Reading in Ruins II

Looking over the recent stories coming out of Silicon Valley lately it’s hard not to feel as if one is reading a joke in reverse time. I, for instance, always have a good laugh before having to remind myself these people are entirely in earnest. For like all humourless people, the men who run these organisations have that fatal defect which makes it nearly impossible for them to view the world at all seriously. Why humourless? Well, watching Mark Zuckerberg explain why he wants us all to make friends with AI chatbots in lieu of actual people, I was obliged to conclude that having floated this idea with those around him, the fact its not immediately being mocked into oblivion was taken as vigorous approval may well prove the fine line between genius and fool is, allowing for general sycophancy, far wider than common wisdom would have you believe. That he’s also put forward the idea they could act as therapists only adds needless colour to what was already a fine joke.

Certainly I’m not the only one who cringes whenever one of these techno-billionaires announces their latest engine for social improvement. The past century, replete with such great leaps forward (followed, shortly thereafter, by the inevitable crash-landings) in architecture, agriculture, nuclear weaponry, and the prophylactic pill, has made us all highly sceptical of such promises. Who didn’t, for example, on first hearing Corbusier’s term for his famous designs, feel the proverbial chill down the spine? ‘Machines for living,’ after all, must rank high among the most disgusting phrases of the last century. But I admit my mouth is riven in glee thinking of what these children of Prometheus will come up with as means of packaging the idea that damaged people — and how many can claim that epithet — should be buddying up to chatbots as a cure for loneliness. Fair-connection friends, perhaps? Machines for Loving? Mon AI? Already the stories of men and women falling in love with these large language models are beginning to infest the news streams. No doubt to the relief of many a tabloid editor. But to find oneself yawning at the prospect of reading articles with headlines like ‘My Wife Ran off with the AI,’ or ‘Husband Caught in bed with LLM Nanny’ is only to recognise, however reluctantly, that man’s chief means of reconciling innovation to daily life is through the medium of the sex instinct. As always with technology, the distance between the banal and the terrifying is only ever a perineum of thought.

When asked about the potential dangers of such technology however, we find its chief proponents have already formed their Maginot Line. AI, they tell us, is a tool. If it’s being misapplied then the answer is not Luddism but to better educate the populace into its proper function. Better yet, why not another tool? Last year, when a fourteen year-old boy from Orlando, Florida took his own life after engaging obsessively with one of these chatbots, the company responsible for producing the software released yet another tool the better to help concerned parents monitor their children’s screen time — allaying their fears I’m sure. This is the old routine, favoured by all fetishists of progress, of breaking what works and then destroying what’s broken, before christening the enterprise as efficiency. The line of argument is of course as facile as it is self-interested. It also wilfully neglects the fundamental defect in the technologist’s worldview, which is that the problem with being gifted a tool is that you can never quite be sure whether you are merely extending your own agency, or whether one’s benefactor has extended theirs; presumably, that is to say, over you.

The distance between our own minds and those from whence these horrors come, however, is not entirely insurmountable. Their difference is a matter of degree, not of kind. Almost 70 years ago, in his novel Homo Faber, Max Frisch gave us an early — at any rate, earlier — study of the type. Having been stranded in the Mexican desert after an emergency landing, waiting to be picked up by a helicopter from north of the border, Walter Faber, the UNESCO engineer and ‘technologist … accustomed to seeing things as they are,’ looks out at the bright, moon-lit landscape of shifting sands, thinking:

‘Why should I experience what isn’t there? Nor can I bring myself to hear something resembling eternity; I don’t hear anything, apart from the trickle of sand at every step. I am shivering, but I know that in seven to eight hours the sun will be shining again. What is all this nonsense about the end of the world? I can’t imagine a lot of nonsense, merely in order to experience something.’

To be blind to a sense of eternity, or indeed to the end not only of oneself but one’s species and way of life, can only leave one with an obstinate, even fevered presentism; which wedded to a commitment to ceaseless technological progress seeks to strive without a concern for consequence. Beyond ‘can it be done?’ what is there to be asked?

As Faber reluctantly acknowledges, his view of the world leaves starved a part of himself, but he refuses to feed it by imagining ‘nonsense.’ Yet to label this desire as such is of course to misunderstand. Science has conspired to explain the phenomena of nature, but as with the sound of the trickling sand he is wilfully neglecting a greater longing, which constantly draws him toward a relationship with the numinous, but which by vigilance he suppresses. Recalling Hazlitt’s point, that ‘we do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts,’ is to grasp that Faber the engineer is half-blind. He will not allow his heart to seek out what his understanding cannot.

Stressing the Malthusian point later on, he says, ‘Anyone who rejects abortion on principle is romantic and irresponsible. It should not be done thoughtlessly, that’s obvious, but in the last analysis we must face facts, for example, the fact that man’s existence is not least a question of raw materials’. Forgetting the heated debates a moment, it’s clear the kind of mind we’re dealing with. For as with all utilitarians, ‘the question of raw materials’ leads inevitably to a race to the bottom of man’s desires. Technologists today depart from this only, though consequentially, in that wedded to this hard logic is a total desire to reach beyond and reconstitute man’s relationship with the world and not only to tweak at the margins. This is fundamentally why these Silicon Valley types are so strange. Whether by infusing brain chips or desiring AI to invigilate every moment of our wakeful and sleeping lives, they both work with frightening disregard for the limits of their ‘raw materials’ and yet with zero concern — indeed, with what appears to be no knowledge of — the human heart. 

Now I suspect the types that go to work in these institutions have little regard for humanities graduates. Why should they? The successes of our age can hardly find their attribution to the products of English departments. Yet I suggest we feel that wound now more than ever. Not only because their buildings might be less ugly, or that they might quote verse instead of meaningless statistics, but because they might be forced to grapple with questions that fundamentally would bring them disquiet. I do not suggest that on every Meta building the line, ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?’ should be displayed. But a recognition that they have made obese only one side of our nature while attenuating another would perhaps confront them with the demand of driving a real innovation in the spirit, and not just the ‘raw materials’, of man. 

Can you imagine a modern technology that would grant the opportunity to consummate one’s desire for virtue? Neither can I. At this point I believe the task harder than reaching even Mars. But if the technologists want a real challenge then they should approach this question. If they don’t, and I think we’re quite some time away from them doing so, then the ever marching progress of technology will continue. And then, well, what’s a Hell for?

— Amory Crane

Amory Crane is Editor-in-Chief at Decadent Serpent. He covers such topics as Art, Literature, and the more broadly Cultural, reporting straight from the chamber of what Shelley once called the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. You can follow him @LaughingCav1 on X or on Substack. He also writes fiction.