Listening to the new Switchfoot album, which for me will always be an event, one could label it a passion project, and it has certainly been a while in the making. The product of where the bandmates find themselves in this present moment, wrestling with songs that seek to find the power of the present inbetween the lyrical bookends of creation and mortality. What if, the songs wonder, the eternal begins now.
This pushes us to then consider what it means to live the present and all of the tension this evokes. How do we find the “Beautiful Life” amidst the “Darkness.” How do we find ourselves in the process of losing ourselves. How do we see when it feels impossible to even imagine. How do we define what is real and what is not. How do we define what the Natural World is.
This narrative is a powerful one on it’s own. What struck me as even more timely and even astute is the album’s lyrical reflection on one of humanity’s reigning crisis: the world of algorithms and AI. A subject that seems to be making itself known in the headlines over and over again. These past few days the thing raising alarm bells is the beloved indie studio A24 signing a deal with an outsourced company researching and developing AI technology. Just the next in line of what seems an endless line of different entities making the same noted and proactive investment in figuring this beast out.
And as it goes with this now common narrative, entity makes the announcement, public backlash ensues. Feelings loom large and heated over this uncertain subject, to be sure.
I was pondering this on my walk today. I understand the reactions. At least I think I do. What I find more interesting is assessing what those reactions are. What they reveal about where we are in this present moment and what we actually believe about the shape of this world.
This is the thought thst came to me, admittedly raw. It seems curious to me that the very thing that fears the increasing presence of AI in our lives is the thing that gave it life. AI is the product of an enlightenment society built on the myth of progress. What drives this myth is the utilitarian commitments that see progress as the symbol of humanity’s greatest accocmplishment: remaking a primitive world in our image (humanism). An accomplishment that marries both moral and technological aims, seeing these things as largely interconnected within the field of the sciences, humanity’s greatest tool.
Somewhere within that mix a seemingly arbitrary line seems to have gotten drawn in our minds. In some way, form and fashion technology has now become the enemy of the great human enterprise. This in a world where the same people have insisted streaming networks driven by billionaire entities and algorithms is somehow perfectly human.
There’s a twist if ever there were one.
A twist, but not unexpected. If Foreman, the lead singer of Switchfoot, is correct, we are saturated in this present moment with a world already saturated in the very same soil it was birthed from. Algorithms and AI is simply the present language defining these same patterns. Ours is a world we not only championed, but bought into without abandon, and often in the name of “everything evolves” and “change is the one constant” mantras. Which is to say, the outcry over AI might feel logical and prescient, but it comes amidst the uncritical embrace of systems that have long since controlled and directed the shape of human development. AI has simply found a way to, seemingly, make people hyper aware of the nature of this world we have long thought to be made in our own image, and apparently we don’t like this reality.
In a very real sense, what lies behind the fears over AI is a fear that the enlightenment narrative which was supposed to save the world by way of our modern, evolved, human ambition is being unmasked and layed bare. Rather than concede that point, AI has become the next in a long line of scapegoats allowing us to preserve the illusion. AI, we insist, erodes true humanist systems and values. It destroys what we (humanity) have built. It’s a mere copy of the real thing, an entity steeped in plagarism and dependent on it’s true master (us).
In truth, what AI actually does is challenge our narratives of what it means to be human. For Foreman, this is the central question behind the songs on Forever Now: what does it mean to be human.
To acknowledge AI is in some ways to acknolwedge that it is modeled on the same theoretical grounds that frames human function. For as long as we can find a way to convince ourselves it is a lesser version of the real thing, whatever that happens to mean, we are able to avoid this central truth about what it is we fear. This is, ironically, part of the nature of our humanity. But the theory, for as persistent as it must be in a utilitarian/materialist worldview, can only stand if we are to see humanity as a product of this same function. Dig into the many smart theorists that are out there and you will uncover this same basic thought. The future of AI is in fact following what we can observe about this function. The irony of course being that AI becomes it’s own tool in a sense, doing the necessary groundwork on it’s own to better it’s own programming.
Which, again, a certain worldview will describe as the same pattern that we find in the functioning brain. Once AI finds the approrpriate brain map, the possibilities become endless.
