Struggling To Stay Human
A free A.I. facility called ‘Chat GPT’ is now online. ‘Chat’ – because you can talk to it and ‘GPT’ for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’ because you can use it to generate a lot of amazing stuff such as pictures or songs in the style of your favourite artist, legal contracts and other formal documents, and even scripts and films. If you haven’t heard of it, here is a clip showcasing its use. Chat GPT is presented as the democratisation of Artificial Intelligence, and in many ways it is. The facility became available in November and no doubt by now millions of its creations have been spun out through cyberspace.
Although there is much speculation about what this miraculous piece of technology can create, little attention is being paid to what advanced technology actually represents. Maybe it’s deemed pointless to enter into philosophical discussion about the significance of our technological dependency. It certainly is delusional to believe that there is some collective ‘we’ out there able to control its development. But I think it worthwhile revisiting some of the philosophical works that foresaw our technological capture. If only to consider what those thinkers imagined might be our future.
Martin Heidegger’s clearest pronouncement on technology – or ‘technicity’ as he called it, is probably the following, contained in ‘Discourse on Thinking’, published in 1959, “No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology… those forces have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.” He returned to the theme in his final ‘Only a God can Save us’ interview, which was published posthumously in 1976, advising that the only response we can make to the encroaching domination of the ‘un-thought’, which is how he characterised the essence of technology, is to attempt to think what it is and what it represents. According to Heidegger, only by making an effort to think through the reality of what technology actually is can anything be effected.
In 1964 Neo-Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, a former student of Heidegger’s, published ‘One Dimensional Man’ which paints a dim view of our ability to attain the kind of thinking Heidegger deemed necessary. Marcuse, who left Nazi Germany for America in 1935, was pessimistic because he had seen how everyday language had been narrowed and shaped to fit a mechanistic imperative, which in turn had diminished our capacity for any form of reflection or critical thought. In Marcuse’s parlance, we have been reduced to ‘one-dimensional’ beings merely functioning in a society that has become entirely determined by quantitative criteria. Qualities that cannot be measured or turned to operational use, that relate to our experience of the world, have simply been discarded, leading to the impoverishment of both our social environment and our public discourse. In short, life has shrunk. And the wonders and mysteries of existence that occupied the human mind for millennia are no longer contemplated. Instead, that space has been given over to the promise of technological augmentation, as transhumanism has replaced transcendence as the imagined destiny of human thinghood.
According to Marcuse, not only has the inner citadel of our private world been breached but we have also adopted the functional language of the occupying power. In the few decades since Marcuse wrote, what has developed from this process is nothing less than a standardised homogenous culture, as scripted and recorded conversations, actual observers, and even digital eavesdroppers, have all become normal aspects of everyday life. Overseeing our existence, like aspects of some spectral presence, corralling us all into speaking with a single voice, which is entirely appropriate because what our utterances are being coalesced into is a singular organism or mass. ‘Mimesis’ –or mimicry – is the word Marcuse uses to describe how we have been completely taken over by functional language to the extent that we now claim societal goals as our own. Not only have we allowed this superficial and distracting agenda to take over most of our waking hours, but we’ve also allowed it to infect us with a false normative framework which means that any thinking stragglers out there who reject this artificial construction are deemed not just wrong but immoral. Marcuse is not saying that we all necessarily think in a function-oriented way, but insists that functional thinking is what now animates society and orchestrates our lives. And that beneath that “superficial dynamism lies a thoroughly static system of life.”
If doubts were harboured about Marcuse’s thesis, I would suggest that events over the last couple of years have knocked them on the head. As it is precisely mass identification with the technological agenda that has wreaked so much damage on the social fabric, what remains of it. I’m sure many are familiar with psychologist, Mattias Desmet’s theory of ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’, through which he attempts to explain why so much of the populace went along with state propaganda concerning the pandemic. Desmet’s analysis focuses on particular societal weaknesses, such as ‘free-floating anxiety’, and a ‘lack of social bonds or societal connections’ that left many people prone to state-nudging. However, the main distinction between Desmet’s vision and Marcuse’s is that Desmet’s theory is grounded in psychology and presumes that the tears in the social fabric can be repaired, whereas Marcuse’s determination is ontological which means that what he is describing is the irreparable new reality.
It seems to me that Marcuse has identified the deeper reality. However, beyond attributing notions of false consciousness to large swathes of the populace, any analysis of that ontological realisation is not possible within Marxist ideology. The difficulty is that the philosophical insights necessary to engage with that finding belong to the language of metaphysics which was disparaged long ago. Aristotle’s ‘Queen of the sciences’, is now regarded as little more than an outmoded artefact of religion. I imagine this was the reason French philosopher and former Marxist, Jacques Ellul, became a Christian. Because in order to make meaningful observations about the world, it is necessary to have an appreciation of human nature that demands something more significant than the current diluted humanism. It has always struck me as odd that in a secular society that volubly aligns itself with humanistic values such as agency, autonomy, and respect for human dignity, so many people seem inured to the loss of their freedom. I suspect that’s because humanism is unable to offer any meaningful vision for the fulfillment of human potential beyond the goals of the techno-social machine, which is why people are so easily fed into it.
