Tag: technology

friction

The point of any technology or tool is the reduction of friction. Friction is more than the physical process by which an object encounters a force that slows its momentum. Friction is any force in our lives that slows us down, makes things more difficult, or provides resistance to our best efforts to move faster or more efficiently. We have fetishized the process of removing friction. The world has come to mirror the beliefs of capitalism, to believe than any barriers to movement and progress are bad, and that we must eliminate all frictions as quickly as we can, that we have a moral imperative to do so. Technology mirrors this drive. Technology no longer serves to make human life simply more fulfilling, but as something that can reduce all friction in our life, to maximize our leisure and our ease at every turn.

We need a return of friction to our lives. We need a reminder that slow, hard work is good for us, and may be a good in and of itself. Friction is a reminder that we are mortal, something we spend our lives trying to forget.

Romand Coles describes radical democracy as a process of doing and undoing. He envisions a political process that checks itself. This is a form of friction, over and against technocracy, bureaucracy, and the politics of the strong man who can fix it all for us. Democracy is messing, inefficient, halting. It achieves progress in starts and stops; sometimes, its two steps back for every three forward. But that friction is good, contrary to the thinking of many across the political spectrum today. Many are overly concerned with the outcomes of our political system, and less with the process of democracy for democracy’s sake. Radical democracy is a political process of constant self-criticism and undermining, not in favor of some particular outcome, but in order to ensure a turning of the soil, so that the voices at the bottom are consistently brought back to the top, to voice. This democratic friction ensures things don’t move so swiftly or efficiently that regular people get swept under the feet of Progress or Utopia.

This kind of democratic friction is also something that should be desirious for any Christian who cares about the society we live in. All systems of government and power – even democracy – are part of the Powers and Principalities Paul talks about. They are systems that have good intentions, yes, but are inherently systems that entrench sin, injustice, and violence, because of their roots in fallen human nature and the endeavors that nature pursues. Thus, any friction that slows down forward momentum and allows time for breathing, for the voices in the wilderness to cry out in the face of injustice and death, is a good and desirable thing. As Christians, we should be very careful to overly idenitfy our faith with the god of Progress, no matter how just that progress may look, because it has its origins in our limited human nature.

Additionally, any progress powered by the state is a progress being powered by violence, because the state is the only “legitimate” wielder of violence in our modern liberal order. Violence, in any and all of its forms, is antithetical to Christianity, and results achieved with the power of violence – whatever form that violence takes – should be viewed askance.

All of this is just a way of saying: lean into the friction, whether it be the friction of an older technology, or an inefficient process, or a check and balance in our politics. Friction is good.

Buy me a coffee

Defining my AI alarm

Freddie DeBoer has a magisterially long piece about AI on his newsletter this week, which is really worth pouring a drink and sitting down to read. In it, after a compelling walk through the intellectual and cultural hubris of the 19th century, and the subsequent disillusions of the 20th, he turns to a discussion of the limitations of AI, driven as they are by the inevitable limitations of humanity. AI, despite the promises of its proponents, is probably not going to be the most disruptive force since fire was discovered. And its not going to be so because biological life is infinitely complex, and the idea that we can somehow create processors and chips and servers that can even come close to replicating them is on par with that Victorian hubris. Here is a really important paragraph from this part of the essay:

In Nicaragua, in the 1980s, a few hundred deaf children in government schools developed Nicaraguan sign language. Against the will of the adults who supervised them, they created a new language, despite the fact that they were all linguistically deprived, most came from poor backgrounds, and some had developmental and cognitive disabilities. A human grammar is an impossibly complex system, to the point that one could argue that we’ve never fully mapped any. And yet these children spontaneously generated a functioning human grammar. That is the power of the human brain, and it’s that power that AI advocates routinely dismiss – that they have to dismiss, are bent on dismissing. To acknowledge that power would make them seem less godlike, which appears to me to be the point of all of this.

The human desire to be like God, or even be God. AI is just Babel, endlessly replaying down through history.

