Lost Connection
Every so often I read an article or a book that seems to capture the current moment and does so in a way that crystallises how I see the world. I suppose this reflects my increasing confidence: I am reading something that reassures me others see the world in the way I do. It is always encouraging to read something that reaffirms what you felt was obvious but about which you weren’t quite certain. However, such articles can also be seductive: a good piece can be very persuasive, and shape how you think, drawing on anecdotes, perspectives and ways of seeing that make sense, leading to the conclusion that’s the way things are – and I knew it!
This is particularly the case when I read an article about how the world is different now. It is especially tempting to be reminded about how things were when you were a child, moments and situations you recall as you look back fondly at events and people in your childhood, adolescence and even young adulthood. On reflection, you conclude everything was simpler then, technology less intrusive, interactions more innocent. Even though you recall there were some challenging moments in the past, overall you are prone to remember what was good, fun, interesting: I suspect this is a form of defence mechanism, one that tends to push terrible events into the background, or take some of the sting out of them. I don’t mean to imply that disasters are obliterated, but I believe we have the capacity to reduce their salience, at least some of the time. Perhaps there were moments when your life was hard and discouraging, but on reflection the world seemed a nicer, happier place when you were young
I was reminded of this recently when I read a very compelling article by Rebecca Solnit. She is an outstanding novelist, but she is also a stimulating essayist. In late January she published an article in The Guardian, a deeply felt critique of capitalism today, and its focus on what she describes (based on a comment from a friend) as ‘the tyranny of the quantifiable’. She described her views as an elegy to “deep immersion in the moment, of engaging with the world in an embodied and sensual way, whether it’s dancing or dog-walking, cake-decorating or dirt-biking.” Her evident concern was that today “we are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing.” She observes that this has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now it is also the tempting promise of technology. “It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves.” As she saw it, the issue today is that we are encouraged to describe and value only that which our modern version of capitalism allows, and even encourages, while other aspects of our lives are overlooked or diminished.
As I read it, I had no doubt that what Solnit was offering a pointed and devastating critique. In her essay she notes how Silicon Valley is concentrated on the quantifiable. “For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend. This ends up meaning that we can minimise our presence in the world and maximise time spent working and online, which also means maximising alienation and isolation. This has involved a reordering of society right down to our retail landscapes … To embrace the tyranny of the quantifiable is to dismiss the subtle value of these daily acts out in the world and the ways they generate and maintain networks of relationships. So we have withdrawn, while being constantly told this is good, and it has turned out to be bad in a thousand small ways, weakening public life and local institutions, isolating us.”
There’s worse. Having convinced many people to avoid going out and have unmediated contact with other people, Solnit reports “Silicon Valley is now telling us we do not want to do our own thinking, creating or communicating with other humans.” She quotes the sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle, who has followed the evolution of computer technologies since the 1970s. Solnit reports that Turkle writes about her desire to raise an empathic child. “I knew that without the ability to spend quiet time alone, that would be impossible. But that was where screens began to get us into trouble. Our capacity for solitude is undermined as soon as we introduce a screen.”
Some of her examples seem almost unbelievably bizarre. “You’ll never think alone again,” said one advertisement for an AI product called Cluely. The ad seemed confused about what thinking is and oblivious to why we might want to do it ourselves. These companies often suggest that things we have always done are too hard to do.” Her commentary on Cluely describes the way this startup marketed its AI assistant “with an advert featuring a young man wearing smart glasses, similar to those that first appeared as Google Glass in 2014 … Glasses of this type, which have internet access and tiny screens, operate on the premise that as you move through your day you need constant help, outsourcing basic decisions, checking facts, being reminded of appointments, in essence being babysat by your headgear.”
