take any kind of principled position on the subject. I have found this maddening. This idea that philosophers are obligated to perform neutral analyses on topics and that they are somehow sullied by taking up a position is beyond frustrating.
On the other hand, I have written from a position inspired by Illich on these topics and got nowhere doing so. I have written papers that do not get read such as "We Can Make Anything, Should We?" (admittedly, in one of those awful collecitons priced in the hundreds of dollars so that only libraries ever buy them). For this one I had to fight tooth and nail to get through peer review, since one reviewer declared it was 'not philosophy' i.e. not analytic philosophy (although unlike Babette, I do not consider myself a continental philosopher because my other languages are too weak.) Likewise, I have written books that do not get read such as The Virtuous Cyborg, my attempt to perform Illich's Tools for Convivality on the design of computer technology, underpinned by a virtue ethics inspired by MacIntyre (although I am not a virtue ethicist as such, for reasons that don't matter to this commentary).
Now writing papers or books that do not get read is hardly unique to me, but I consider it significant that my first book of philosophy, Imaginary Games, saw me being invited onto podcasts and interviewed all over the shop, including at the Edinburgh Festival and How the Light Gets in at Hay-on-Wye. It was so much easier to promote a book that made the arguments for videogames being art (albeit almost all very poor quality art) than anything that asked for reflection upon the effects of technology or the methods of the technological.
The one speaking gig I got on the back of The Virtuous Cyborg was to a Manchester-based group who I would describe as being technological fetishists, and it felt as if they had never even considered the idea of placing limits of technological design for ethical reasons. I'm sure they swiftly forgot everything I said in order to return to gazing longingly into that glorious future, the imaginary jam-factory-of-tomorrow.
And of course, I'm acutely aware that these are merely my own stories. I am convinced that were anyone to desire to investigate, it would be discovered there would be dozens, hundreds, possibly even thousands who have written against technological inevitability one way or another, and simply been silenced through the effortless and fool proof method of non-citation. Of course, this is the fate of academics in general these days - one thing that made making a permanent break with all the universities I was affiliated with in 2021 far easier was my abiding impression of academia as a means of removing the vast majority of intellectuals from public debate.
Please consider the importance of this non-citation factor to the propagation of technological inevitability. I would suggest this is another symptom of Borg Complex, and arguably one of the most important.
Finally, I must apologise for the length of this comment (I have not had time to make it shorter) and express how much I appreciate a new missive from the Convivial Society. You are the only other Illich-influenced Substacker I know, and I always look forward to reading your thoughts.
You might like the premise of a book I just ordered (haven't read yet) - A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy, available through Verso. From the last sentence of the description:
> As Schuringa concludes, the apparently increasing friendliness of analytic philosophers to rival approaches in philosophy should be understood as a form of colonization; thanks to its hegemonic status, it reformats all it touches in service of its own imperatives, going so far as to colonize decolonial efforts in the discipline.
<<Nonetheless, the techno-utopian future mapped out by today’s richest fools can’t happen, and so it won’t. The Club of Rome once reminded us that there are “limits to growth,” and the fact that we don’t talk about it anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t right. People have stopped talking about climate disruption. I can promise you, the carbon-cascade is still happening. Even if it’s politically inconvenient.
The thing about nature—and I don’t mean some pristine and bucolic phenomenon apart from us, but the iron laws of physics—is that, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t give a damn what we think or want. This is a good thing, if harsh at times, because it means there’s a ground. The old baseball metaphor says, “Nature always bats last.” Being sure of that should be a source of consistency and reliability on the one hand . . . and humility on the other.>>
I skip over the AI search results and won't use it for my writing and I think true intelligence must be embodied by a carbon-based form that evolved over millions of years on the local planet, but the "inevitability" thing has really nagged at me. Couldn't put my finger on it, but you did.
Weizenbaum for the win once again: the computer scientist who writes like he's also been long-enmeshed by ethics and the Humanities. I wish there were more. Jaron Lanier is another.
