On AI, despair, adaptability, and community
This is an entry from my journal. The gist is to not lose hope but also to become more decisive in finding our people.
I was talking to a friend the other day. He is handsome, smart, highly educated, and has a family with kids. He basically checks all the boxes of a successful man. Advances in AI have made many, including my friend, fearful of the future. We do not know what is in store for us and thus we feel that we are not in control of the situation. My friend cried out of stress. And when a man cries, things are serious.
The changes AI causes are unavoidable. Every new technology creates disruption and brings attendant instability. This one is already touching every aspect of life and will continue to do so with greater intensity. Its chilling effects will be felt very strongly by the majority of people. As such, the concern is well justified.
Though we must maintain a sense of perspective. The ancient sages knew all this. We are not experiencing something unique. The technical details do differ, yes, but despair in the wake of transformation, be it personal or social, is the same. This is the time for adaptability.
In Greek we say «ουδέν κακόν αμιγές καλού», which literally means “nothing bad unmixed [with] good”. It translates more liberally into “there is nothing purely bad; everything that is bad is mixed together with some good”.
The ancient sages have understood, since time immemorial, that the opposite is also true. There is no pure bliss either: nothing out there is good for you no matter what. Whatever you do which you think is benign, is so up to a certain degree. Beyond that point it will harm you.
It is thus essential for us to broaden our view in this and in every other case. To understand things in their wider context and to not overcommit to any one pattern of behaviour. The ancients prescribed moderation as the highest quality of a person. They knew that only by avoiding the extremes do we not commit to overreactions. This is how we do not endure the harm brought about by exaggerations; harm on top of what the prevailing conditions may be causing.
Fear is a powerful emotion that compels us into a certain state of being. It has the power to immobilise us as well as to force us into action. Those who think that fear, or indeed any emotion, is to be avoided, or overcome, or anyhow not considered, are misunderstanding the crucial function of the passions. They are there to send signals about change that unfolds in our milieu. The body is like a wonderfully calibrated instrument of measurement: it can discern patterns that we would otherwise fail to account for in our thought experiments.
To suppress emotion is to put one’s wellness in jeopardy. It is to pretend that some stimulus is not there and that some cascade of reactions triggered by it is not happening either. Pretentiousness may give one some immediate benefits or perception thereof, such as the social credibility of the manly man who does not cry. But therein hides the weakling, the coward at heart who is not prepared to confront the reality which their emotions alert them to.
We are embodied mind. Any school of thought that disregards the body—the passions—is leading us down the path of pretentiousness. That is not the road of moderation. It is an extremism brought about by human’s smugness to think they are god’s equal, to believe they are a party in the making of the world, to assume they can bargain with the heavens, to behave as if they can be mind as such; and, qua extremism, it is unsustainable.
AI is but a mirror. It is reflecting what we have been doing this whole time. AI is an indirect truth-teller in that it shows in the most obvious ways what kind of people we have become.
We willingly congregate large cities where we live as individuals or tiny groups in a spirit of a war of all against all. The city life consists in distrust: the child does not play care-free on the streets but is instead confined to a room where it can melt its brain on the computer all day, the woman avoids certain places at specific times because of the prevailing hostility, the elderly are increasingly cast aside, the family is untenable…
We moved away from the natural rhythms to a fast-paced reality of compounding exaggerations: social media streams that elicit rage, clickbait to deceive you into checking some stupid content, short bursts of satisfaction to keep you engaged into something that is actually extracting the vitality out of you, pornography everywhere and the practice of porn—of selling that which is sacred in what we carry—as the norm, and superficiality throughout.
In short, we have created conditions that facilitate the monstrous side of humanity and inhibit that which thrives in solidarity. AI did not cause any of this. What is now happening with the technological transformation is that more people realise how they actually have no community around them. They live in this place where they think they have plenty of people in their midst, though they actually are in a precarious spot. Why? Because they now understand how none of those strangers are there to provide support in pursuit of the common good: they are all fighting for their own survival in a spirit of individualism and are, as such, destined to fail. They are not collectivists since their environment and upbringing have not instilled that culture in them.
This is the culture of saying “no” to every “me, me, me” and of critising lovingly yet firmly every propensity for “lalala” away from the realities. This includes being resolute in the face of the self’s own temptations, mindful of its frailties, and dedicated to doing things the right way, which typicall is the hard way.