She continues “In the Cluely advert, the young man (who’s one of the product’s creators) gets a steady stream of prompts for talking to a young woman on their first date. So much of what tech offers is solutions to non-problems, or to problems that need to be solved through other means. Why is the young man incapable or afraid of talking without coaching? Is he really talking to his date or is he relaying instructions? How would she feel if she knew she were talking to an algorithm via her distracted date’s phone? With continued use, he may become even less capable of doing what we’ve all done for ever: converse, which is an act of collaborative improvisation.”
“We must presume that the point of a date is to establish a personal connection, but in this interaction it’s reframed as something like a business opportunity. The young man wants to impress the girl, but it’s hard not to conclude that if she is impressed, it won’t be with him, but with his dialogue coach! Ned Resnikoff writes in his newsletter, chiming in with Turkle: “Cluely’s explicit promise is to abolish solitude – and, in effect, to abolish thought. All dialogue with one’s self is to be replaced by queries put to a large language model.”
Critiquing much of what we might choose to be the result of ingenious marketing can allow us to miss the deeper issues that Solnit addresses. As she explains “The tyranny of the quantifiable tramples over the question of what it is we get from doing the work, why we might want to do it, how writing – which is mostly thinking – can be part of developing a self, a worldview, a set of ethics, a greater capacity to understand and use language.”
She also offers some scary examples. She reports that someone had told her that she was “having a chatbot write her husband a poem for their anniversary, which made me wonder if the husband desired a polished product or an expression from the heart. In Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, the big-nosed title character ghostwrites love letters for his friend to the Roxanne both of them love. She comes to realise it’s the author of the letters she really loves. What happens when you realise the true love who touched your heart isn’t even human? Accepting it as your AI lover seems to be one answer.”
“One argument for AI companions is that they are always there for you: when you want them on, off when you want them off, with no needs of their own. Yet behind this lies a capitalist argument that we’re here to get as much as possible and give as little as possible, to meet our own needs and dodge those of others. In the real world, you get something from giving – at the very least, you get a sense of being someone with something to give, which is one measure of your own wealth, generosity and power. We were designed to give; the gifts were meant to circulate. Love is too often discussed as a sort of good you want to stockpile, harvest, collect, even extract, but to be loved without loving is a sad accomplishment, a miser’s hoarding of someone else’s wealth. The work of loving is also the work of forging a self and a life. … and of confronting the unpredictable, the vulnerable or risky, the intimate, the embodied”.
It is very tempting to keep on quoting Solnit. She is describing what people of my age see the world becoming. I can’t help it: I must quote her once more: “The capitalist agenda of maximising getting and minimising giving has some application in commerce but impoverishes life. We are social animals who need to be with other humans, whether it’s at a carnival or funeral or the ordinary times in between. There is a sense of belonging that goes deeper than words when we are with people who care about us, and even more so when we are in alignment, whether it’s two people falling into step on a walk or a dozen dancing together or a congregation praying or 10,000 marching together.”
However, it was around this point that I stopped. As I see it, the capitalist agenda is concerned with investing in products and services that clever people can persuade others they want. Sometimes those products or services meet legitimate needs and interests; sometimes they create needs or desires that are trivial, inauthentic, or positively misleading. However, hasn’t that always been the case? Businessmen, politicians, priests and writers, aren’t they are all trying to sell us their vision? They were doing that centuries ago, and they will be seeking to do so centuries into the future. Helping us to see things ‘the right way’. That’s an old story, and the capitalist system has only managed to organise the process a little more effectively.
Perhaps that isn’t the core of the issue. Solnit is particularly exercised about AI and AI assistants. She suggests that in order to assist you, these artificial intelligence systems offer what she describes as ‘agreeable sycophancy’. There are real horror stories, of course, as users fall for financially crazy schemes, develop paranoia, begin to distrust family and friends, and even plunge them into suicidal despair, “with the helpful chatbot offering advice on how to kill yourself.” Agreed, but that is nothing new. The elderly, the young, confused teenagers and thwarted adults, they have all been susceptible to smart strangers or ‘helpful’ family members. As much as that is true today, so it has been true over the centuries, as both the fiction and non-fiction of the past make clear. We are gullible, and AI is merely another way to tap into our gullibility.