You've written an essay that is indicative of my experience and had been in my thoughts since AI became "a thing." In my 20-year tenure working in the tech industry, I have experienced the “Luddite” epithet multiple times when I’ve raised concerns about interface designs – the very role I was hired to do. I’ve challenged the unethical use of dark patterns, horribly unusable applications, and unethical products more times than I can remember. Most of the time, my concerns were simply dismissed. I finally left Design and went to Accessibility because companies were forced under threats of lawsuits to fix the applications they mindlessly created.
Those who fling "Luddite!" at people who challenge the unethical implications of an untried and untested technology don't know the history of the Luddite movement. The original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. They were opposed to the *unethical use* of technology. By that accurate historical definition, I am proud to be labelled a Luddite. And innovation acolytes who dismisses those of us who challenge innovation, just because we challenge innovation, are well on their way to being assimilated into "the Borg." Despite the fact that it's generally forgotten, the record of innovation is replete with disastrous consequences. If innovators truly believe in the value of their creations, they should be willing to put them through the necessary steps of rigorous testing and ethical considerations. But they don't. "Silicon Valley" is blinded by it's own ambitions to "change the world" (not to mention, money), fueled by a toddler's level of impatience, while charging forth with ridiculous mantras like "move fast and break things," and "fake it until you make it, and "disrupt!" The Theranos debacle, which should have been a wake up call to the industry, has simply been ignored.
I hope that you keep this essay publicly available. Because I plan to share it.
I recently became interested in the survival of the epithet 'Luddite': its cultural stickability, as it were. I wrote a very long essay describing the historical moment in which Ned Ludd— well, 'was born' isn’t quite right— 'came into being'?
My conclusion was that considering Ludd was / is a mythological figure, we re-summon him every time we say his name, so even people who use the term 'Luddite' as an insult are thereby keeping the name of Ludd alive, thus making Luddism ever more energetically powerful.
When health care switched from paper charts to electronic medical records in the US, clinicians and health systems received incentives by meeting "meaningful use standards" (e.g., are you electronically prescribing? are you electronically documenting certain things? etc). Decades after the switch, we have no such carrots now. There are only disincentives for not using the record the way various stakeholders want you to.
Now, in a perfect example of technopoly and fitting well with what you call manufactured inevitability, clinicians are adopting AI ambient scribes at perhaps a much more rapid rate, and certainly more voluntarily, than we ever adopted EMRs. These promise to off-load the burden of documentation to AI, something clinicians loathe. But what clinicians fail to see is this will increase surveillance and micro-management of the clinical encounter by an order of magnitude. https://familymeetingnotes.substack.com/p/where-the-walls-listen
This is also happening to some degree even in the pharmaceutical space. Anti-amyloid therapies for Alzheimer's dementia offer paltry benefits, if you can even call them that, and serious risks and burdens. But as advocacy groups supported them and as companies pushed them through FDA approval, clinicians and health systems were left with the dilemma: should they even offer to prescribe these, knowing the benefits won't outweigh the burdens in the vast majority of cases? The resistance: patients and caregivers want them, they will demand them, and you need to be prepared to discuss and offer them.
For many years I worked with a large community that thought deeply about technology. Highly skeptical of the benefits, sub-groups within the whole would each set their own rules regarding what would be allowed. Movement was allowed between the groups…but interestingly, very often new groups would form with more conservative standards. From the outside it looked chaotic, random and hypocritical….until you witnessed inner logic.
One of my greatest joys was time with their children. Open, curious, attentive, uncynical and playful.
I saw first hand that the technology we use is our choice. Most of us do not choose wisely, and the sunk cost fallacy makes it difficult to turn back after that first taste
"AI won't replace you, but someone who knows how to use AI will" is manufacturing inevitably on top of a fundamental contradiction, given that the whispered promise of AI is that it will soon become smarter than we are now.
Only slight disagreement: not sure if individual acts of courage alone will add up to much. I think there needs to be collective action. I see lots of my colleagues reluctantly give in to the 'inevitably' when policy changes by the admin would make it easier for them to follow what they believe in (i.e. acting together to influence policy would make demanding and perhaps somewhat unrealistic acts of individual courage less necessary).
And this chills me to the bone. My wife and I often joke-not-joke that “this is not the internet we wanted”. Thanks (and commenters too) for the insights.
