In this post, I plan to look back at other technological changes to get hints for what a wise use of AI might require of us as humans. I don’t know how truly useful or transformative AI will be. But assuming it will become as normal for the under 20s as using the internet and smart phones are for Millennials, we may spot likely problems and healthy responses from past changes. This post is very much exploratory, and I’d welcome responses from people with more insight into AI.
1) Food production technology
200 years ago, many people struggled to get enough food to live, and famines that caused widespread death were common. Food production technology (tractors, breeding, chemicals, refrigeration etc) mean that we can now easily produce enough food for everyone in the world. (Easy in the sense that only a small percentage of the population need to work on food production, and the risk of ordinary people in peaceful countries starving to death is basically zero. Obviously many people are still working very hard in farming and the supporting industries.) Only areas with ongoing violent conflict suffer severe famine now.
Before this development, one of the most important requirements for human individuals was the ability to keep going with insufficient food for periods of time. If you could not work hard for several months without ideal nutrition, you would probably die young, and your children would probably die. Read The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder to get a sense of what life was like in the late 19th century in America. Toughness, the ability to keep going while hungry, was an essential, and so society valued this toughness in its members. It was also useful if when there was plenty of food you could store it (i.e. put on weight) so that when the lean times came you had a reserve of energy.
But once food became truly plentiful and cheap, which is arguably only in the last 60 years, new problems emerged. Now, no one needed to go to work hungry. But you could easily overeat and become overweight. You could eat unhealthily, eating sugar, while lacking protein or vitamins. Some people had done this in the past- the rich had often been overweight. But now this is a mainstream problem.
It would be foolish to go to an island and try to farm the old way, so that the periodic famines kept people from the modern problems. A new virtue is needed to live well with a new abundance. Not toughness to endure an enforced lack. But self-control to restrain an overeating. Bodies that naturally refuse to overeat are now an advantage rather than a disadvantage. But even for those without that advantage, the way to benefit from modern abundance is to learn to say no to what the body desires (more and more delicious food) and yes to limits in amount. To make choices for quality of food rather than simply taste and volume.
Interestingly, the common historic Christian practice of fasting (not eating breakfast or lunch) two days a week might well be a helpful way to regulate appetite.
2) Internal Combustion Engine
The internal combustion engine is an amazing technology. It was preceded by the steam engine, itself a revolutionary advance. And it may end up being replaced by electric motors. But the petroleum powered engine converts fuel into useful power, into work done, in a way that would have seemed miraculous 200 years ago. It is part of the food technology revolution. It enables mining and factories on a huge scale. It transforms household chores like heating water, cooking, and washing clothes. It has also transformed transport (foot, horse, sailing ship go to car and plane).
Before the internal combustion engine, human physical strength and human endurance were vital for productivity and life. The average person would walk many miles a day- to work, to market, to school, to church, to friends. The rich would ride a horse or carriage. But the average person was walking many miles. Then most work involved physical strength and energy. Not only blacksmiths and lumberjacks. But laundry, home heating, water collection, cooking, construction, farming, and transport. Physical strength and the character to endure in physically hard work through tiredness and discomfort was vital for society.
The internal combustion engine (and other industrial revolution inventions) enabled people to use much less personal strength and energy. It is possibly to live in a home with minimal physical labour, thanks to gas powered heating, electrical lights, and a washing machine and vacuum cleaner. It is possible to drive from your front door to a workplace, and then spend your day sitting down working at a computer. Even those doing farming or construction might spend most of the day in an air conditioned cab, doing work that would previously have taken 100 men without breaking a sweat.
The problem is that without exercise, we tend to become overweight (see above) but also lack of exercise makes our muscles flabby, our bones more fragile Inactivity probably also makes our mental health worse.
So once again, the “excess” of strength and energy provided by a technological change causes new problems. And yet simply returning to a pre-industrial society is not really an option for the vast majority of people. Those who still do genuinely physically demanding work often suffer long term health issues, and can rarely continue the work through to modern retirement age.
But it seems that there is something about not maxing out the potential benefit that is needed to use a technology well. That might be deliberately choosing not to use every energy saving device- walking or cycling to work rather than driving, and so spending time and energy each day that you could replace with a motor, because it is good for your physical health. By building it into daily routines, it becomes easy to keep using a moderate amount of physical strength and energy. Another option might be using tech to take away the daily strain, but then deliberately doing something every day that is good exercise- swimming, running, martial arts, team sports. This has the advantage of choosing forms of physical exercise that you find most fun or satisfying.
Either way, there is a pattern that seems suggestive. Using the new abundance because it is good. Limiting some form of abundance offered because the problem is now “too much” rather than “too little”. Self control and self discipline now more valuable than just toughness to endure. Exercise is now about personal wellbeing rather than productivity.
3) Music recording and photography
Until the invention of the gramophone and the photograph, music and art required musicians and artists. If you wanted music, you either had to make it yourself or gather with others to listen to music. High quality music generally required paying a musician. Likewise, art for walls needed to be painted by an artist, even if it was a copy of another work.
But the gramophone and photograph (and all the improvements in reproducing pictures and music since) changed that radically. Now everyone can listen to the best performances by the best musicians. They can listen 24/7 by themselves. They can surround themselves with art masterpieces.
