Tag: technology

drawing together the threads on AI

I did some writing back in March about AI, as that tool came to dominate the national conversation and begin seeping into our lives more fully. The rise of AI really galvanized my thinking and focused my mind around a variety of ideas that had been floating around in my head. I reacted at first with intense pessimism, which has cooled slightly (I even found some good applications for Large Language Model tools in the classroom!), but, all-in-all, that is the mood the growth of AI has left me with: pessimism about the future it is ushering in, and how humanity will react to and integrate with this new tool. In an ideal world, AI would be introduced into our world slowly, with a lot of oversight and conversation. This conversation would be led by regular people, by community interests, by civil society, and by ethicists and religious leaders. We would be thinking long and hard about what we want AI to do, and how we want to get there, and we would be aware of the dangers cropping up left and right.

Instead, as expected (can you imagine any other way it would really be?), AI is being foisted upon by the worst actors out there: global tech companies, venture capital and financial interests, and techno-utopists driven by freshman-level understandings of ethics and utilitarian commitments where humanity takes a backseat to progress. AI will inevitably be wielded to make money for the global elite, billionaires who can’t imagine enough digits in their bank accounts, and who see their fellow humans as means to the ends of enrichment.

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.

I wanted to use this post to draw together some of these threads that have been running through my writing and rattling around in my brain recently. All of this pessimism about AI is intimately connected to my theological commitments, and my political and social ones as well. The primacy of human dignity, the direction of human attention towards the ultimate Good that is God, the importance of community and connection, the need in a liberal and capitalist world to focus on the lives of regular, everyday people in our politics: no matter which lens I look through right now, all of them encourage skepticism towards the growth of technology and the increasing hold it has on our lives. And that hold is driven by global corporations and moneyed interests, all of whom view the whole world as one giant market from which they can extract from the rest of us wealth and power and obeisance. My commitments all demand that I resist this, and that I use the tools at my finger tips – my words, my ideas, and my voice – to push back and fight against this.

I am writing this today from outside, in my backyard, where the Oklahoma wind is swirling around me, and summer is in full swing. And it reminds me: this is what lasts. AI hasn’t got shit on the wind, on the warm sun, on the smell of soil and flowers, on the birds chirping as they perch on the string of lights hanging around our back porch. The moneyed interests of the world – they are all going to get old, and confront mortality, and when we are all gone, this will all remain. The rat race everyone is caught up in – I’ll let others run it, because I have compost to turn over and weeds to pull. You can’t put that on a microprocessor, and I can’t get it delivered to my pocket. How sad for those who are trying to. They think I’m going to miss out if I don’t use AI; boy are they mistaken.

I really am pretty pessimistic about the state of our culture, and the power of technology in our lives. But it just takes a few minutes away from that bubble, out under the blue sky, or in the pages of a book, at the tip of my favorite ink pen, or in the words of this morning’s daily prayers, to find where my optimism lies, to remember the hope of the world and to be reminded about who has the final victory. There’s a task for you: ask ChatGPT to give you hope. It’s answer will be crafted to please you – but it’ll still be false. Hope is out here.

“We become just by the practice of just actions”

Aristotle and Aquinas rightly argued that the virtues are acquired through habituation and, in particular for Aquinas, the habituation of the passions. The habits we acquire necessary to make us not only do what justice requires but to become just in the doing are complex responses learned over time. Therefore to become just means acting as the just act; but you cannot become just by slavishly imitating what the just do. Rather, you must feel what the just feel when they act justly. The virtue, therefore, can only be acquired through our actions if what we do is not different from what we are. The virtues can be learned through doing, but the “doing” cannot be a product separate from the agent. Aristotle observes, “men become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing harp. Similarly, we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.”

Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, page 156.

I really like this explication of acquiring the virtues from Hauerwas, because I think it captures the a lot of the problems inherent to progressive justice-obsessed spaces online. A lot of progressive political life is lived on social media, whether that be Twitter, Facebook, or more recently, TikTok. Clearly, among these folks, there is a yearning for justice, and an ever present call for action and to “do better” at a personal level. These calls come paired with the irony-laced mockery of political foes, showcasing the contempt those foes are held in. These two things are often inseparable: a desire for a more just, loving and inclusive world, and an attitude of derision for those not as committed to such a vision.

