Lumping everything together and saying 'it's all AI' is just daft

Ha ha you’re using a spell-checker you luddite, get on board or you’ll be left at the roadside (while we party on to Elon Musk’s ‘everything will be controlled by AI within 5 years, 20% chance of total annihilation, but, hey, we’re all going to die anyway, enjoy the ride’…)

There’s so much going on around this AI stuff that I can’t find a place even to start thinking about it.

The first thing is people crowing on Substack about those of us who are trying to sound alarm bells about the threat to humanity and to the planet - telling us that a spell-checker is AI, so we have to stop being stupid hypocrites. This is absurd. It’s like saying, hey, you eat tomatoes that were grown hydroponically, so don’t criticise me taking a vitamin pill so that I can eat food that’s been so processed that it doesn’t maintain a molecule of its original nutritional identity.

Being concerned about the infiltration of generative AI into writing, work processes, and the human need for relationship, is not the same thing as using a computer programme to spot a spelling mistake or alter the colours on your own photograph.

It’s not the same as the printing press, or calculators, or Google maps, either. Of course, now that these things exist, the parts of the human brain that could remember large amounts of text, do maths, and remember topographical information are atrophying. But a human who is bad at sums or who gets lost is not having their cognitive and emotional integrity incrementally invaded, anaesthetised, and gradually, over time, actually extinguished1. It’s also not simply, as in the case of the Luddites, a protest against changes to forms of production which threatened people’s livelihoods, although that’s here too.

Something I’m seeing increasingly is conflation of really helpful uses of AI (such as enabling people to overcome restrictive medical conditions, write through dyslexia, check syntax in a second language, start a business from a rural hut, or distinguish a lethal fake medicine from the real thing) with those uses that have been developed to prey upon human weaknesses and needs simply for profit (and control).

I see vague talk about training, but I’m not sure it’s quite that simple. We need to develop sophisticated forms of AI literacy; the ability to distinguish between the forms of AI that are useful, and the forms that are climbing into our brains and our souls and snacking gleefully upon our sense that it’s ok to be a beautiful, flawed, human being. The capacity for this kind of discrimination is the very thing that current conditions are eroding.

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Once upon a time, there were ridiculously elitist and privileged institutions called British universities. There were a lot of problems with these institutions, not least that they developed within the rigidly hierarchical British class system. Despite their multiple shortcomings, however, universities originally existed outside of government and policy control, and one of their main roles was to look at what was happening socially and politically and raise questions about things which the non-economically-biased minds there were freed up to see.

Schools of Humanities and Social Science, whilst often operating in ways which were opaque and never explained to students, were committed to fostering the development of this capacity to stand outside things and ask unexpected questions, and one of the main ways that this was done was by forcing students to write a particular kind of essay.

‘Oh, that’s the dark ages’, you say, ‘that’s a completely outmoded form of assessment which was long ago replaced by other forms of assessment that don’t discriminate against people who didn’t go to a private school, or have a good schooling, or who have certain disabilities’. Well, that’s true, particularly since Higher Education became a mass endeavour whose purpose has gradually been reduced down to being a factory for gaining qualifications that are dictated by employers in various industries. When the focus is on gaining a qualification, and one which now costs people thousands of pounds to obtain, it’s perfectly understandable that students have turned to GenAI in order to make sure that they ‘get’ the qualification which is now seen as the sole purpose of the whole endeavour.

But the marketisation of universities has slowly destroyed the very thing that seems to be our only hope as the wave of AI threatens to overwhelm every existing area of human activity in the name of endless productivity and growth. The capacity to understand when you’re being manipulated; knowing what questions to ask of information that’s being presented to you; how to look for evidence, go back to original sources, not take things at face value. ‘Research’ is not watching a bunch of YouTube videos which you’ve selected because they support your biases, or believing what someone who was once affiliated to a university is saying for the same reason.

The Humanities or Social Science essay started with the writer themselves. The essay was originally intended to be a subtle and effective means of gradually training a person to stand outside of themselves and start to see all the ways that their vision was limited, biased and insufficient. Its aim was to force them to uncover their own assumptions and emotional convictions; to teach them to ask questions of everything they felt and believed, and then go looking for evidence to see if anything, in fact, could back that up. It also made them go and look for evidence against their own position, so making them engage with perspectives other than their own, and sometimes even causing them to change their minds.

