Tech giants need philosophers, but is mindfulness made crude by apps? And Tim Berners-Lee wants to "save" the Web he made
We noted that the new European Commission president, Ursula Von der Leyen, hasn’t just committed the EU to a transformational climate change programme, but has also made some very idealistic statements about information technology and automation:
Ursula Von der Leyen
“We will automate work that is wearisome for us humans: carrying heavy loads, performing repetitive tasks in factories or in offices. And this will give us time. Time for what distinguishes human beings. Time for what computers can’t do: empathy and creativity.”
Encouraging, and part of our own agenda - where the two vectors of planetary limits, and technological liberation from routine labour (mental or manual), are bearing down on us, and we need to figure out how to respond progressively, sanely and humanely to both.
To that end, three stories of how we can make that response.
Tech giants need philosophers
Here’s a fascinating initiative from the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, called “Transformations of the Human”, with Tobias Reed as its director. He explains: “By placing philosophers and artists in key research sites to foster dialogue with technologists, the aim of the program is to render AI and Biotech visible as unusually potent experimental sites for reformulating our vocabulary for thinking about ourselves.”
In this Quartz article, Reed explains his inspiration:
It was sometime around 2013 when I first recognized that the modern concept of the human—again, the very concept that has organized our sense of self and our experience of reality—fails us.
Take the microbiome, which has been becoming increasingly popular in science, health and wellness circles in the past few years. There is no single organ system that is not contingent on microbial metabolites. Most of the neurotransmitters in our brain are made by bacteria living in our guts. No one can tell where a human ends and their microbiome begins.
Or, take AI. Once AI researchers succeeded in building machines endowed with neural nets that learn, that experience, that remember, that think and reason, the assumption of an unbridgeable difference between humans and machines—between intelligence and mechanism, between the animate and the inanimate—became untenable.
It seemed clear that we cannot continue to live by concepts we know are both untenable and destructive to the planet. But the question that concerned me most was what to do with it all.
Can we reinvent the concept of the human? This question troubled me for a long time, until I realized that fields like AI and microbiome research or synthetic biology not only undermine the historic way we think of the human—they also allow for new possibilities for understanding the world.
It suddenly dawned on me that I could look at each one of these fields, not just AI and the microbiome, but also synthetic biology, biogeochemistry, and others, as if they were a kind of philosophical laboratory for re-articulating our reality.
Isn’t AI, by undoing the formerly exclusive link between humans and intelligence, opening up whole new possibilities of understanding how the world is organized and how humans fit into this world?
Intelligence is now no longer an exclusively-human property, but something animals and machines have as well.
By establishing a continuum between the natural and the artificial, AI research invites us to think of machines as natural, and of engineering as a kind of natural (meaning biological) practice.
We are living in an era of a major, most far-reaching philosophical event: A radical re-articulation of what it is to be human and of the relation between humans, nature, and technology.
Yet at present, no one really formally talks about this philosophical quality of tech. Hence, no one attends to it, with the inevitable consequence that the sweeping re-articulation of the human unfolds around us in a haphazard, entirely unconscientious way.
Shouldn’t we try to change this?
is mindfulness made crude by apps?
We have kept track with cutting edge mindfulness work on A/UK - as a tool for citizens to active self-mastery, and to control their reactivity to ideological and political triggers. But it’s also worth noting where it might be misapplied - and this Fast Company article on mindfulness apps and websites is properly cautionary.
As they write:
In today’s stressful world, mindfulness—a type of popular spirituality that strives to focus on the present moment—promises to soothe away the anxiety and stress of modern life. The Internet is full of popular cure-all mindfulness apps targeting everyone from busy urban professionals to dieters, those suffering from insomnia, and even children.
…Early Buddhist mindfulness practitioners were those who criticized mainstream societal values and cultural norms such as bodily beauty, family ties, and material wealth.
Mindfulness apps, on the other hand, encourage people to cope with and accommodate to society. They overlook the surrounding causes and conditions of suffering and stress, which may be political, social, or economic.
…There is no doubt that Buddhist apps are a reflection of real social distress. But, in our assessment, mindfulness, when stripped of all its religious elements, may distort understandings of Buddhism.
A core aspect of Buddhism is the concept of no-self: the belief that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul or other essence. In promoting an individualistic approach to religion, then, Buddhist apps may well rub against the very grain of Buddhist practice.
Indeed, our findings show that Buddhist meditation apps are not a cure that relieves suffering in the world but more like an opiate that hides the real symptoms of the precarious and stressful state in which many people find themselves today.
In that case, Buddhist apps, rather than curing the anxiety created by our smartphones, just make us more addicted to them and, in the end, even more stressed.
The inventor of the web, Tim Berners Lee has a plan to save it - from itself
From the Guardian:
Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global action plan to save the web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations and other malign forces that threaten to plunge the world into a “digital dystopia”.
The Contract for the Web requires endorsing governments, companies and individuals to make concrete commitments to protect the web from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity.
“I think people’s fear of bad things happening on the internet is becoming, justifiably, greater and greater,” Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, told the Guardian.
“If we leave the web as it is, there’s a very large number of things that will go wrong. We could end up with a digital dystopia if we don’t turn things around. It’s not that we need a 10-year plan for the web, we need to turn the web around now.”
The contract, which has been worked on by 80 organisations for more than a year, outlines nine central principles to safeguard the web – three each for governments, companies and individuals.
The document, published by Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation, has the backing of more than 150 organisations, from Microsoft, Twitter, Google and Facebook to the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At the time of writing, Amazon had not endorsed the principles.
Those who back the contract must show they are implementing the principles and working on solutions to the tougher problems, or face being removed from the list of endorsers. If the stipulation is properly enforced, some may not last long.
A report from Amnesty International accuses Google and Facebook of “enabling human rights harm at a population scale”. The report comes weeks after Google was found to have acquired the personal health records of 50 million Americans without their consent.
The contract’s principles require governments to do all they can to ensure that everyone who wants to can connect to the web and have their privacy respected. People should have access to whatever personal data is held on them and have the right to object or withdraw from having that data processed.