Like Heidegger, Ellul recognised technology as a sociological phenomenon. This seems to me to be a most important realisation. Because technology is not something alien to us; it is what we have produced from out of ourselves. Though more like a by-product than a birth, I’d suggest. As Ellul says in the opening sentence of ‘The Technological Society’ written in 1967, “No social, human or spiritual fact is so important as the fact of technique in the modern world. And yet no subject is so little understood”. He didn’t see his writings as oppositional. Rather, he regarded himself simply as a witness, testifying to how contemporary culture was creating new myths to ease the populace into technological dependence. “There is not even the beginning of a solution,” he wrote. Essentially, because “there is no breach in the system of technical necessity.” And the necessity for technological organisation has arisen because human society has become an amorphous mass lacking any individuating vitality. Other than the laws of biology, and technology is working on those, there is no other directing life force; they’ve all been eliminated. No rites, rituals, duties, relationships or responsibilities, no obligation to truth or beauty or even elemental reason remain to steer us through life. In a misguided search for freedom we have broken down the borders of human identity believing them to be constraints. But what is left is not some free-flowing form, able to select from any number of new selves, but no form at all.
In essence, technique is nothing less than a new form of consciousness. It is the form of consciousness appropriate for the technological world we have created, and that we have turned into our second nature. For technology is an autonomous force: it serves itself, as Ellul recognised. “All-embracing technique is in fact the consciousness of the mechanised world.” That doesn’t mean that it thinks. It can’t. However, the society we have created does not depend on thought. It has the logic of function to direct it, which is why pondering on the thorny question of whether machines can attain consciousness is an irrelevant, albeit useful, distraction. As it keeps us all hobbled to the system, warily looking ahead for some Terminator-style moment of transition. Whereas, the reality is far less CGI. And it is already here. Technique is the all-encompassing vision that enables us to be integrated with machines. It is the product of the interaction between science and a material reality and is now widespread throughout society. There is hardly any human activity left that has escaped the technological imperative. Baking, dating, making friends, organising a party, even training your dog, are all now viewed through the technological prism. As computer scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum observed back in the 70s, “We have permitted technological metaphors….and technique itself to so thoroughly invade our thought processes that we have finally abdicated to technology the very duty to formulate questions.”
Weizenbaum was the computer scientist who created the very first interactive program between humans and computers back in the 60s; the first chatbot we’d probably now say. ‘Eliza’ he dubbed it, after the vocally-challenged character in the popular musical ‘My Fair Lady’. What astonished Weizenbaum and prompted him to write “Computer Power and Human Reason”, which was published in 1976, was seeing how readily people who used the program were persuaded that the computer was capable of thinking. Bizarrely, some even insisted that they had been understood. The script he used for the interactive program was based on Rogerian psychotherapy and consisted of lines like:
Person: It’s true. I am unhappy.
Eliza: DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY
Person: I need some help that much seems certain.
Eliza: WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP
Person: Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother
Eliza: TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY
What further astonished Weizenbaum was the suggestion made by a number of psychotherapists that the program could be wheeled out nationally, and set up in some pod like form at airports and railway stations, in an effort to meet the needs of a psychotherapy-hungry public. How could this be considered therapy Weizenbaum asked himself? It was nothing but a computer program. There was no interaction; people were simply engaging in a prompted monologue. But then he realised, ‘the remaking of the world in the image of a computer started long before there were any electronic computers.” And it was precisely because human behaviour had already become predictable and functional that computer programs were needed to manage and direct it. Thus the never-ending programs, which certainly now control as well as direct our lives, and which have made us even more dependent on their operations, began as a response to that need. We conjured them into being.
Of course, our views on technological organisation vary. Some of us regard technocracy as more efficient and egalitarian than politics and don’t believe freedom has been compromised in any way. On the contrary, they look forward to the exotic capabilities technological enhancement may bring. It really comes down to your understanding of human nature and human potential. Though it seems to me that we have conflated the notion of ‘potential’, which is innate with that of ‘possibilities’ which are not, and as a result have lost our understanding of what human potential comprises. Because it is not incidental activities that make us human, but the activity of being human itself. As Aristotle makes clear in his Metaphysics, 1029b 13 “for being you is not being cultivated, since it is not in virtue of yourself that you are cultivated. Therefore being you is what you are in virtue of yourself.”
Ellul described his work as “a call to the sleeper to awake,” which is easy to understand. Only, people don’t always like being woken up. They can turn nasty. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is not always king as Nunez, the hero in H.G. Wells’ short story, ‘The Country of the Blind’, found out. As, indeed, have many other people over the last couple of years, losing their jobs, businesses, friends and social life, all for refusing to close their eyes to the evidence in front of them. And the assault is not over. It can’t be. Because what is most important in a monoculture is uniformity. Words like ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ are really just cover for a strident orthodoxy of thought. There is no place for heretics; they threaten the status quo, which is why they are usually excommunicated. Nunez was denied citizenship of the blind community unless he complied and gave up the ‘illusion’ of his sight. He nearly did. But on the morning of his horrible ‘operation’ he sees the sun come up and is overwhelmed by the beauty of the world and decides to escape. “When sunset came he was no longer climbing, but he was very far and high. His clothes were torn, his limbs were blood-stained, he was bruised in many places, but he lay as if he were at his ease, and there was a smile on his face.” We just have to find out where he went.