I’m not going to pretend that every Humanities or Social Science essay achieved this; there were many problems with the assumptions that university lecturers and departments made in their efforts to try to get students to achieve what they believed in. As a teacher and researcher in a British university I published a number of papers attempting to identify these problems and trying to offer solutions and new ways of achieving the capacities that these disciplines existed to foster. But the basic intention of developing critical analytical skills and the capacity to ask questions of data and information were pretty much agreed on, wherever you were in the university.

All of this is lost now that ‘anyone can write’, with the help of GenAI. I’m amazed at how many writers I’ve seen recently on Substack say that they ‘only’ use AI for summarising, organising, researching, improving word choice, outlining, and gathering information. At the end they say, ‘but the thoughts are my own’, as if the only things that really matters if you’re calling yourself a writer is the final decision on word choice. You can argue that there’s nothing wrong with using GenAI as an information-processing practice, but I don’t think you can call what you’re doing writing. Writing is not looking at words suggested from a source outside of yourself and deciding whether or not you like them; that’s actually a sophisticated form of multiple choice.

I’m not trying to argue that GenAI can’t be useful, but it doesn’t teach you how to investigate your biases, engage with things you don’t like, or flex your brain until it finally comes up with an emergent synthesis that surprises even your own mind. In fact, we know that chatbots are programmed to do the exact opposite; to affirm your ideas and sycophantically flood you with a warm wave of the support and attention which you likely never received as a child, making you increasingly dependent on its numbing and unchallenging approval.

The process of mentally engaging with a difficult and frustrating idea involves all aspects of your experience and emotions, the whole life you’ve lived; it’s something that happens within the totality of an embodied consciousness which has moved through time. What GenAI gives you is not this. You can still bring yourself to the situation and make a decision about what’s being presented to you, but you’re not being stretched, you’re being pampered. It’s like someone gave you a remote control so that now you don’t have to get up out of your cosy armchair.

We’re designed to move, not to sit in big, fat, padded armchairs. We’re programmed to act upon the world, to use our capacities to work on the challenges that the world presents, whether that’s how to kill an antelope, make a tree into a violin, or shout when we witness a gross injustice.

Writing was never supposed to be an exclusive, mysterious club. The way that Humanities and Social Science programmes in universities went about their mission often, and increasingly, failed to achieve its aims. But the skills that could, when the system worked, be gained through essay-writing practices are skills that are needed by everyone, not just those who go through university programmes, and now more than ever.

Without them, the mesmerising flicker of dopamine-generating, emotion-hijacking, human-replacing trivia is gradually colonising not only attention, but the deepest parts of the internal experience of being a distinct, thinking, question-asking human being. This is not merging with the Tao, or understanding oneself to be a tiny speck in an undifferentiated sea of Brahman. The Tao2 and Brahman3 include the greater, wider, tide-pulling, season-following physical realities of trees and roots and birds and peaches, of which we are a part.

A mind and heart that are held captive in digital space is not this. In digispace the human has no body, is no longer connected to the earth. Scooped out like an oyster from its shell, hanging between worlds, being manipulated by forces completely beyond itself. This is an intensely vulnerable position, and, for an embodied being, extremely dangerous.

It’s also oblivious to the cost of this disembodied, earth-pillaging dance, which is already rising up to meet us with wildfires, ice-melt, and a raft of future catastrophes that private business and the endless desire for growth are turning their backs on. Not for much longer, sadly.

Elon Musk’s recent interview with the Editor-in-Chief of the Economist suggests that he finds the whole thing a bit of a laugh, an interesting experiment. I hadn’t realised until I saw this interview that the tech boys have deliberately set up a situation which is already completely out of their control, just for the fun of seeing what might happen when you get a bunch of robots talking to each other without human interference (while you make a fortune at the same time). When asked whether he was concerned about his 20% estimate of total annihilation of humanity (within a surprisingly short timescale), he replied that we were all going to die anyway, so we might as well enjoy the ride. The most financially-influential person on the planet doesn’t seem to be a big fan of being an embodied being.

When asked where he thought it was all going if we’re not all wiped out, Elon Musk replied by saying that what he saw ahead was an age of endless abundance.

This idea has stuck in my mind. All I could think about was the still utterly mysterious abundance of the life that has evolved on our planet, and the speed at which this natural abundance is being destroyed. What is the ‘abundance’ which replaces the wonder of the evolution of a stamen, or the bee which collects its nectar in order to fertilise another part of the living earth?