Technology | unobtrusive lucidity

Memoirs of Power Tools

Last year, a new neighbor bought the house across the street.

The previous owner had a…colorful personality that led to some interesting stories to tell. So, we were wondering what the new owner would bring. They’ve done a lot of renovation to the house, which has been interesting to watch. This guy is always building, sawing, hammering, putting something together, or, alternatively, bringing in a lot of supplies and re-doing the landscaping of the property.

When I think of that kind of work, I think of a couple of things. First is my father…it’s perhaps apropos that I’m writing this on Father’s Day. He kept a workshop in a detached building and was always outside in the evenings after dinner. The saws could always be heard, and he was always building. My dad made his living in electronics, but he loved woodworking, and the shop was his man cave. He sculpted with wood, as much an artist as a craftsman.

The other thing that I think of is my college career, because I spent most of it as a theatre major. My focus was largely on the technical side of theatre, and as such I spent a good amount of time in the scene shop. Even though I grew up observing my father’s use of power tools, I didn’t really learn to use them until college. While I’m far from being a pro, I do know my way around a drill, a rip saw, and various other tools, but to use them today would surface just how incredibly out of practice I am, because I don’t use them every day.

Or every month.

Or most of the year.

In recent years, for various reasons, I think about my dad often. Part of this is harboring some guilt for not calling him nearly as often as I should. Part of it is that things like seeing this new neighbor working outside all the time reminds me of what my dad did when I was growing up, and I wish sometimes that l was less academic and more hands-on with life.

A few years ago, before we moved to our current house, I was driving home from…somewhere… and I passed a house with a work van parked in the driveway. I forget what sort of work it advertised on its side…electrician, perhaps? Roofing? Given that it was the weekend, the van was not in use, and I remembered my father coming home from work, being with his family, engaging his hobbies, living a simpler life. There wasn’t email then, but if there had been, he wouldn’t have been checking it, because he wouldn’t have had a smartphone in his pocket. He left in the morning, worked his day as a specialist in his field, and returned home to live life, much as I imagine the owner of that van did. Then, after a significant number of years, he retired, which he was able to do because he was rewarded for his longevity with a pension.

While I don’t really want to change who I am in this regard, I often think that life would be simpler if I worked in a field…or in a time…that brought with it a similar lifestyle. Leave for work, do your trade, come home to the family. Work outside on the weekends, watch the game in the evening. There’s an enviable simplicity to that rhythm. That simplicity pre-supposes a security that doesn’t exist in our world any longer (who among my generation can realistically ever expect to retire?). Even without this, though, I feel that there must be ways to re-introduce a simplicity into our lives. Some are obvious…refuse to let work have a foothold in our after-hours lives (I deleted work communications from my phone some time ago), pare back on social media’s poisonous influence. Some are less obvious, or at least they are to me as I haven’t figured them out as of yet.

My techno-optimism has died in its old age, and I’ve started looking for ways to bring back this sort of simplicity. I want work to have its appropriate place, to mean something, and for life to be free from tech billionaires making decisions for me.

As foreign as this sounds to a generation that has grown up in this landscape, I can’t feel that this is what it was meant to be. Our lives have fallen out of balance, and we need to get that back. I’m not sure how exactly that happens. I just know instinctively that it involves less complexity than our current state.

Hello? Is This Mic On?

Where have all the blogs gone?

I was thinking this this morning as I was perusing my RSS reader. Being a sucker for fond remembrances of days gone by, I’ve gone through many iterations of RSS readers through the years. Each time, I port over all of the feeds that were in my previous reader. As a result, I have…well, a lot…of feeds in NetNewsWire at the moment, only a fraction of which are ever currently updated. As I scroll down the sidebar list of blogs that I have subscribed to through the decades, I remember so many fondly. I’ve met some really cool people and made friends through blogs, back when blogs were at their prime. Most of these, however, have been dormant for some time. The feeds that update on a weekly basis belong to certain prolific and popular bloggers, or larger publications. Those like this one? People who were passionately contributing their thoughts to the public sphere? I suspect that only a few of us remain.

As a rule, I’m not a trendy person. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given that I use an RSS reader to collect my feeds, as I’m guessing there are some out there who are even questioning what that is. As social media was introduced and eventually evolved to do irreparable harm to our social fabric, most readers outsourced their reading preferences to the Algorithm and stopped (perceiving themselves as) having the time to look for good writing. If something isn’t being thrust in front of our faces, we forget that it exists. My friend, that’s not a byproduct of the technological evolution. It’s by design.

So, I suppose that writers such as myself are, if not a casualty of the Internet’s impossibly fast and unhealthy evolution, then certainly relegated to a niche. In the before times, I posted two or three times weekly, and now struggle to post monthly, so this is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy. I miss those days, though, don’t you? Back before the web was weaponized?

I think that part of the phenomenon, though (and I’m being intentional to not call it a “problem”) is less engagement. I actually have little insight into who reads this as I don’t invade your privacy with analytics, so there could be hundreds of readers on each post who simply don’t comment. That would actually make sense, because I think that commenting died before engagement did in the blogosphere (and yes, I’m aware at how much I just dated myself by using that term).

I suspect that things may change though, and that this will be reflective of a cultural change. I say that because I hear…feel?…rumblings of discontent at being a culture comprised of those who consume rather than those who engage.

The first time I heard the phrase “consume media,” I had a visceral reaction. This should not be the case and has become a sad state of affairs. To consume is passive, to sit back and allow one’s brain to be flooded with entertainment without that entertainment having any substantive impact on them…the equivalent of elevator music. And, while there is a conversation to be had about minimizing the vision of the artist by refusing to look longer than 10 (metaphorical) seconds at their work, the point I’m making here is that engaging media, and, by extension, art, is an entirely different experience than simply consuming. Engagement involves thinking, unpacking, permitting oneself to be impacted by the story.

When I was in theatre, the experience of seeing a play was twofold. There was the experience of going to the show, of course, which is magic in itself. Beyond that, however, was the experience of going for coffee with your friends after and discussing what you had just watched. What did you see in the show? What did it make you think? How did it make you feel? Layers of substance are revealed in these conversations that begin to get us closer to what the playwright was trying to convey.

To some degree, that happens today in discussion forums, but not in the same way. After all, it would be impossible to meaningfully watch or listen to the amount of media that various platforms prefer us to consume in an endless stream, which maximizes the profits of them and their advertisers. One would think that, with all of this volume, smaller and more independent voices would be able to have a better chance of getting their work to you, but you see, their work doesn’t rank in the Algorithm, and we long ago ceded those RSS feeds because we didn’t want to think for ourselves.

Were blogs a solution to this? Hardly. In the days when we aggregated our own reading, though…when we went looking for things that interested us…new work had a better chance of making its way to the top.

So, I think the winds are changing, because readers and viewers and listeners are willing to pay for what they like, and are pushing back on the so-called attention economy. As they do so, and culture hopefully begins to go back to a better way of doing things, I think that blogs will regain some popularity. I’m hopeful, not because its better for the bloggers, but because its better for everyone.

Please engage. Don’t consume.

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.