It is the culture of austere dedication to the common good which necessarily involves giving up a little bit of one’s own comfort. To be a parent one must tolerate the annoyances of a crying baby, for example. To live with others one must accept their individuality. To a neighbourhood predicated on trust through close interpersonal relations, is to recognise diversity and to let at least a tiny bit of the ego die so that the collective may live.
The guy who blithely uses AI that costs you your job while draining a small lake is the same person who would not have cared about you, and indeed about longer-term wellness, in the pre-AI days. This is the phenomenon of “decoupling”, as I have been calling it: someone is aloof from the milieu that their actions affect. Decoupling involves the place and the space. It is about locality and the society it supports. It also extends to generations yet to be and to the rest of the species on this planet.
This guy is the same person who happily destroys the planet with their wasteful consumer choices, mindlessly buying stuff they do not need, discarding what is still perfectly usable, all because, again, they are decoupled from the environment they are polluting and from the climate catastrophes that people in another place and/or another time frame will suffer from. Decoupling is what makes one more of a problem. And there are degrees to it, all the way to the person who does not care about anything beyond their own self.
Against this backdrop, we have to look at the positives of this new era. AI is making salient the pressing need for community: to find the others, to rekindle the spirit of sharing, to live once again within our means, and, yes, to submit to the authority of the collective. The sooner we wake up to the importance of discovering our people and of becoming communitarian in our outlook, the more resilient we will be in the face of radical reform.
Remember that emotions are neither good nor bad. They are signals. Ignore them once and you will suffer. Keep ignoring them and your life is forfeit.
Despair is a feeling that is telling you how your current lifestyle is leading to ruin. You are woefully unprepared to cope with the challenges as they arise. Despair is effectively saying “change now or you shall perish based on what I am feeling”. What it does not say and what it cannot tell you is the course of action you must take. This is where practical reasonableness comes in to work together with the passions in pursuit of viability.
We have a society where tokens of sophistication are the currency we trade in. One’s profession, academic credentials, and social standing speak of their character. These have been useful approximations of a person’s technical acumen as well as character traits, such as commitment, capacity to learn, resilience in the face of challenge, rigour, and so on. AI is now undermining this currency: you think you are good at some job and thus a respectable person until the robots take it away from you. Then you are bereft of purpose in life exactly because you were committing the original mistake of thinking that your status was your ultimate purpose. You mistook the currency for the value.
Adaptability demands that we figure out what is the essential objective in our life. That is the organising principle that must govern our actions. Once we think this through, we will know that what we really care about is to be with others and to be content with our self as it emerges from within its social and natural whole. In the grand scheme of things, some fancy looking job title does not matter if we do not have others we can be in around in a spirit of honesty.
A person who has exhibited competence in their life has also shown a certain level of confidence. Fundamentally, confidence speaks of a human’s belief in their adaptability. It shows that the person has the conviction to rise to the occasion, to let go of what is burdensome, and to cut off what has become degenerative. Competence is what proves as much. This means that they are prepared to move on even from their own achievements once those hold them hostage to a situation that is no longer viable.
I am here thinking of the careerist, though the point is more general. Once it is over, it is futile to lament the fact. That is the time to find alternatives and to accept that you will have to live with whatever new material realities are available to you. This may even involve economic hardship and poverty. Know, however, from the one who lives frugally that poverty does not harm you as much as the perception of losing the luxuries you have grown accustomed to.
Adaptation means that you will have to discover the wild animal within. It demands attentiveness, cooperativeness, and decisiveness. You will have to learn to live with vigour, to indulge less, and to be more strict with yourself in letting go of what does not yield the expected results. Doing this alone can work for a while and is an option for those who have a strong character. Though everybody needs others to thrive, not just in the basic sense of survival but also through fulfilling experiences.
To be clear, I am no AI panegyrist. I am not here to be a cheerleader for the aspiring overlords. What I am telling you is that your old lifestyle is bankrupt and is what will make you a servant of those masters, should you not change direction. What I have covered thus far speaks to the attitude of the person and to the imperative of building communities. This is but a piece of the whole. There is a grander political picture that we must draw together. It involves the redistribution of resources. But we will get there one step at a time. Remember that we can always rely on cutting-edge technology to dismantle the tyranny of abusers, provided we are doing it together.