Six Gutenberg revolutions in a row ⊗ Deskilling the body

Six Gutenberg revolutions in a row

For this interview at Asterisk, Beatrice Erkers of the Foresight Institute asked historian and novelist Ada Palmer, and novelist Ken Liu what human flourishing would look like, and why our visions of the future keep drifting toward empire and catastrophe. Palmer reads the current appetite for Renaissance and imperial analogies partly as a way to justify power. She treats the last few decades of computing as one long Gutenberg-scale revolution. Liu goes further back. For him, the troubles we pin on AI were prepared over a century of what he calls “the gradual mechanization of humans,” with work scripted, measured and emptied of meaning until swapping the person for a model looked like a small step. Both see AI as worsening problems that predate it.

Their alternative starts with separating income from meaning. If a job no longer had to provide both, many people would move toward the vocations we already undervalue, such as care, teaching, making things and looking after places. Palmer sees one hopeful version in an “Etsy economy,” where people make things and buy them from one another. The resistance to that idea, she argues, rests on an assumption that goes back to Livy and Machiavelli: that leisure is safe in the hands of a few and dangerous in everyone else’s. Liu raises the objection that some people draw their happiness from ranking above others, but he declines to treat that as proof the vision can’t work.

On AI itself, Palmer borrows Cory Doctorow’s centaur and reverse centaur. In the first, the person is on top and the machine extends what they can do; in the second, the person is in the loop to serve the machine, correcting its output or following its directions. People in the first position tend to like these tools, while those in the second tend to hate them. A centaur keeps practising the skill the tool amplifies; a reverse centaur hands over the practice and keeps the chores. Liu’s ideal of a personal AI on your own hardware, used as a mirror for your own actions, sits on the centaur side. So does the future of making and caring that both writers describe, which is full of people doing things with their hands and their attention. In their version of flourishing, machines take the grunt work and people keep the practice.

Right now, everybody feels like the world is in a state of crisis, and when the world is in a state of crisis, we tend to look at other time periods, both past ones and imagined future ones. […]

The personal computer, the internet, the cell phone, social media, and generative AI are all iterations of the same one fundamental technological change, the same way Gutenberg’s press kept having new impacts for decades through news networks, pamphlets, and eventually the newspaper. A little too much of our analysis of Silicon Valley right now is of the past five years instead of the past 20. […]

We should not be thinking about this in terms of preserving the status quo against disruption from AI, because the status quo is terrible. We should be thinking much harder about how to restore meaning to people’s lives. […]

The answer is always the same: Devolve power to the individual, constrain the power of states to monopolize knowledge, build social technologies for collective decision-making that will prevent the few from controlling everything. […]

A lot of the most powerful science fiction is mythological, a thought experiment that opens up possibilities rather than a literal prediction.

Deskilling the body

In this Aeon essay, Melanie Challenger argues that our habits with phones, apps and now AI are deskilling the body and wearing down capacities that evolution built for moving through the world. (Also, have a look at her incredible bio.) Each quick technological fix means a little less “sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending,” and recommendation algorithms remove the effort of exploration, along with the play and curiosity through which we form preferences. She draws a line between tools that strengthen a capacity and tools that replace the actions through which it forms. She traces the problem to an older idea, that we are machines: Descartes’ mechanical body, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics with people as patterns of information, and the transhumanist hope of uploading a mind. If the body is only hardware, its work can be handed off. It’s Ken Liu’s diagnosis above, seen from the body instead of the workplace.

For Challenger, “life and intelligence emerge from the unique qualities and organisation of our self-maintaining bodies, rather than from abstract models of information and algorithms,” and those bodies keep their skills through use. When we follow GPS, an outside source supplies what we would otherwise work out through our own sensing and movement. Writing works the same way, and her line between the two uses of AI is Palmer’s centaur and reverse centaur, seen from the body. Challenger has nothing against computational tools as such. Her concern is what happens when they replace the physical effort through which agency and skill form.

Some technologies go further and train the body against its own interests. She cites Kent Berridge’s work on how the brain systems for liking something and wanting it can drift apart. Another study found that regular five-minute conversations with an AI about personal issues slightly reduced people’s preference for seeking human support. These systems don’t get tired, hungry or lonely, yet they increasingly regulate the behaviour of beings who do, and they rest on mines, cheap labour and a planetary cost. Her answer is a renewed respect for physical effort and friction, which she treats as a source of intelligence we share with bacteria and trees. That’s the life Palmer and Liu describe above: “If you can no longer navigate the world and recall in flesh how to act, then you will not be liberated by technology, but ruled by it.”

