Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Journey Through a Back Yard

A heart composed of flowers and other items my daughters found in the back yard.

My parents still live in the house in which I grew up. They have a large back yard. I’m of the age in which I’m struck by a good deal of memories whenever I visit. As I write this, I’ve been here for the week to assist my parents with various things. I take walks through that big back yard whenever I visit of late, and there’s an odd mental thing that happens: I can visualize the arrangements and different states of the back yard…and, for that matter, the rest of their home…through the decades. With those visualizations come certain, very specific memories.

These vivid memories began some time ago, and have only grown over the years. I think that it’s easy to lapse into these memories because of how amazingly quiet it is where my parents live…it’s a very rural area, so the lack of noise is palpable when visiting. The memories that strike me so vividly have become almost formulaic by this point.

I remember playing near the apple trees in a Spider-Man mask when I was a kid.

When I was a bit older, I would step through the back door from my room to the yard and pretend that it was interior of my TARDIS.

The first time that I saw Transformers, I re-enacted scenes from that first episode in our side yard. That series, incidentally, was life-altering to a kid my age.

Perhaps the most amazing memory involves a storage shed on their property. When I was a kid, my dad built a secret club-house inside of that shed. There was a table, and I later put a map on the wall to make it a secret headquarters. It was secret…the door was hidden, a secret panel in the outside wall that opened when a small peg was pulled. My dad put so much love and attention into that clubhouse.

For the last few years, the moments that strike me about this back yard have grown in number. I remember chasing fireflies with my daughters. I remember a Father’s Day when my daughters made a heart from various found items and placed it in the back yard. They couldn’t wait to show me, and when we visit lately, they can’t wait to chase fireflies with me.

A generation has passed, and I’m watching them form memories in this same back yard that they will (I hope) always take with them, just as I have. I think a lot families in other parts of the world experience this with homes and properties that are passed down through generations, and we often aren’t able to experience it because our culture has become so nomadic. I’m glad I’ve gotten to in at least a small way, because the perception of time brings this incredible shift in perspective around your loved ones. One realizes what is important.

This week, I was thinking about how I felt guilty about not playing in that secret clubhouse enough. My dad and I talked about how much attention he put into it. He was proud of that project. Before I left, I thanked him for building that awesome gift, for giving it so much effort. He said, sincerely, “you’re welcome.”

That moment was profoundly meaningful. As meaningful as any that have happened in that amazing back yard.

Re-Focus

When life gives you lemons…well, you know the adage. It’s sort of cringe-worthy at this point, but still springs to mind a lot because, well, let’s face it…life seems to have a particular fondness for lemons.

I’ve been forced to re-focus quite a bit over the course of the last year, confronted with a mirror that I didn’t particularly want to look into. I’m glad that I did, because I’ve realized a lot of places where my life has gone wrong due to decisions I’ve made, and have been able to work to correct those decisions. I thought that was the path I was on for the next year or so, and was content for that to be enough, because it’s hard work.

The onslaught of lemons wasn’t quite at an end, as it turns out. The catalyst that forced my introspection last year was an unceremonious layoff that left us scrambling for income. There was a point at which I wasn’t sure if we would be able to keep our home, or if we would have to move. The dust seemed to have settled in a decidedly better place emotionally, and we were settling into a new rhythm, when, about three weeks ago, another serious event happened…the sort that causes life to become extremely uncertain and introduces a feeling of things spiraling out of control. Again.

During the initial days, I reckoned with the stress and anxiety that such an event introduces. There’s a great deal of difficulty in approaching day-to-day life when it feels like things have shifted at a fundamental level. That weekend, there was a family event and we attended. I thought it was going to be a small event…as it turned out, a lot of extended family that I hadn’t seen in a long time were there.

Among them was a nephew that I hadn’t seen in…well, in too long. I remember this guy when he was a baby. About ten years ago, he visited us for a couple of days. He was into superheroes at the time, and I have this great memory of us watching Justice League Unlimited while he was there. We did some other fun family things, but that’s the memory that’s most prominent for me. I thought I was just being a cool uncle.

