To Insist on the Miraculous is to Deny the Machine
Can humanity survive AI? Our best hope is in trying.
Earlier this week, Wisdom of Crowds recorded a live episode of the show at Bistro Cacao here in DC with the great
(audio coming soon). The topic was Artificial Intelligence and what it’s doing to humanity; if these things really achieve the promise that our Silicon Valley overlords are heralding, how will not only our lives, but our very sense of meaning, purpose and relationship to the world be changed?Me, I came down hard on the doom-and-gloom side of the ledger. No, I’m not convinced that all the hype about AI is fully justified. The progress has been breathtaking, but that’s no guarantee that it will continue from here until we build a superhuman machine brain that will subvert humanity. Still, if even part of the ominous “promise” is achieved, I suspect the disruptions will be cataclysmic.
At the end of what was necessarily an inconclusive but stimulating conversation, someone in the audience asked about how humanity might end up pushing back against these technological encroachments. I immediately thought of Thomas Pynchon’s 1984 essay, published in the New York Times, titled “Is It OK to be a Luddite?”1
It’s rare that an old essay about technology and the future still holds up. Towards the end, Pynchon memorably gestures at a point that today feels all too real: “If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come — you heard it here first — when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy.” I remember re-reading the essay before ChatGPT launched and thinking to myself just how off Pynchon had been, given how primitive Siri and Alexa still were. What a difference five years makes.
But the real charm of the essay is not in its predictions. It’s in describing the march of technology and humanity’s fraught and violent relationship with it.
Pynchon starts by reaching for his Oxford English Dictionary, which reveals that the original Luddites were English revolutionary vandals, who between 1811 and 1816 ran around the country smashing up looms and other machines in textile factories, apparently pledging their allegiance to a mysterious “King Ludd” as they did so.
It turns out, “Ludd” was a real person (if not quite of royal blood).
In 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a house and “in a fit of insane rage” destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged — this had been going on, sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710 — folks would respond with the catch phrase ''Lud must have been here.'' By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname “King (or Captain) Ludd,” and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick — every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.
In Ned Lud, Pynchon identifies a type, a kind of folk hero — “the Badass” he calls him. The Badass (predominantly admired by men, not women, Pynchon notes) is what humanity reaches for when we are at the mercy of forces much larger than us, forces often euphemized by us moderns as “technological progress” but that at any time seem likely to either immiserate or destroy us. “Don't we,” Pynchon asks, “in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass — the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero — who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?”
Like all good Pynchon, the essay swerves and careens all over the place in a sometimes maddening way. But like all Pynchon writing, it lands on stunning truths.
To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you recall, goes: “Well, the airplanes got him.” “No ... it was Beauty killed the Beast.”
To insist on the miraculous is to deny the machine — this phrase has been lodged in me since when I first read it in this essay however many years ago. Miraculous here is not explicitly the divine. But humanism, like morality itself, is impossible to pin down without at least a gesture at infinite things.
Technology is in one perspective the obvious product of human ingenuity — the fruit of the human mind. And for the optimist, technology is what improves our lot over time — we live longer, we’re richer, we’re less at the mercy of nature. What’s not to love?
But ye shall know them by their fruits, a wise man once said, speaking of false prophets. And viewed another way, the technological fruits of our ingenuity have always been sinister, promising “prosperity” but actually impinging on our humanity. They transform how we interact with the world, but with each turn of the innovation screw, they also shrink us as human beings and cut us off from transcendence, from beauty, from love.
The tragedy of it all — which is part of the larger tragedy of living in a fallen and irredeemable world — is that there is no defeating technology, because its Satanic power is an expression of our own ingenuity. There is no way to limit AI — we can’t unlearn what we have discovered, and regulation won’t work either.
But in being human, Pynchon reminds us, we will nevertheless try to resist. And at the limit, we will dream of resistance — of something or someone Bad and Big enough to smash the evil fruits of our ingenuity. And in doing at least this, futile as it may be, we will preserve our connection to bigger things even as the machines try to remake us in their image.
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Pynchon ably subverts Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
I am not convinced by these confident, fatalistic assertions regarding our lack of agency to prevent particular applications/widespread embrace of certain aspects of AI--especially when paired with the imaginings about how the world AI makes will enable glorious social reforms. We can't prevent AGI from radically disrupting human learning and education in any meaningful way, but imagine all of the leisure time we'll have in this new world where the same people cutting the social safety net now will be freed up to support UBI!
We have established pretty remarkable, if imperfect, regulatory regimes and norms to restrain the pursuit of human cloning. We have sophisticated infrastructure and effort deployed toward arms control and the nuclear weapons. I am not quite at the point where I'm willing to concede the basic inevitability of how this will all unfold. While we're talking about the triumphant return of the American chestnut tree, Congress is considering a ten-year ban on regulating AI. Interesting priority to have if all of this is going to happen regardless of what people actually want for their lives and our society.
-Michael
We need to stop worshipping the toasters.