Solnit points out the danger of flatterers; that we need kind people in our lives who will tell us the truth when we’ve veered off course. She suggests that chatbots cannot do this, apparently because the only information they have about us is what we have supplied. Really, is that the case? I suspect it is the opposite, as con men have learnt over the years: listen to the mark and then play back what they have told you, adding in the twist, the offer, the redemption. She suggests it is the very rich who already suffer from sycophancy, from living in echo chambers, but this is a problem for all of us. There are no end of friends and colleagues who will happily concur with our points of view, and then helpfully agree with the actions we propose.
Solnit quotes from Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, who told a Rolling Stone reporter “Part of what keeps us sane is other people’s perspectives, which are often in tension with ours …When you say something questionable, others will challenge you, ask questions, defy you. It can be annoying, but it keeps us tied to reality, and it is the basis of a healthy democratic citizenry.”
Solnit sees the solution to these woes in connection. She encourages us to distinguish between “the things real friends can do and AI cannot: bake you a cake or drive you home, hold your hand or live through a crisis or a celebration with you. And because of that difference people need to have real friends. More than that, people need real communities and social support systems. The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes. Stealing ourselves back, alas, is not as easy as walking out the door. We need somewhere to go and, more importantly, someone to go to who likewise desires to connect.”
The more I read, the more I was frustrated. Solnit isn’t describing something that has suddenly arisen because of those chatbots and AI systems she described. It has always been like this. We are a confusing mixture of dependency and exploitation. We depend on others, on our families, friends, workmates and even those we meet in shops, workplaces, playing fields and galleries. At the same time, we cherish what we have as individuals, what we have acquired, what we have obtained from others for ourselves. We sometimes are willing to pay the costs for borrowing or appropriation, but we also like to get what we can for as little cost as possible.
Much of human history, or that part of it which we can discover, is about people seeking to exploit others, balanced against those occasional, truly inspirational accounts where the dominating motive was giving rather than taking. In the bookcase in our apartment, there is a wonderful collection of history books: Bloch on Feudal Society, Tuchman on The March of Folly, books on the rise and fall of the Medici, the decline and fall of Byzantium, and on the exploits of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane, on the world of the Pharaohs and the wars of the 20th Century. They depict the rise and fall of human aspirations, as great leaders tried to do something more than simply rule and exploit, but in every example it is also the case they illustrate how greed, selfishness and opportunity have thwarted noble aspirations. As I see it, Solnit is describing more of the same: like any others she seeks a world that never existed, where people lived in harmony, greed was banished, and cooperation and collaboration shaped experience.
We tend to resist the prophet in our time. Solnit is a prophet, in her fiction and in this essay. She concludes “We are told that machines will become like us, but in many ways they demand we become more like them. To let that happen is to lose something immeasurably valuable. That immeasurability is what makes this struggle difficult, but what cannot be measured can be described or at least evoked and valued. It cannot be boiled down to simple metrics such as efficiency and profitability. Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.”
Is this essay call for action, or a voice in the wilderness? We are inspired by writers who address major issues, and who dissect human nature and the political and economic systems we have devised. We do need hope, to believe that things can be better, that we are more than animals with strangely larger brains than the rest. As I read he essay I’m sure you know I wanted to believe that we will respond to her appeal, and humanity will shift its direction. However, I suspect you also know that I doubted it.
History shows that our bad habits remain, despite emotional and inspirational pleas to change. As any parent concerned about their aspirations for their child knows, no matter how they work hard to instill the values and behaviours that will make their child a better person and contribute to a better society, it’s not that simple. Yes, that is what many parents want to achieve, but the outcomes can often seem rather discouraging: practice falls short of hopeful aspirations, and that this is often the situation we like to believe is the result of the malign influence of others. However, quite simply it may be because this is the way things are.