A distillation of my comments to Brookeshelves on this matter:
There's not enough electricity: generation, transmission, transformers or copper; there's not enough groundwater for cooling; there's not enough capital to bring it about; and, per Brooke, there's also just not enough words to feed ('train') the machine to 'bring' AGI into 'being'.
I think that theology writer Andy Crouch may have called this for what it is: "What Tech wants is what Mammon wants..."
Me? This Luddite has firewood to split and stack today, that I may be warmed in part from my own efforts and the deadfall from my own hilltop.
1. "‘We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?’ But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself." I agree wholeheartedly with this statement, but acceptance of it requires a rejection of the American national philosophy of pragmatism to a degree that I don't think many are willing to undertake.
2. The idea of "AI literacy" is laughable. Maybe there are specialized and advanced uses of AI for which literacy training is useful at the moment (I admit, that I'm baffled by tutorials for running the latest image generation models, for example, or integrating AI API's, or creating AI "agents") but for 95% of what AI is useful for, the only literacy needed is the common sense not to take its responses to one's queries at face value. This push for AI literacy is like the push to give toddlers iPads so they can develop digital literacy. The fact that the toddler can pick up the iPad and in a few hours can launch apps and manipulate them means that they don't actually need to "learn" it, but that they are designed to be accessible with pretty low barriers to entry.
Thank you for these vital thoughts, Michael. The concept of "technological inevitability" has been on my mind for a long time, and I admit I am torn. Is it truly just a myth or a rhetorical strategy?
It is important to remember that this idea isn't solely propagated by tech evangelists. I’ve recently been revisiting the writings of Werner Heisenberg, which also influenced Arendt. In The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics (1958), there is a crucial passage—one that Arendt herself cites—where he suggests that "maybe one day the many technical devices will be as inevitably a part of man as the shell is a part of the snail." In the same chapter, Heisenberg states that this growing together of humanity and technology appears to have the inevitable character of a "biological process"—which, as such, would be largely beyond our control.
Of course, such an explanation carries the danger of invoking a "higher power" before which we resign and abdicate our responsibility. I simply want to point out that the idea of technological inevitability might be more than just superficial rhetoric.
I work in cancer research at a public, academic research institution. The inevitability, ubiquity, and revered power of machine learning and LLMs to solve our problems--be they in the lab or the administrative office--is very real. I do often feel anesthetized to kindle courage, humility, healthy techno-skepticism, or any kind of resistance.
"Indeed, it is a curious fact that some of the very people who are ostensibly convinced of the inevitability of AI nonetheless lack the confidence you would think accompanied such conviction and instead seem bent on exerting their power and wealth to make certain that AI is imposed on society."
Yes! This reminds me of John Stuart Mill's argument in The Subjection of Women that the only rational basis to exclude women from public life and the professions would be the view that they were naturally superior to men, since if they were inferior (as most men of the time thought) or simply equal in talent to men (as Mill thought was more likely), fair competition would handle the rest.
Likewise, we are not allowed to have AI as simply one tool among many, which, if it proves useful for a task (and not too costly or inefficient to use), could be taken up just for such tasks. Rather, it is being imposed in every aspect of life on the grounds that AI is, categorically, "better", a claim that is all-but-meaningless for a technology.
Your conclusion is spot on, and the first time l’ve seen it so neatly and accurately summarised.
I hope you're right.
I would add that courage may also involve, depending on your circumstances, going against everyone you love: parents family, relatives, friends, mentors and so on. That, I think, is the electric fence for some people I know. I'm not particularly observant but I am reminded of Christ speaking of turning sons against fathers etc.
The manufactured inevitability of TECHNOCRACY has been a running theme my entire life.
I feel a little courage well up every time I hear or read someone else talk about it. Thanks for the reminder. The failure of technocrats due to ignorance of their own blind spots is also inevitable, the only question is when.
Dear L.M.,
While I fully support your call for courage, and most certainly recognise what you are referring to as 'technological inevitability', I feel that your assessment of the 'Borg Complex' only captures the style of direct communication, and misses the symptom that might be the most important means for propagating the phenomena of 'manufactured inevitability': the non-citation of anyone who expresses any alternative perspective.
