Come, human. Ensconce yourself in the fine swaddling robes of rational perfectionism
I’ve written a lot of words about how we anthropomorphize AI, and why it’s a big problem. But the opposite is just as true and problematic: we’re increasingly molding ourselves to AI in pursuit of a disembodied perfection, even transcendence. Along the way, we’re giving up our agency to build better worlds. Let’s dig in.
The history of technology, is in some ways, a history of dehumanization and disembodiment. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr writes that the more we use a particular tool, “the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.” We become a li’l less human, and a li’l more tool-like! As technologies have become more intellectual, they have altered how we think of the mind. In a great paper, “The brain is a computer is a brain,” Alexis Baria and Keith Cross show that the computational metaphor goes both ways — it’s not just that ‘the computer is a brain,’ it’s that the ‘brain is a computer.’ As Baria and Cross note, a neuroscientist might draw upon the handy ‘the brain is a computer’ metaphor “to explain how retinas transduce light into electrical signals by comparing it to the image sensor of a camera.” But the metaphor has seeped out of the lab and into every life. How often do you say, “I just can’t process that right now,” or, “Oh, I don’t have the bandwidth”? We use technological metaphors to explain our minds and ourselves.
The problem with all of this, as Baria and Cross argue, is that the computational metaphor affords “the human mind less complexity than is owed, and the computer more wisdom than is due.” Either we anthropomorphize AI, imbue it with too much undeserved power, and undermine our agency. Or we vastly simplify what’s going on inside the human mind — again, undermining our agency. It gets weirder — think about it, ‘artificial’ is in the name! So, we acknowledge that a machine’s ‘intelligence’ is artificial, but we are perfectly fine with this — because AI is tied to mathematics and rational thought, which, societally we value more than emotional intelligence or intuition. As Baria and Cross note, “in its fake-ness as a human intelligence, AI paradoxically succeeds in being a more trustworthy form of intelligence, by being the epitome of rational thought.” Put differently, we covet a kind of disembodied perfectionism in pursuit of rational thought and mathematical purity.
But this pursuit of perfection isn’t just a rationalist endeavor, it’s also wrapped up in religion and the desire for transcendence. Now, technology and religion have always been entangled. As David Noble writes in The Religion of Technology, “modern technology and religion have evolved together and […] as a result, the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief.” Noble looks at how the image of god changed during Charlemagne’s empire, explaining that it was once “purely spiritual in nature, located in the rational soul,” and then became “incorporated in the corporeal — the body and the external senses.” Why? Noble argues that technologies or the ‘mechanical arts,’ as they were known then, “reflected and reinforced such a transformed vision of the image-likeness of God to man”. According to Ernst Benz, who specializes in social history, this view became “one of the strongest impulses for man’s technological development and realization.” In short, technology became divine.
The history of technology and religion isn’t a static story. In more modern times, so-called intelligent machines became associated with human transcendence and immortality. Writing in 1999, Noble explained:
“Artificial intelligence advocates wax eloquent about the possibilities of machine based immortality and resurrection, and their disciples, the architects of virtual reality and cyberspace, exult in their expectation of God-like omnipresence, and disembodied perfection.”
But over time, as L. M. Sacasas argues, technology has been zapped of any religious values and imaginaries and replaced by a secular, consumerist orientation. According to Sacasas, we’ve entered into a period of secularization wherein technology has become an end in itself. Here’s Sacasas:
“I would argue that the religion of technology was always fundamentally unstable. Technology is a means to an end. The moment it became an end in itself, that is to say, the moment technology became the dominant partner in the religion of technology and took up the role of civil religion, at that moment our present moment became inevitable. When the religion of technology drives a culture, that culture, to riff on Thoreau, will eventually find itself directionless, with improved, and sometimes barely improved or even unimproved, means to nonexistent ends. It will eventually find itself fruitlessly focused on the incremental optimization of quantifiable measures of little consequence. It will eventually find itself in a crisis of meaning and characterized by various degrees of alienation and polarization.”
In turn, Sacasas sees the rise of effective accelerationism (e/acc) as a response to secularization. For example, he reads Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” as “a revivalist sermon […] a jeremiad, calling for repentance and a return to the religion of technology.”
Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of God Human Animal Machine compares modern-day AI discourse to Calvinism. John Calvin, a protestant theologian, insisted that we must obey God “without asking a reason” and “surrender to the incomprehensible divine will.” Similarly, we’re told to accept the results of a black-box algorithmic system without knowing what’s going on in the box. We’re told we couldn’t understand the system's complexities even if we could interrogate the training datasets or algorithmic design choices. And we’re told that the results will transcend human intelligence. O’Gieblyn sums the comparison up this way: “To obtain superior knowledge the machines possess, we must give up our desire to know ‘why’ and accept their outputs as pure revelation.”
Sacasas and O’Gieblyn are both right — the secularization of technology has led to a pursuit of technology for technology’s sake, and this pursuit has taken on a Calvinist zeal that demands adherence and leaves salvation and transcendence up to the algorithm. Our agency to build better worlds is ripped from our hands and given straight to the algorithm. Noble puts the problem this way:
“Ironically, the technological enterprise upon which we now ever more depend on for the preservation and enlargement of our lives betrays a disdainful regard for, indeed an impatience with, life itself. If dreams of technological escape from the burdens of mortality once translated into some relief of the human estate, the pursuit of technological transcendence has now perhaps outdistanced ourselves from such earthly ends.”
The pursuit of disembodied perfectionism — via a mathematically rationalist mind and technological transcendence — offers an escape from our present, earthly context. In a world that wants uncritical acceptance of technological pursuits, asking ‘why’ is a radical act. In a world that rewards and privileges disembodied perfectionism, embodied imperfection is a radical way of being. In a world that wants technological transcendence, a life lived right now, in service of others, is a radical life. Part of the problem here is that what’s considered radical has shifted to suit new norms — so if all of a sudden we valued human intelligence, whimsy, embodiment, uncertainty, and service to others over machine replicas, what radical future worlds would you want to build?
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