“…our limitations are what make us human and stories are how we understand our humanity.”
— Benedict Cumberbatch, Hello /r/movies, I’m Benedict Cumberbatch. Ask me anything!
The staggering environmental costs aside, the degradation of creative and intellectual fiber in the common woman—when those aspects were already deteriorating to some extent—in the context of AI is remarkably sobering. And really, really not what we need right now. I also have little patience for AI LinkedIn-bros who don’t know jack about calculus but proclaim themselves to be thought leaders. (Looking at you, basically all companies trying to implement AI with no clue what they’re doing…) There are a lot of surface-level and medium-level things to rage about when it comes to AI.
“The rising capabilities frame concerns that our children and grandchildren could find themselves in a post-epistemic world where it is difficult or impossible to distinguish fact from fiction.”
— Eric Horvitz, On the Horizon: Interactive and Compositional Deepfakes
While I have fond memories of my undergraduate philosophy professor Lee Hardy, the formal work of philosophy does little to enthuse me. So, other than the general gesture that AI is highly situational and generally abused one way or the other, it’s not something in which I like to get bogged down. Not everyone has to weigh in on everything, y’know? But as I once again feel the inexorable pull of Dostoevsky, I’m starting to piece together the great cobweb that somehow entwines the philosophical miasma around AI with the philosophical miasma around my favourite angsty Russian.
“The thirst for life, no matter what kind of life, as long as it comes now, as quickly as possible, leads them to absurdities, to the breaking of their souls, and even to complete destruction.”
— Nikolay Strakhov, The Nihilists and Raskolnikov’s New Idea
No one writes the agony of struggle quite like Dostoevsky (or has inspired so much writing about the agony of struggle). I can only imagine how apoplectic he would be to see the current state of things, and I wonder what his novels would look like if he was writing today. Perhaps AI is a new iteration of the Grand Inquisitor; a benevolent pseudo-dictator of our own making, specifically crafted in the image of what we imagine the perfect provider would be. But, Dostoevsky and I both ask: what’s it for? What’s left for us?
“Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”
— Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files issue no. 218
I fear that not struggling is not the Pixar-animated situation of WALL-E. It’s the corruption of students’ abilities to think critically for themselves. (Yes, I know I sound like a pedantic klaxon-ringer when I say that.) It’s companies laying off huge swaths of their creative departments to be replaced with AI and even more profits. The thirst for a vision of life, as quickly as possible—will it lead to the breaking of our souls? It certainly seems to be leading all too easily to absurdities.
“If an enemy is rich, they are greedy, if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of ‘empire.’ They make a desolation and call it ‘peace.’”
— Tacitus, Agricola XXX
My new psychiatrist surprised me by suggesting therapy. When I asked him why, he said, “Because your life could be better.” I’m not sure what that means, truthfully—I wonder if my psychiatrist knows, either, outside of strictly clinical outcomes—but I find myself uncertain about what I want out of it. Maybe it’s not about suffering less, but more about finding ways to suffer better? Because the flame does hurt, even if it’s consuming my dross and refining my gold. But at least it isn’t a desolation called peace, no matter what kind of AI-ified world people want.
