“Less mechanisation in life! Resist the machine apocalypse!” We’re pretty techno-optimist here, but these are powerful voices against
We are pretty techno-optimistic at the Alternative Global (see our “ingenuity” and “technology” categories). We’ve no great faith in the prospect of us solely “innovating” our way out of our collective crises. But we think that radical, transforming technologies can be harnessed to well-developed and self-determined individuals and communities - or that it’s always at least possible.
But you’d have to admit that there is a lot of what could strictly be called Neo-Luddism around. We understand Luddism, in General Ludd’s 19th century words, as a resistance to technology “that does not benefit the commonality”. As Brian Merchant reminds us in his new book, Luddites only smashed machinery which impoverished and entirely replaced skilled workers - innovation which enhanced their powers were most welcomed.
See the reports on the explosion of the WhatsApp group “Smartphone Free Childhood”, set up by two parents concerned (in the wake of the Brianna Ghey murder) about the influence of social media tech on children and youth). Not to mention the Guardian Weekend’s Luddite issue last week.
As part of an evident wave, we were alerted to two pieces this week that argued, from fundamentals, that we must assert the human against the machine.
First is a fascinating piece from John Bell, director of The Conciliators Guild, “an organization dedicated to highlighting the critical importance of innate needs and motivations in politics” (and we might add, drawing its model of human nature from the practice of Human Givens, much deployed in our own work).
The title of the piece is resounding - The Crucial Need For A Less Mechanised Life. Excerpt below:
If the Western world is indeed adamant about annihilating challenge in favour of a technologically-based comfort, then we are in the process of also annihilating meaning. And without meaning, we are lost. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA, in 2022, nine of out of ten Americans believe their country is facing a mental health crisis. The consequences of our shiny new world are anxiety, addictions, depression, suicide and the allure of illusory ideological projects.
Indeed, one can perceive our current trajectory as a form of global suicide. Our technological minders are focused on material gain, or manifesting their left brain talent, but they are also helping us dig our own graves. By being blind to larger context, whether history, culture and biological evolution, we descend into a rabbit hole of the self. We may look fine, but inside we are hollow and empty, right at the edge of losing fundamental purpose. Ironically, despite all their tribulations, most Lebanese are not so. They remain, for now, real if flawed human beings living in terrible circumstances.
In the past, we flourished through simple and direct human relations, embedded in cultures rooted in time, nature and ritual. Common sense and simplicity once prevailed. I remember times in Lebanon in the 1960s when being together with family, talking, laughing, with neither a deadline nor a smartphone was enough to be perfectly satisfied. Similarly, long summers of youth in Canada with almost nothing to do were equally pleasant. Of course, we got bored, and we would then pick-up a book, call a friend, go for a bike ride, or stare into the night sky in awe. There were no phones or video games and yet somehow, miraculously, we were satisfied.
Today, we may have reached a kind of dead end. Material comfort and excessive consumption may seem like steps forward when we gaze at the glass towers rising across the world, or the endless movement and mixing of populations across the earth. However, inside our psyche and soul a partial, half-human is being built, increasingly similar everywhere and lacking in the very quality zealously worshipped in this new world, diversity.
Bell goes on to invoke (and has already in the piece) Iain MacGilchrist’s work on the imbalance between the left (reductive) and right (holistic) hemispheres of the brain. More here.
Spookily, the other piece that came to us this week was from MacGilchrist - a long challenge to AI from his model, printed in the leading theological journal First Things. The title is equally strident: Resist the Machine Apocalypse, An excerpt:
Making the most of these new technologies will require us to grasp a paradox: To succeed at AI, whose purpose is to give us control, we must relinquish control, at least to a great extent. In other words, we must let go of those left-hemisphere mechanisms: bureaucracy, micro-management, and strangulation by systems. We must work with, not against, nature.
A gardener cannot create a plant or make it grow; a gardener can only permit and encourage the plant to do what it does—or else crowd it out and stifle its chances to thrive. Humans, likewise, can only be more or less impeded in our growth by external pressures. We need spontaneity, openness to risk, and trust in our intuition in order to exercise imagination and creativity—and in order to be alive and truly present.
So if we wish to entrust the future to good gardeners rather than manipulators, we will need people with intelligence and insight, and we will need to give them time. Stop breathing down their necks. Stop asking how many papers they have published recently. Or how near they are to a patentable product.
It is true that if you trust, sometimes you will be let down, but more often you will be handsomely rewarded. By contrast, if you monitor and control, you will never get more than mediocrity. And we cannot afford mediocrity right now.
What makes life worth living is what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul—some would say, with the cosmos at large, or with God.
Only in encountering the uncontrollable do we experience the world in its depth and complexity and come fully alive. The resonance we enjoy in a real relationship with a sentient other is not possible where there is no freedom, no spontaneity, no life.
If we are not to become ever more diminished as humans, we need to remain in control of machines, not come under their control. I am not talking about an apocalyptic future; I am talking about apocalypse now. We are already calmly and quietly surrendering our liberty, our privacy, our dignity, our time, our values, and our talents to the machine.
Machines serve us well when they relieve us of drudgery, but we must leave human affairs to humans. If not, we sign our own death warrant.