Monthly Archives: June 2024

Nostalgia in Perspective

About a year ago, I decided to re-watch the first season of Heroes. When the series first debuted, we were just married, and life was full of promise. It was, after all, the Before Times, our lives were still mostly academic, and what better to settle in to watch on a weeknight than a fascinating new take on superheroes? I was hooked.

The series, in my recollection, declined a bit in quality. Season 2 fell victim to the 2007 writer’s strike, and I was unimpressed by season 3. As I began collecting the Blu-Rays last year, though, I decided to go all the way through…to give it another chance. I’m glad, because the quality gets better again as the series progresses.

I’m not writing about Heroes, though…perhaps in another post.

As I’ve re-watched these episodes, the technology grabs my attention (product placement was really a thing in that time), primarily their mobile phones. You see, this was before we all had ubiquitous connectivity provided by slabs of glass that we carry in our pockets. These were the days of text-only data connections and physical keyboards. Better days, I would argue.

They were also the days before I made some choices based on discontent that pushed our family into a new direction, a career change that ultimately resulted in time away from my family and poor health for years, decisions that caused un-necessary stress and close financial calls through the subsequent years, to say nothing of the close friends with whom we’ve lost touch. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because, had I to do things over again, I would go back to that point and make a different decision. Watching a television series from that time period is just bringing that home for me.

It’s easy, especially when one reaches a certain age, to become steeped in nostalgia. In my case (I’m guessing I’m not alone), this is informed by the fact that life was slower, less stressful, less chaotic then. We weren’t ruled by Big Tech yet. I could look at the future and still be hopeful.

The natural inclination of this sort of nostalgic impulse is twofold: dwell in memories, and try to force life back to what it was. Neither of these are productive. The first wastes time when permitted to become consuming, the second will never work because it’s simply not possible. That’s a topic for a different day. My point is that I put effort into both of those, and they were wasted efforts. As Bonhoeffer has been quoted as saying:

“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I have to make the best of where I am, where we are, with the lessons I’ve learned. I have to allow those experiences to make me better. I have to work to bring the best of the Before Times into the present, because we unfortunately can’t go back.

Hopefully, that’s helpful to my fellow nostalgia addicts.

A Future Realized

The first time I took a phone call on my watch, I felt like Dick Tracy.

The sad thing is, that’s not even scratching the surface of my nerd status. My Mom is a Trekkie. I grew up steeped in Star Trek and Dr. Who. My vision of the future was set. I wasn’t the kind of geek that spent much time hacking around on computers as a kid, but I definitely had a vision of what a computerized future would be like. It began with having a natural conversation with the computer, just like they could on the Enterprise. It evolved into Max Headroom, and, even at a young age, I was beginning to think through, at least at a rudimentary level, that dystopian future in which the machines were as intelligent as we are and “off” buttons were illegal.

While that concept of the future evolved with the fog, blue lights and lasers that marked a lot of 90’s prime-time science fiction, I didn’t know…and most don’t…that the idea of artificial intelligence wasn’t new. It had roots some decades before. It began at Dartmouth in 1956, with a symposium of experts. By the time I was a child imagining a brave new world of the intelligent droids in Star Wars, this thought process was well underway by many academics.

In fact, David Noble argues that the concepts can be traced as far back as Descartes, who was obsessed with the theory that the body held back the mind from achieving it’s potential.1 For Descartes, pure thought was closest to God. He popularized a theology in which a human is only mind and body, not mind, body and soul, which would leave later thinkers no room for spirituality. The mind was the ultimate state of human-kind in this thought process.

Later, George Boole reduced thought to a mathematical formula. His binary logic became the foundation for modern computing.

Turing, eventually an atheist, invented the “Turing test,” which stated (I’m over-simplifying a bit) that if a human user could not differentiate a machine’s response from a human response, the machine was deemed to be intelligent. Turing saw a future in which we would build machines that would more intelligent that humans.

AI inevitably combined with the field of cybernetics, forming an endeavor beyond artificial intelligence that was known as artificial life. Enthusiasts of this theory believe that, as artificial intelligence becomes general and self aware, humans will have created a new species, one with which we can eventually merge and, because the mind is the ultimate in human experience, live forever in cybernetic form. Ghost in the Shell, realized.

The theological flaws are evident in this worldview. First, because it’s adherents (inasmuch as they are religious at all…most of the original thinkers had little space or patience for religion or theology) hold to a reductionist view of man, there is no awareness that we cannot create a soul in a new species. If we can manage to create an artificial mind, that is good enough. Secondly, creation in its current state is viewed as inferior. There is no tolerance for humanity, as beautiful as it can be. Only the flaws are seen, accompanied by an honest belief that it can be reformed into something completely different and better.

If you, like me, are thinking of Shelly’s Frankenstein monster here, I assure you you’re not alone. And we shouldn’t be surprised. As the world around us is reduced to unemotional data, we already are seeing an attempt to extinguish art by generative AI. The logic can only follow that this world would ignore the warnings sounded by science fiction writers through the ages that this isn’t going to end well. As Tillich said, artists are the prophets of their time. Prophets, however, can hardly exist in a world that is only data, in which humanity’s essence is only mind.

To this, I would push back with a theological response. Humanity doesn’t need to be improved upon. We are created in God’s image, and, with all of our flaws, are capable of great beauty, compassion, and creativity. Humanity needs to be brought back into its original state, which is the process of redemption, the end goal of the Divine plan already underway. Part of humanity’s state is a soul, something that can’t be quantified or reduced to an algorithm, something that can thus only be created ex nihilo…and not by us.

Realizing a Ghost in the Shell future of humans melding with machines is a future in which humanity is ruined. Preserving our humanity is a worthy goal, but this process achieves exactly the opposite. A true cyberpunk future must be avoided, and avoiding it involves waking up. To say that AI is “just” another innovation…to ignore the prophetic warnings from screen and page that have confronted us for so long…is hopelessly naive. And yet, that naiveté has spread through our culture with a contagion fueled by money and power-seeking. If history shows us anything, it is how difficult those forces are to stop.

So, a future has been realized. It’s not the one that many of us want, but rather one that is forced upon us by technological optimists with too much power. We can’t opt out, as it were. Our only hope is to try to survive, and hope that others wake up before it’s too late.

I’m not optimistic.

1. The source of my historical summary here is David Noble’s “The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention.” I highly recommend this book as a historical treatment for the background of much our technological climate.