Babette Babich has written extensively on how the continental tradition in philosophy has been expunged in academia by the analytic tradition through the non-citation and non-hiring of continental philosophers, and the accompanying assimilation (the Borg again...) of continental philosophers into the analytic tradition by converting them (Borg) through analytic assumptions.
The analytic tradition has no means of resistance to your 'technological inevitability'. Its practitioners believe it would be wrong to even get involved. As a sign of this, you will notice that everyone who has written about robot ethics *and attained traction in the public sphere on the topic* has taken a position of political neutrality, and refused to take any kind of principled position on the subject. I have found this maddening. This idea that philosophers are obligated to perform neutral analyses on topics and that they are somehow sullied by taking up a position is beyond frustrating.
On the other hand, I have written from a position inspired by Illich on these topics and got nowhere doing so. I have written papers that do not get read such as "We Can Make Anything, Should We?" (admittedly, in one of those awful collecitons priced in the hundreds of dollars so that only libraries ever buy them). For this one I had to fight tooth and nail to get through peer review, since one reviewer declared it was 'not philosophy' i.e. not analytic philosophy (although unlike Babette, I do not consider myself a continental philosopher because my other languages are too weak.) Likewise, I have written books that do not get read such as The Virtuous Cyborg, my attempt to perform Illich's Tools for Convivality on the design of computer technology, underpinned by a virtue ethics inspired by MacIntyre (although I am not a virtue ethicist as such, for reasons that don't matter to this commentary).
Now writing papers or books that do not get read is hardly unique to me, but I consider it significant that my first book of philosophy, Imaginary Games, saw me being invited onto podcasts and interviewed all over the shop, including at the Edinburgh Festival and How the Light Gets in at Hay-on-Wye. It was so much easier to promote a book that made the arguments for videogames being art (albeit almost all very poor quality art) than anything that asked for reflection upon the effects of technology or the methods of the technological.
The one speaking gig I got on the back of The Virtuous Cyborg was to a Manchester-based group who I would describe as being technological fetishists, and it felt as if they had never even considered the idea of placing limits of technological design for ethical reasons. I'm sure they swiftly forgot everything I said in order to return to gazing longingly into that glorious future, the imaginary jam-factory-of-tomorrow.
And of course, I'm acutely aware that these are merely my own stories. I am convinced that were anyone to desire to investigate, it would be discovered there would be dozens, hundreds, possibly even thousands who have written against technological inevitability one way or another, and simply been silenced through the effortless and fool proof method of non-citation. Of course, this is the fate of academics in general these days - one thing that made making a permanent break with all the universities I was affiliated with in 2021 far easier was my abiding impression of academia as a means of removing the vast majority of intellectuals from public debate.
Please consider the importance of this non-citation factor to the propagation of technological inevitability. I would suggest this is another symptom of Borg Complex, and arguably one of the most important.
Finally, I must apologise for the length of this comment (I have not had time to make it shorter) and express how much I appreciate a new missive from the Convivial Society. You are the only other Illich-influenced Substacker I know, and I always look forward to reading your thoughts.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
I think you’d like Dougald Hine on Substack. There are quite a few Illich admirers out there.
Thanks the tip, Zoe! Greatly appreciated.
You might like the premise of a book I just ordered (haven't read yet) - A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy, available through Verso. From the last sentence of the description:
> As Schuringa concludes, the apparently increasing friendliness of analytic philosophers to rival approaches in philosophy should be understood as a form of colonization; thanks to its hegemonic status, it reformats all it touches in service of its own imperatives, going so far as to colonize decolonial efforts in the discipline.
Thanks Davis! I agree with what Schuringa is saying here - and delighted there are other voices drawing attention to this phenomena.
<<Nonetheless, the techno-utopian future mapped out by today’s richest fools can’t happen, and so it won’t. The Club of Rome once reminded us that there are “limits to growth,” and the fact that we don’t talk about it anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t right. People have stopped talking about climate disruption. I can promise you, the carbon-cascade is still happening. Even if it’s politically inconvenient.