When he saw me a few days ago, he gave me a big hug. The first thing that he said was that he still remembers watching Justice League Unlimited with me all those years ago, and that he occasionally still goes back to re-watch that series (it’s a really good animated series, by the way…extremely well written). We got to hang out a bit that weekend…nothing big, but it all seemed so important to him, each small event holding this weight of importance in his perception.

We’re still working on righting the ship after this recent event, but that weekend helped me gain a very important perspective. Choosing to watch an animated superhero show with a nephew all those years ago turned out to be a foundational event in a family relationship. So was this recent weekend. Those relationships…the people, their journeys, and how those journeys intersect with ours…are so much more important than jobs, finances, schools, and the other things that we place at such high value. More important by an order of magnitude. I had no idea that I was serving as such an example to this family member. I am humbled and honored, and that will continue despite the state of these other concerns.

So, I’m continuing to learn. I think what I’m (re-)learning is that the most important things in life aren’t tied to careers, income, and those sorts of things. I’m learning that relationships with people are so, so much more important, especially in a digital world that holds them at held at arms’ length. I’m learning that the most important things in life are generally different than what I perceive my priorities to be.

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.

We Really Don’t Need the Next Big Thing

No, I’m not a luddite, as the title of this post would seem to indicate. I’m just exhausted. I’m tired of not having choices. And, if I’m to be completely honest, I see no version of the direction we’re heading that leads me to be optimistic.

This is a change for me. I summarized it during a conversation with someone this holiday weekend this way: I used to be a techno-optimist. I am no longer. There was a sweet spot with technology. I remember it well. As I finished grad school, the first e-reader was released. After years of carrying around heavy books, I remember thinking…where have you been for the past 3 years? That was the time when so many things…academically, professionally, and ordering pizza…could be done online, in such a time-saving way. Information was at our fingertips. The Internet was, overall, a force for good. It just wasn’t in our pockets yet.

Then smartphones became ubiquitous. That’s what I now identify as the tipping point. That’s when social networking became profitable, when our identities and data began to be sold out from under us without our knowledge or consent, and our lives began to be so heavily influenced by the “tech bros” in ways we didn’t even understand. That was the point in which the technology stopped serving us and we began to serve the technology. All of these years later, that progression is reaching its conclusion.

Artificial intelligence is that conclusion. Perhaps we should refer to it as the singularity, though many people argue over what that term actually means. Whatever our terminology, I’m going to summarize my argument as this: AI is an existential crisis, an extinction-level event, and we’re running toward with open arms because we can’t wait to play with the shiny new toy. We can’t wait because we’ve been conditioned by the technology we serve to desire it that strongly. Our wills, in large part, are no longer our own.

Even if you, like me, are not interested at all in AI and want passionately to avoid it, you are already not able to. It is going to be baked into every piece of software and most pieces of hardware that you use, whether you want it or not, whether you know it or not, and it is going to analyze and build patterns off of your behavior, adding to what it knows from others, so that we are all quantified and analyzed through the rest of our lives. A generation will grow up under this constant scrutiny. Our choices will become increasingly guided by it, primarily for others’ profit.

I’ve heard an interviewer of the programmers that are building AIs say that the technology is a black box. The programmers don’t know how it arrives at its conclusions. The technology was never intended to be connected to the Internet, and now it is there, potentially self-propagating, unable to be shut down. This is Max Headroom realized. This is Ghost in the Shell in real life. If you’re not disturbed by this prospect, you’re not paying attention.

Where to go from here? What potential for redemption is there? My faith tells me that there must be one, but I can’t see it from here. I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. I’m in hopes that current lawsuits bankrupt the technology so that it becomes unviable, but, even if that happens, AI is being weaponized, so the arms race will take over. I only see a world that we’ve destroyed and in which our children have to live. I hope that they can make it better.

Because we’ll just be obediently waiting for the next big thing to arrive.