An unacknowledged way AI is killing life
I've noticed that A.I. is increasingly gaining ground in people's life. Even ignoring the more worrisome cases of misuse, such as the Neuromancer-esque divinization of A.I. by some people, it has taken a hold of the most basic of internet functions everyone does: googling. Soon, few people will know the origin of the word, since everyone is starting to just ask ChatGPT, or equivalents, whatever they would google before.
Many criticisms are, rightly, being lobbed against AI, from economical to ethical concerns. But one I have yet to see is one of the most dangerous, in my mind. It is the severing of the relationship between a teacher and a pupil, one of the intrinsic ways in which a community is maintained, and culture is kept alive. By learning from our fellows, we are strengthening the bonds that make up society. This can be such mundane things as a Father teaching his kid how to shave, or a local craftsmen taking on youths as apprentices, or just the simple conversation we have with our neighbours about their lives, what they go through.
The reason to interact with other people is precisely to learn something from them. To understand the world, by seeing it through different lens. To understand ourselves, by recognizing what we see differently from others, but also what we share. This is why we read books and watch movies, to send our gaze outward, to see ourselves from without. Art is a mirror that reflects twin perception. The artist creates in his image. The watcher sees his own reflection. The object becomes a link between two visions.
This link between people, this dependency on one another, is the source of love. Saint Augustine, sixteen hundred years ago, said it beautifully:
"Moreover, there would be no way for love, which ties people together in the bonds of unity, to make souls overflow and as it were intermingle with each other, if human beings learned nothing from other humans."[²]
The decaying of this link was prophetised by Schumacher in the 70's. He was specifically concerned with the loss of the teaching link because of technology:
"If the nature of change is such that nothing is left for the fathers to teach their sons, or for the sons to accept from their fathers, family life collapses. The life, work, and happiness of all societies depend on certain 'psychological structures' which are infinitely precious and highly vulnerable (...) a man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness"[¹]
Technology at the time was superseding the role of teachers, especially fathers, by making their knowledge useless, since technology was evolving too fast to keep up. It seems to be a tendency developing since the Industrial Revolution. Today, this has taken a thousand steps further.
It was already dangerous before AI. We have been Googling whenever we need to learn something. Sometimes we'll find youtube videos, but more often than not we find a random website written by some unknown person. For more complex things, such as language learning, it has become the norm to simply use an app. We aren't interacting with our community. We aren't even interacting with people. But at least there was a human element, someone who wrote websites, recorded videos, developed apps.
With AI, even that human creative element is gone. Those who learn through AI have removed every human element in their experience. It's a soulless mode of being, I think. There may be a time when we won't depend on anyone else, and our lives will be fully actualized towards our Self as a singular, individual entity, turbo boosted by AI. The worst part is that, as far as I've seen, it isn't even an effective way of learning anything. AI is killing an intrinsic aspect of human connection, and giving nothing in return.
I don't want this future.
I will make an effort in my life to be a teacher and a pupil to others.
[¹] - Schumacher 1973, Small is Beautiful: 159.
[²] - Saint Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, praef. 13.
This post is part of Agora Road's Travelogue