The thing about nature—and I don’t mean some pristine and bucolic phenomenon apart from us, but the iron laws of physics—is that, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t give a damn what we think or want. This is a good thing, if harsh at times, because it means there’s a ground. The old baseball metaphor says, “Nature always bats last.” Being sure of that should be a source of consistency and reliability on the one hand . . . and humility on the other.>>
https://stanleyabner1951gmailcom.substack.com/p/stripe-adventure
Paraphrasing Brecht's Galileo: "And yet, the glaciers still recede..."
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15
Jeez this was good. Thank you.
I skip over the AI search results and won't use it for my writing and I think true intelligence must be embodied by a carbon-based form that evolved over millions of years on the local planet, but the "inevitability" thing has really nagged at me. Couldn't put my finger on it, but you did.
Weizenbaum for the win once again: the computer scientist who writes like he's also been long-enmeshed by ethics and the Humanities. I wish there were more. Jaron Lanier is another.
You've written an essay that is indicative of my experience and had been in my thoughts since AI became "a thing." In my 20-year tenure working in the tech industry, I have experienced the “Luddite” epithet multiple times when I’ve raised concerns about interface designs – the very role I was hired to do. I’ve challenged the unethical use of dark patterns, horribly unusable applications, and unethical products more times than I can remember. Most of the time, my concerns were simply dismissed. I finally left Design and went to Accessibility because companies were forced under threats of lawsuits to fix the applications they mindlessly created.
Those who fling "Luddite!" at people who challenge the unethical implications of an untried and untested technology don't know the history of the Luddite movement. The original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. They were opposed to the *unethical use* of technology. By that accurate historical definition, I am proud to be labelled a Luddite. And innovation acolytes who dismisses those of us who challenge innovation, just because we challenge innovation, are well on their way to being assimilated into "the Borg." Despite the fact that it's generally forgotten, the record of innovation is replete with disastrous consequences. If innovators truly believe in the value of their creations, they should be willing to put them through the necessary steps of rigorous testing and ethical considerations. But they don't. "Silicon Valley" is blinded by it's own ambitions to "change the world" (not to mention, money), fueled by a toddler's level of impatience, while charging forth with ridiculous mantras like "move fast and break things," and "fake it until you make it, and "disrupt!" The Theranos debacle, which should have been a wake up call to the industry, has simply been ignored.
I hope that you keep this essay publicly available. Because I plan to share it.
I recently became interested in the survival of the epithet 'Luddite': its cultural stickability, as it were. I wrote a very long essay describing the historical moment in which Ned Ludd— well, 'was born' isn’t quite right— 'came into being'?
My conclusion was that considering Ludd was / is a mythological figure, we re-summon him every time we say his name, so even people who use the term 'Luddite' as an insult are thereby keeping the name of Ludd alive, thus making Luddism ever more energetically powerful.
Indeed. Not many people know about the historical context of the Luddites. The Smithsonian published an article on it.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/
Coincidentally, I was just looking over some highlights from Technopoly and this closely related excerpt from Postman:
"A resistance fighter understands that technology must
never be accepted as part of the natural order of things,
that every technology-from an IQ test to an automobile
to a television set to a computeris a product of a
particular economic and political context and carries with
it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may
not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny,
criticism, and control. In short, a technological resistance
fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance
from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat
strange, never inevitable, never natural."
Postman was so very prescient ...
When health care switched from paper charts to electronic medical records in the US, clinicians and health systems received incentives by meeting "meaningful use standards" (e.g., are you electronically prescribing? are you electronically documenting certain things? etc). Decades after the switch, we have no such carrots now. There are only disincentives for not using the record the way various stakeholders want you to.
Now, in a perfect example of technopoly and fitting well with what you call manufactured inevitability, clinicians are adopting AI ambient scribes at perhaps a much more rapid rate, and certainly more voluntarily, than we ever adopted EMRs. These promise to off-load the burden of documentation to AI, something clinicians loathe. But what clinicians fail to see is this will increase surveillance and micro-management of the clinical encounter by an order of magnitude. https://familymeetingnotes.substack.com/p/where-the-walls-listen
This is also happening to some degree even in the pharmaceutical space. Anti-amyloid therapies for Alzheimer's dementia offer paltry benefits, if you can even call them that, and serious risks and burdens. But as advocacy groups supported them and as companies pushed them through FDA approval, clinicians and health systems were left with the dilemma: should they even offer to prescribe these, knowing the benefits won't outweigh the burdens in the vast majority of cases? The resistance: patients and caregivers want them, they will demand them, and you need to be prepared to discuss and offer them.
