A Question of Limits

I have always been a relatively slow employer of new technology. I innately resist change so I am sure my words here will carry a hint of bias. They may even sound like the grumblings of an old man. Be that as it may, I don’t like disruptions in routine. I don’t like minor hassles that peck away at the seconds of my life. I was later than most people around me switching from a flip phone to a smart phone. Until the U.S. mail became less reliable over the last year or so, I paid all my bills by writing physical checks and dropping them in a mailbox.

I believe I have come to my limit with regard to the technology I am comfortable with using on a daily basis. We only have so much time in this life and as rapidly as technology changes, it can be a full-time job to keep oneself up to speed. Personally, I’d rather spend my time interacting with physical things—reading a book (the real kind with a front and back cover and paper pages filled with ink-hewn letters of the alphabet), working in my pecan orchard, taking a walk, writing, fishing, etc. I don’t want to spend my time learning how to set up the new streaming service on the smart TV, or deciphering how to link the app on my phone with said “smart” TV, or attempting to use Google Docs. I don’t want to have to set up another username and password that must be changed every 6 months for yet another service. Through banking, shopping, correspondence, shipping, paying bills, keeping up with Dr.’s appointments through the health portal, our daily lives are inundated with such things. Perhaps it’s a failing on my part, but enough is enough.

I am sure that before my time is up, I will be forced into even more technologies that rob me of life because either; a) they are supposed to make our lives easier; or b) you can’t function in society without them. But these reasons serve as their own limits and there is one technological “advancement” among us now which does more than give me pause. The more I learn about it, the more I say to myself, “how can any rational person think it is ok to let this go unchecked?”

I refer of course to that new darling of tech folks everywhere, artificial intelligence. Sure, its been around a while but its uses have remained relatively benign, some even helpful. Banks use it for fraud detection, it can improve navigation, predict arrival times and alternative routes (you know, the things we used to use paper maps, a watch, and our brains for), it improves internet searches. The medical field is using it to help analyze CT scans, X-rays, and MRI’s. A.I. can help personalize a health plan based on genetics, clinical history, and lifestyle. It can help predict medication response. It speeds up drug discovery. I have not directly nor intentionally used it in my own work, but I have worked with younger, smarter and more patient people than I, in the use of A.I. for evaluating things like hurricane damage and losses to pecan orchards, as well as color stability in the kernels of pecan cultivars. A.I.’s potential for data analytics can speed up scientific discovery in unimaginable ways. This can be a remarkably good thing, but then all technologies come with risk.

Every technological advancement—stone tools, the wheel, agriculture, the written word, the printing press, trains, electricity, cars, airplanes, the telephone, indoor toilets, air conditioning, the computer, the atomic bomb, the internet, the smartphone—have all changed the ways in which humans live their lives. Many of these changes have made life better. Some we are less sure about. Not to mention, the impact of our technologies on the world around us. Where does human flourishing end and exploitation begin?

Artificial intelligence is a new type of technology. For thousands of years we have been at work teaching other human beings to learn. They learn from the experiences and knowledge of those who came before them, from the experiences of their contemporaries, and from their own experiences. At times we have taught other species—horses, mules, oxen, dogs, to work alongside us to accomplish tasks and make those tasks easier. More often, than not this works out great. It has lightened our load and carried little risk. These animals have a limit to their understanding and often simply want to be rewarded with food and sometimes companionship.

But now, we have taught machines to learn, and that rate of learning, which has surprised everyone, now far exceeds our own. Artificial intelligence represents a branch of computer science that aims to create machines capable of performing tasks that have historically required human intelligence. These tasks include learning from experience, understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, solving problems, and making decisions. But from whom and from where do these machines learn? They learn from other machines, from computers, from the internet and from social media, the last two of which are filled with the wonderful, vast trove of knowledge gathered throughout all of human history, with enormous quantities of information from all over the globe and throughout time. But the internet and social media also contain the worst and darkest things the human species has to offer.

There are aspects of A.I. in use today that I am not sold on because I don’t think the ways in which they are supposed to be improving our lives are actually improving them. ChatGPT for instance, is the greatest tool for dumbing down a society that I have witnessed in my own lifetime. Surpassing even, that of reality television, 24 hour news networks, and social media. There are a number of “minor issues” with A.I., like security, privacy, bias, misinformation, job displacement, and economic inequality, that must be addressed.

Then, of course, there are the more dystopian scenarios of artificial intelligence that, while some consider perhaps a bit far-fetched, many A.I. proponents who are working in the field admit as a serious possibility, even likely. There is the existential threat, the thing they call “the singularity”. The singularity refers to that point at which the technology and machines we create become so much smarter than we are that their growth becomes uncontrollable, an intelligent, computerized cancer so to speak, that will make slaves of us all.