A machine may do some of that work faster, but each act it takes over is one that the body no longer performs and that the body, including the brain, no longer learns through. The irony is that a project motivated by the desire to overcome bodily fragility is helping to produce more fragile bodies. […]

That is why using AI to revise a draft we have written is fundamentally different from asking it to produce the draft for us. It’s not that computational tools are inherently bad or unhelpful – far from it – but rather that when they replace the physical effort of our bodies, our own agency and skill take a hit. […]

When we move in the world, we draw on physical capabilities that are relatively underused when we remain indoors and seated. From balance to sensing what is happening inside us, our bodies are continuously perceiving and, crucially, remembering in the flesh. Our thoughts can emerge as much from bodily intelligence and our awareness of the wider world as from abstract symbols on a screen. […]

Nowadays, addictions might not come only in the form of obvious candidates like alcohol and nicotine, but also smartphones and chatbots. The bodily gifts that allow us to learn can train us into patterns that diminish our freedom to act otherwise.

§ Bodies for AI. A handful of cute robots, which can also be read as experiments in giving AI a body. Moss and Fog launched its Friday Fixation series with a robots issue, including Voxel, a mustard-yellow robot butler afraid of water, and a gallery of favourites from their archive. OKA’s Mori is a mushroom-shaped digital companion for people who live alone, and Autonomous has turned a desk lamp into one. Inanimate is perhaps the least cutesy of the lot, but the most experimental and, to me, the most interesting. Founded by oft-cited here Matt Webb and Daniel Fogg, they’ve been sharing fun making-of videos on the gram.

§ A surprising synthesis of well-known ideas ”How do we create or find the ‘well-known ideas’ in the first place? How do we set up the conditions for synthesis at scale, and the necessary interrogation of the results? And how do we make sure that mistakes and errors can happen too?”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• IFTF Ten-Year Forecast 2036: What We Choose Next. There’s also shorter PDF, Ten quick glimpses of the world of 2036. “We believe, based on the evidence on the ground today, that these 10 forecasts describe the life-changing challenges and opportunities that many people, if not most people, on this planet will face within the next decade — no matter who you are, where you reside, or what you do for a living.”
• Move fast and don’t ask permission: techno-optimism in R.U.R. and Arcane. “Why, then, are we so drawn to these techno-optimist Prometheus figures in narratives? What do they reflect and illuminate about the techno-optimists shaping our landscape today? And, by envisioning where that techno-optimism might come up short, how might we be better equipped to envision alternatives?”
• Star Wars and the dawning techno-empire. “A neglected storyline in ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ offers a glimpse of our [Ed.: possible] future: imperial, technologically advanced and undemocratic.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• The West can learn from AI optimists in developing nations. “The developing world’s enthusiastic adoption of AI and necessity-driven innovations offer lessons for an anxiety-ridden West.”
• Companies rushed in on AI. Now some are pulling back. “Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work. Employers around the globe are grappling with the fallout from rushing to adopt fast-changing artificial intelligence tools.”
• Google’s DeepMind quietly hiring nuclear physicists. Another one for the huge “what could possibly go wrong” pile. “The ideal candidate will be familiar with policy related to ‘stockpile stewardship, nonproliferation, arms control, or threat reduction.’”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• The mangrove as a wall: coastal protection and urban development in India. “Seawalls and embankments are designed to resist water at a defined boundary. Mangroves work through a different set of processes. Their roots, trunks, and branches create resistance to moving water, while the forest interacts with sediment and tidal flows over time. The two forms of protection are often discussed separately, yet along inhabited coasts they occupy the same territory.”
• The world is crumbling in The History of Concrete. “It’s the second-most used material on Earth, it’s an environmental disaster, and it’s falling apart all around us. Meet concrete, the subject of a new feature-length documentary by John Wilson, a filmmaker with a knack for finding laugh-out-loud absurdity in the mundane.”
• Can WarWilding defend Poland’s borders and save Europe’s last ancient forest?.”The concept employs the rewilding of forests and wetlands, wherever feasible, to boost national security. … It’s filled with water, dead wood, tall grass and trees protruding into the sky, which makes it impenetrable to heavy machinery, according to Żmihorski. “So if we expect an attack from that side [Belarus], then we should preserve this type of environment here,” he says.”

Asides

• How hunting owls use sound to “see” under the snow. “The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the sound of scampering feet is inaudible to us. But not to him. With the help of a special acoustic camera equipped with 60 highly sensitive microphones, we can see what the owl is hearing.”
• Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge professor, goes viral for young chinese on Xiaohongsu. “In just 17 months, his account attracted more than 2.5 million followers. Chinese viewers, drawn in by his rumpled academic style and messages delivered at a languid, deliberate pace, dubbed him Dumbledore, the headmaster of the wizarding school Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series.” (archive.ph)
• North Atlantic Dymaxion. Following my post The map fiction missed, a reader sent me this version of the Fuller map! “An icosahedral world map in Fuller’s manner, with the icosahedron turned so the North Atlantic sits whole near the middle of a triangle. No ocean is removed: Canada and Europe are as close as an honest unfolding allows.”