For many years I worked with a large community that thought deeply about technology. Highly skeptical of the benefits, sub-groups within the whole would each set their own rules regarding what would be allowed. Movement was allowed between the groups…but interestingly, very often new groups would form with more conservative standards. From the outside it looked chaotic, random and hypocritical….until you witnessed inner logic.
One of my greatest joys was time with their children. Open, curious, attentive, uncynical and playful.
I saw first hand that the technology we use is our choice. Most of us do not choose wisely, and the sunk cost fallacy makes it difficult to turn back after that first taste
.
"AI won't replace you, but someone who knows how to use AI will" is manufacturing inevitably on top of a fundamental contradiction, given that the whispered promise of AI is that it will soon become smarter than we are now.
So glad you're back!
Only slight disagreement: not sure if individual acts of courage alone will add up to much. I think there needs to be collective action. I see lots of my colleagues reluctantly give in to the 'inevitably' when policy changes by the admin would make it easier for them to follow what they believe in (i.e. acting together to influence policy would make demanding and perhaps somewhat unrealistic acts of individual courage less necessary).
And this chills me to the bone. My wife and I often joke-not-joke that “this is not the internet we wanted”. Thanks (and commenters too) for the insights.
I like to joke that I liked the Internet before it sold out and went mainstream
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A distillation of my comments to Brookeshelves on this matter:
There's not enough electricity: generation, transmission, transformers or copper; there's not enough groundwater for cooling; there's not enough capital to bring it about; and, per Brooke, there's also just not enough words to feed ('train') the machine to 'bring' AGI into 'being'.
I think that theology writer Andy Crouch may have called this for what it is: "What Tech wants is what Mammon wants..."
Me? This Luddite has firewood to split and stack today, that I may be warmed in part from my own efforts and the deadfall from my own hilltop.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cgbrooke/p/the-scarcity-of-writing?r=wo0if&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
There is a line in a song about a train: "... its coming round the bend". "I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when".
Energy and materials, LTG, and the all-too-real arms race? Upload your psche, man: transform a planet, a bracelet on your leg... a no-brainer.
Two thoughts:
1. "‘We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?’ But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself." I agree wholeheartedly with this statement, but acceptance of it requires a rejection of the American national philosophy of pragmatism to a degree that I don't think many are willing to undertake.
2. The idea of "AI literacy" is laughable. Maybe there are specialized and advanced uses of AI for which literacy training is useful at the moment (I admit, that I'm baffled by tutorials for running the latest image generation models, for example, or integrating AI API's, or creating AI "agents") but for 95% of what AI is useful for, the only literacy needed is the common sense not to take its responses to one's queries at face value. This push for AI literacy is like the push to give toddlers iPads so they can develop digital literacy. The fact that the toddler can pick up the iPad and in a few hours can launch apps and manipulate them means that they don't actually need to "learn" it, but that they are designed to be accessible with pretty low barriers to entry.
Thank you for these vital thoughts, Michael. The concept of "technological inevitability" has been on my mind for a long time, and I admit I am torn. Is it truly just a myth or a rhetorical strategy?
It is important to remember that this idea isn't solely propagated by tech evangelists. I’ve recently been revisiting the writings of Werner Heisenberg, which also influenced Arendt. In The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics (1958), there is a crucial passage—one that Arendt herself cites—where he suggests that "maybe one day the many technical devices will be as inevitably a part of man as the shell is a part of the snail." In the same chapter, Heisenberg states that this growing together of humanity and technology appears to have the inevitable character of a "biological process"—which, as such, would be largely beyond our control.
Of course, such an explanation carries the danger of invoking a "higher power" before which we resign and abdicate our responsibility. I simply want to point out that the idea of technological inevitability might be more than just superficial rhetoric.
I work in cancer research at a public, academic research institution. The inevitability, ubiquity, and revered power of machine learning and LLMs to solve our problems--be they in the lab or the administrative office--is very real. I do often feel anesthetized to kindle courage, humility, healthy techno-skepticism, or any kind of resistance.