The result is that we have access to vastly more music and art, at a higher quality. But the cost is that the middle level of production (competent but not outstanding musicians and artists) find it harder to make a living.
A more widespread problem is that many people have given up on producing any art or music because they cannot compare with the excellence of the recorded versions. That leads over time to a reduced appreciation of true excellence, and a noisy background (aural and visual) that can amplify junk. There is also a loss of skills and local communal connection.
There continue to be subcultures of musical and/or artistic endeavour at more local levels. I don’t know how to encourage that, but would like to move towards more space for people I know to play music live or use their artwork to adorn shared spaces.
4) Internet/ Smart Phone
The internet and smart phone revolution is one that happened in my teens/twenties, and so I have seen the transformation in my lifetime. No doubt the printing press had similar revolutionary effects. But I grew up in the print era. So I knew that there were libraries with books in. Reading widely to gain general knowledge, and knowing how to find the book with the answer you were looking for, were both vital skills. So too was map reading and memorisation. Many specialised forms of information required writing to or ringing a broker, like a travel agent. Other forms of information required access to specialised libraries or archives. You could connect with other people by telephone call or letter, but outside of your physical community network, meeting others with your interest probably involved going to an event. International calls were hideously expensive. Once you had arranged to meet a friend in town, you had to go, or leave them waiting awkwardly on their own for half an hour, then to walk 30 minutes home.
With the internet and smart phone, all that information was now available in moments. You could find the best route to a new city, what diseases had a particular symptom, and when the seven years war was fought. In seconds. Wherever you were. You could search for flights or insurance from home, without talking to a broker. You could find a forum with other people interested in sweet peas or Luna Lovegood. You could find a video telling you how to change your car front bulb. You could keep in touch with friends overseas initially with email, then chats and video calls. Group chats enabled quick responses and sharing of photos or advice.
The problem is how to deal with an abundance of information and connection. The abundance of information can make us slow to actually remember things. Worse, we can lack the wisdom to discern which information to trust. The speed of communication can make us feel “always on call”, but also sometimes lack depth of connection. Social media has particularly become addictive, fostered unhelpful comparisons and enabled conspiracy theories to spread. This abundance of information and connection creates new problems that we (millennials) are still learning how to handle.
So it seems that we can neither ignore the connections and information of the internet. Nor can we simply fully embrace it. Instead, we need self-control to limit it, and wisdom, to know how best to use it. We need real world community where we don’t use phones and the internet. We need to have times we don’t connect online. We need to limit the “junk food” quick information of the internet with slow quality input of deeper reading, listening to music, making art, connecting to nature, or playing in person games. We need to learn how to discern what is reliable and useful online resource, and what is wasteful, untrue, or addictive. That learning needs both online familiarity and offline real world grounding. We might need to sometimes choose the slower and less convenient real world option to keep skills and discernment that might otherwise wither. Deliberately taking some journeys without a satnav, or writing a card to post to a friend instead of messaging are a couple of examples. Reading deeply into an area, writing some things out by hand, even perhaps memorising poems and Scripture, are all ways of keeping the mind working in deeper ways that are likely to help avoid the internet slop from overwhelming the mind.
So what about AI?
If the internet offers information and connection, I think AI offers something more like a conversation partner and assistant. It not only offers information but makes connections between different things and even weighs their relevance. It might be able to handle the sorts of bureaucratic tasks that seem to waste so much time, remind us of things we might have forgotten or overlooked, and help us clarify our own thoughts in conversation with it before sharing a more complete version with others. We may look back at how much time was wasted on paperwork and mindless admin tasks with amazement at how wasteful it all was.
But we may also find ourselves in all sorts of trouble. Not because AI is bad, but because we are not good at handling abundance. And a conversation partner who is always there without any other agenda, and who is calibrated to suit us perfectly, might cause our real relational skills to atrophy. Over reliance on AI may lead to an inability to discern the sources or reliability of information. The boring tasks that AI takes on may turn out to be the tasks that enable us to spot connections and process information.
So based on food tech, the internal combustion engine, and the internet and smart phones, what principles are likely to be helpful guides for us? (See an earlier thought on this here: The Cloister, the Forum and the Starship – Jots and Scribbles)
1) We probably will need to use it because it will be so productive and helpful. People who don’t use google maps or messaging apps are really missing out, and the same is likely to be true of AI.
2) We probably will need to limit its use to guard our own humanity and our human relationships. Full AI all the time, especially if in something wearable (Google Glasses?) or implanted, is likely to make us slaves to the AI and diminish our ability to relate well to other people.
3) Sabbath rest and fasting from tech is probably going to become a vital discipline
4) Having areas of life or hobbies which are deliberately non-tech, non-AI will probably be useful to keep skills of learning and doing that are not totally AI dependent.
5) Real deep knowledge and reading of areas will help to assess the reliability of AIs as sources of information.
6) Memorisation and writing things out by hand may become training and part of education again to keep certain ways of thinking and using the human brain healthy.
None of this is written as an expert in AI. I have just begun dabbling in it. If you have thoughts on how AI will shape us, or how we might respond healthily, do comment.
Jots and Scribbles 