Here the nuances dig even deeper yet. Because of course this has immense implications for how it is that we engage human society. As a tool, AI reaches into all facets of life. It drives medical research and inovation, environmental engagment, how we shop for groceries (or anything for that matter), what we drive, how we build, on and on and on. This is part of the conundrum it creates for us as a species. The myth of progress rests on this notion of a better world, and by better it means technologicaly advanced (bound together as that is with morality).
Not unlike the discovery of fire, the main engine of such changes throughout human history are driven by this notion of new inventions doing the work (energy) that we used to do ourselves. There are a number of voices though that will argue that we can also find in that historical picture a clear dividing line between when the rate of change began to outpace our ability to conform to it (or conform it to our lives more aptly). AI is simply one more expression of that same reality. In many ways, it’s no different than the world we have been living in for a while now. We simply haven’t recognized it, largly because we have bought so sharply into the enlightnment narrative. Lose that and the whole humanist enterprise comes crashing down on itself. The whole world becomes a machine, if you will.
And, for that matter, nothing cuts quite as sharp as a tool that seems to undercut one of our most important characteristics: our creativity. In some weird sense you can hear and feel the mantra that says, you can have our technological inovation, because in some way, shape or form we can still convince ourselves that these inovations are our own. But you can’t have our art.
Or more recognizably, the harder statement: you will never have our art, because you will never be able to make it.
For all the social impact AI does have, this becomes the primary grounds by which we hold on to that position of human excecptionalism.
Now, this is where I would say I personally diverge when it comes to the popular discourse surrounding AI. So much of what I see echos the same concerns on the popular level. We always need a scapegoat, and right now AI is the easy target. Nothing like a great unifier. In fact, you don’t need to look far to see two sides each trying to attach the problem of AI to the other. Try as one might, the blame will also always come back to our need to make these scapegoats human. Depending on who you listen to, it’s a product of leftist indoctrination or being led by the disinformation of the right. In both cases it’s one step removed from framing either case as communism in disguise.
Those human machines are nothing if not predictable after all.
Where I personally diverge is on the front of saying, the real problem with the conversation surrounding AI is that it’s all still bound to the same root problem: a problematic narrative. Until we change the narrative AI will continue to foster the same fears, because it’s the narrative that gives it it’s power over us, not the technology. It’s that narrative that has, largely in our ignorance, handed us a premise in which the things we fear can’t even really be defined. We talk about real versus fake as though the human experience belongs to some different category in a utilitarian/materialist worldview. We train ourselves to ignore the stated systems and structures that give rise to that experience in such a view, camping out on constructed notions such as the “will.” Sometimes I wonder if the best thing we can do to hold our rational senses accountable to this end is, ask the hypothetical question: what happens in a future where AI morphs into not just a replica of the human brain (the engine of that machine), but of something with immense more capability.
And then ask how we tend to do this all the time already in, as one book puts it, the invention of prehistory. The very thing that allows the modernist narrative of the enlightenment to keep surviving against all manners of logical inconsistencies and less than rational appeals to the way the world actually works and what history actually reveals: it is the invention of Prehistory that allows the modernist narrative to set its humanist interests over and above the supposed primitive world that ironically gave it its existence (modernism needs the bloody and violent demise of so called primitive to exist within its own myth of progress).
Here I also diverge in a second way. If that narrative is what enslaves us to this fear, a different narrative can liberate us from it. In this sense it’s not so much in standing against AI as in being able to actually name what it is. It belongs to the category of technological progress. To the myth of progress. And yet, and this is where my beliefs kick in, this myth, for as much as it sells us on that all too appealing notion of remaking the world in our image, binds us to a story that can only ever lead to the same inevitable end: dividing humanity against itself. What we need is a myth that can actually bring into view our experience of something that is legitimately beyond us. That’s the irony. AI is not beyond us. In the narrative in which we are taught to fear it, AI can only ever be us, and we can only ever be it. We are all part of the same machine that replicates the same function that fuels the pattern of all life. Just as it’s possible to experience a work of art that AI makes as genuine “in our brains,” so we experience anything in precisely the same way. That’s the truth of that particular narrative. For something to transcend the notion of construct, of being “our creation,” and to represent something real and true, inherently so, it must appeal to something outside of ourselves. So it is with beauty and awe. So it is with love. These are the sorts of things that tell a different story. about the nature of the world, truths to which we are drawn, not truths which we construct.
To bring it back to switchfoot, that’s what allows us to imagine eternity beginning now. That’s what frees us to believe in the present
The Stories of my Life 