The debate over artificial intelligence is a question of limits. These limits walk a fine line between making life better or easier and doing harm. I recently heard a podcast interview with author, Paul Kingsnorth, who made the comment that the creators and proponents of artificial intelligence seem to consider it to be a religion. As Kingsnorth mentioned, more than one of these proponents of A.I. liken this technology to God. Martine Rothblatt, for example refers to A.I. systems as “making God”. Elise Bohan proclaims “we are building God”. When asked if he believes whether or not God exists, Ray Kurzweil, says “not yet”.

Secular society has largely abolished God in recent decades, taking to heart Frederick Nietzche’s 1882 comment that “God is dead”. Over the course of the 20^th Century, humanists, intellectuals, and politicians alike, increasingly hitched themselves to the notion that religion is for losers and fools. This has only been amplified in the 21^st Century.

Many people cite their disillusion with organized religion to be a result of the inability to align it with their lived experience or with their failure to explain it intellectually. Why do bad things happen to good people? Some stop believing because of religious or spiritual trauma or abuse to themselves, to loved ones, or simply those acts perpetrated upon others throughout human history. Others simply cannot stomach the socio-political labels associated with some religions.

I won’t pretend to offer a solution to the spiritual and religious estrangement from which so many suffer. But I often think that this simplistic view of religion arrives from a failure to recognize the difference between a personal faith in/relationship with God and the collective actions of organized religion. Organized religion, though divinely inspired, is a human institution replete with all the fallacies and failings of human beings, just as we find in government, educational institutions, and the entire host of human society, including our technologies. This doesn’t make them necessarily bad, simply subject to misuse by human beings.

Try as they might, secular humanists, among them many proponents of A.I., cannot shake the need to believe in something greater than themselves. They have abolished God from their own lives, so they are driven to bring about or augment and amplify this thing called A.I.

I am a Christian, myself. Methodist to be exact. Our tradition attempts to explain many of the struggles of life by that incident known as “the fall of man”, described in the Bible as the expulsion of man and woman from paradise, otherwise known as the Garden of Eden. This story explains the desire of human beings to tinker at playing God. In seeking this wisdom too great for us, we unleash things into this world—actions, thoughts, ideas—that harm us, that harm the world itself. Thus outside the garden of paradise, we live in a fallen world during our time here. Like it or not, that life is about struggle. If we don’t struggle with one thing, we struggle with another. That is the human condition.

One of the justifications used for A.I., as for most technology, is that it will free us from the struggle. This is a futile attempt to escape the fallen world we live in and it’s reckless pursuit can lead to no good end given the human appetite for too much of a good thing.

Our minds and bodies were adapted over centuries of natural selection to deal with struggles—physical, intellectual, and spiritual. We are made for adversity and we need life’s challenges, these stimuli, to grow as human beings, to be healthy. We see it in the illnesses of our society already—the lack of physical activity in today’s sedentary occupations, the processed food we eat, our isolation from the natural world, the decline of our communities and personal relationships, all have made us sicker, weaker and more unhappy as we increasingly focus our lives upon ease, convenience, and entertainment.

The life of ease being sought through our ever-advancing technology can be equated with a genuine life of sloth and it should not be confused with having peace in one’s life. Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the knowledge that amid conflict, hardship, and strife, one can still find a divine contentedness. That peace is often won, if not through faith, then through our own experience, or through a synergy of the two.

All technology, to some degree, is designed to help reduce labor and effort in favor of getting more work done faster or more efficiently. There is nothing innately wrong with this to a point. But, where is that point? Can we recognize when a technology so minimizes effort on our part that we begin to regress? If so, how likely are we to respond in a way that preserves enough of life’s challenges, enough of a lived experience? What happens when we fail to learn the greater lessons about handling adversity, lessons that, while not easy, have served us so well over thousands of years? A.I. and certain other technologies rob us of peace when they rob us of the sharpening of those sacred gifts of mind, body, and spirit, the absence of which is, in essence, death itself.

So, we come to that great question, where should our limits be set? Technology has been with us since the invention of the first stone tool and the wheel. We will always have technology. Each must decide to accept the limit of technology with which they feel comfortable, the limit which they find necessary. Yet there must be a balance between reliance on technology and preservation of the human spirit. It has become a question almost as fundamental to our human experience as that of our religious faith.

Referring to the care of land, Aldo Leopold once wrote “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” A sound outlook, indeed. When considering our own limits, perhaps we would do well to measure our response by a similar phrasing; A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the human soul and its relationship with the creator of life. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.