But, as Hauerwas reminds us, Aristotle and Aquinas taught us that the doing of virtuous deeds cannot be separated from a character of virtue. And the making of such character cannot be done by oneself; it requires a community, the real presence of other people, who hold us accountable and teach us what it means to have character, who show us the virtues required for such a life, in action. In turn, those people learned from others before them, on and on down through the ages, from those who first learned them. If we want a better world for everyone, then we cannot expect it to be forged amongst a disparate collection of atomized individuals who have only a vision of the world shaped by the demands of Progress. No, it takes people trained and practiced to identify the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, not just to understand them, but to feel those things deep in their soul. As Hauerwas says above, its not about a pale imitation of a certain way of life; its a Knowing deep in the soul, a Knowing that can only be given as a sort of Grace, that will really change the world in any real way.

And if that isn’t a compelling case for the importance of the church, over and against the wasteland that is the modern technoculture, then I don’t know what else is.

Social media and the death of friendship

I posted this last week on my person Facebook page, but I wanted to share it here as well. Enjoy.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about friendship and the role it plays in the modern millennial techno-culture that I find myself inhabiting. There is a real tendency among people in my demographic – especially among those you find online tweeting and creating meme culture – to relish in the difficulty of creating and maintaining friendships, and an attendant valorizing of the “self care” of saying no to those who want to make plans. There seems to be real comedy to be found in the last minute breaking of plans and turning down attempts at connection. I’ve come to think of this as a phenomenon called “ironized introversion”, in which it becomes cool to radically embrace the identity of introverted- to the point of refusing to interact in an embodied way with people when it is not required by work or family obligations (and even those are becoming more and more optional for many.) Social life becomes a purely digital and online endeavor, where the other avatars and accounts on social media become more “real” than anything else about people. 

I know I sound like “old guy yelling at technology” here, but I’m really not meaning to. Because I do sympathize; I am an introvert, very much so, although I like to embrace the hubris of thinking I’m a real introvert, and not one for the social credit it seems to bring nowadays. Human interaction wears me out; an evening with friends requires about three times as much isolation afterwards to recover energy. So I get it, I really do.

At the same time, I do work hard to cultivate real, embodied friendships, in the “meatspace” and not only the digital one. I spent the majority of the last two years off social media by and large, and one of my fears in doing so was that I would lose a whole host of meaningful relationships with people who I am “friends” with here. But, in fact, I found that what it forced of me instead was intentionality and active cultivation in my building and maintaining friendships. Sure, the number of people I regularly interacted with in some way went down in absolute terms. But I also became vitally aware of my actual, important friendships, and they really flourished over the last couple of years in a way that I hadn’t really experienced since high school probably (school life is, after all, probably the peak for many people’s experience of real friendship.) Now, these weren’t all free of technology. The closest friendships I built were still over distance, maintained by and large via Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls and text chains. But notice the intentionality found even in that. We made regular, weekly plans to talk, face to face as we could. We hold each other accountable to these check-ins. And, when we could this summer, we all came together for a few days of real time together, time that I look back on already as one of the highlights of the year for me.

So, it really bugs me, the attitude contained in this tweet, that I see so often around me. Friendship is really hard. It’s risky. It’s messy. It can be exhausting. It involved real flawed human beings, so the likelihood you are gonna get hurt at some point is high. I get that. But there is also nothing like it. Friendship – real, honest to goodness friendship, with other physical human beings – is amazing and life-giving and vital to being a whole human being. Family is great, but there is nothing like real friends who are there and present and choose to love you and spend time with you.

Friendship is an embodied thing. It requires proximity and effort and intimacy and vulnerability. And it is a vital feature of the Good and Virtuous Life, for everyone. Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas all teach us this, that you cannot be fully human without the presence of others, without the love of friendship. Yeah, making plans is hard, and leaving the comfort and safety of home can be a lot, especially after a full week of work and obligations. But real friendship is necessary. Other human beings are not consumables or commodities, and they aren’t the stuff of memes and social media irony. To relegate friendship to the digital world and spend a lot of time laughing at your own ability to turn down other people’s attempts at relationship building is to make means of those around you, of which there is no greater sin we can commit against one another. 

So, make plans. Go out. Risk yourself. Court exhaustion. Cull your friends list. Be a friend, a real, flesh and blood friend.