Anyways, read Freddie for more in that vein. I want to focus on something else. I’ve written here fairly recently on AI and my own pessimism and even alarm about this new use of technology. What I want to do is reiterate the nature of my AI alarm, in order that I not be misunderstood. This is important because of how Freddie describes many of the loudest voices of AI alarm that are out there. Here he is again:

Talk of AI has developed in two superficially-opposed but deeply complementary directions: utopianism and apocalypticism. AI will speed us to a world without hunger, want, and loneliness; AI will take control of the machines and (for some reason) order them to massacre its creators.

(…)

That, I am convinced, lies at the heart of the AI debate – the tacit but intense desire to escape now. What both those predicting utopia and those predicting apocalypse are absolutely certain of is that the arrival of these systems, what they take to be the dawn of the AI era, means now is over. They are, above and beyond all things, millenarians.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/ai-or-the-eternal-recurrence-of-hubris

I am not an AI millenarian. My brand of alarm is much more mundane than that, at least in the sense of Great Events. I dislike AI – in the form of the large language models and the like being developed and marketed right now – because I believe they are dehumanizing and destructive to cultural goods. I don’t worry about ChatGPT taking over the world and killing all humans. That’s far from anything I think possible, for the same reasons Freddie lays out. We don’t need AI in order for those fears to become real; haven’t any of us paid attention to history:

Everything that AI doomers say that artificial intelligence will do is something that human beings could attempt to do now. They say AI will launch the nukes, but the nukes have been sitting in siloes for decades, and no human has penetrated the walls of circuitry and humanity that guard them. They say AI will craft deadly viruses, despite the fact that gain-of-function research involves many processes that have never been automated, and that these viruses will devastate humanity, despite the fact that the immense Covid-19 pandemic has not killed even a single percentage point of the human population. They say that AI will take control of the robot army we will supposedly build, apparently and senselessly with no failsafes at all, despite the fact that even the most advanced robots extant will frequently be foiled by minor objects in their path and we can’t even build reliable self-driving cars. They say that we will see a rise of the machines, like in Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, so that perhaps you will one day be killed by an aggressive juicer, despite the fact that these are children’s stories, told for children.

No, I just worry that the growth of AI will perpetuate the neuroses and dangers of much of our modern technoculture. AI will perpetuate loneliness. It will continue the devaluation of the creative arts, of the humanities, of original ideas. It will become another tool of wealth inequality and economic destructiveness. Like my recent essay flagged, it is another attempt by humanity to escape all frictions. It will be another technology that promises us the moon and leave the vast majority of us holding the bag while a few get richer and more powerful. In the words of Freddie, it will further the modern propensity to seek “to avoid human.” It is an idol, in the same sense as the Golden Calf that Moses raged against. It promises what it cannot deliver, and we are so desperate to hear it that we forget how to be human.

I wrote this back in the spring:

All the while, people who are being promised a bright, AI-driven future will instead get more loneliness, more monetization of our attention, and less meaningful connection. It’s already well-acknowledged that Big Tech has used the levers of addiction to make the gains they have made in our lives; this knowledge will surely be put to use in figuring out how to addict us to AI in the hopes of extracting a few more pennies from the areas of our lives that have so far escaped their pocketbooks.

Freddie states it like this: “The bitter irony of the digital era has been that technologies that bring us communicatively closer have increased rather than decreased feelings of alienation and social breakdown.” He’s right. And this is what I fear from AI. That it will continue us down the path of despair and alienation and cynicism and apathy we are traveling. That’s a pretty destructive thing to unleash on ourselves. That’s what I fear.

not a luddite

One final note on all my pessimism about technology recently: I don’t want to give the wrong idea. I’m not anti-technology. I don’t walk around with a flip phone, I do own a television with subscriptions to all the major streamers, I play XBox often (current gaming: FI 2022), I have a lot of cultural content I love and consume regularly (Star Wars, sports, prestige television.) I am not against creature comforts, and I do love an evening on the couch with a good show or a basketball game.

The danger I want to warn against is the seeming demand on our lives to let our technologies dictate the shape of our lives, and the growing monetization of every aspect of our lives. As noted here before, I am a leftist with a strong critique of modern capitalism. I’m not an out and out socialist; instead, I reject totalizing ideology that tries to fit humanity and culture into a mold, and the dominant ideology in our world today is global techno-capitalism.