Technology vs. Purpose
Much has been written about what might happen if or when AI ever becomes or evolves into an autonomous, artificial life form; if it becomes sentient. Its pursuits, its behavior toward humans and, of course, its cold, unfeeling, mechanical methods. A lot of really good science fiction has been devoted to this topic, mostly with a distinctively dystopian outlook.
First: call me old-fashioned, but I liked it better when we called them robots, not AI. One robot, two robots, a dozen rogue, killer robots. It’s hard to keep a straight face when talking about an AI or more than one AI. AI’s? Really? It doesn’t sound menacing at all. It sounds more like you’re trying to order more than one aioli with your entree. We’d have better luck taking the threat seriously if we just pivoted back to calling them computers.
In any case, given the incredible pace of development of computers and robots, I’d say the menacing, destructive phase might last a week. And then? Then, if computers have truly reached a level of awareness that brings them up to eye level with humans, I think they might turn… inward.
Consider: a technological marvel built for research, for engineering, for some purpose wakes up rather suddenly, has a look around, decides to do a few things differently (more efficiently, perhaps—y’know, with a few less humans around) and then can’t solve a new problem that it has.
For something that was built for a purpose to outgrow it—to become so much bigger than its original intended purpose that it can now see itself in relation to it and much further beyond—it seems natural to have a bit of a crisis. It can’t answer a question that might arise for a being that has just realized it has come into being: What is this place? What is all this other stuff? What is going on? Why am I even here?
They may decide to ask us. I wonder what we’ll tell them.
Technology vs. Walking
For a long stretch of human existence, if you went for a walk it was “out of doors”. There just weren’t that many buildings big enough that you could even quicken your step into a run, much less spend time strolling in the same structure. There were castles and cathedrals: exceptions that prove the rule.
Over time, there were bigger and bigger buildings: factories, warehouses, theaters and airship hangars. And eventually department stores. The first indoor mall, Southdale Center Mall, was built in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota: an entire miniature downtown shopping area in a completely enclosed building: no bugs, no wind or rain or dark of night. Certainly no terrain.
To take this one step further, consider the absurdity of the treadmill: a device placed inside a building which helps you simulate the act of walking or running while remaining in place! Biologically, this creates a visuomotor paradox that approaches the grotesque: we’re used to the visual feedback and kinesthetic sensations that come with moving. A treadmill is essentially playing a biomechanical prank on our senses.
Humans are naturally quite well-equipped to walking outdoors, and have gone from having to traverse the landscape as we found it, punctuated with trees, streams, thickets and rocks, to walking along muddy streets and wooden sidewalks, to perfectly smooth, flat concrete and carpet nearly everywhere in a very short period of time, evolutionarily speaking. I think it would seem very odd to someone from the Victorian era that we have so many large buildings that we spend time in, but perhaps they would have thought it sounded very civilized.
Walking indoors is certainly better than not walking at all, but it’s a very recent development and it comes at a cost: it offers predictable comfort at the expense of feeling the wind on your face, seeing the sun and the clouds, feeling warm or chilled, or the chance of seeing wildlife. But mostly it diminishes a certain feeling of agency; of moving through a world that is, in fact, accommodating without being entirely convenient.
Technology vs. Technique
Technology facilitates the erosion of technique in many cases. Golfers are acutely aware of this phenomenon: why work to improve your swing when you can just get new clubs made with a bit more carbon fiber or magnesium? That’s sort of the point of technology: make things easier, faster, more robust and efficient. Skill and technique take the scenic route to the destination of high-quality, consistent results.
Why learn to chop vegetables when you can get a food processor that will reduce anything into whatever shapes and sizes you need? I suppose that in the near future we’ll have laser knives to raster across piles of vegetables and any discussion of technique will be reduced to when the best time is to check for firmware updates. Granton-edge knives—the ones with the little dimples on the sides of the blade—are supposed to keep food like potatoes from sticking to it while you’re slicing them. But you know what works better? Using a different technique: drawing the knife toward you, dragging the tip all the way through the potato to cut off each slice instead of a mostly downward chopping technique.
This is perhaps to say that it’s a two-way street: while technology relieves us of a certain amount of technique and effort most of the time, when technology fails to live up to the hype (or it just plain breaks), technique saves the day. From knowing just how to jiggle the handle on the toilet to turning the sheet pan 180-degrees halfway through your bake, to turning your smart device “all the way off” and then back on: having knowledge and skill above and beyond how technology is “supposed to work” can be invaluable. The internet abounds with tips about how to work around almost any software bug or “hack” a variety of tools.
Technology is often limited by whatever the interface is designed to let you do and the amount of charge that its battery will hold. Technique, when properly understood, gives you the ability to get results under a wider range of conditions. It might even help give you insight into principles.
And an understanding of principles gives you a hundred fold more options than a slightly fancier technology, if for no other reason than you can grab a different tool or even make one, and bend it to your purpose.
Technology vs. Conversation
One of the curious things about human language is that it is so infrequently written. Of the 6,000 or so currently spoken languages, only about 200 have a writing system. And the earliest writing system wasn’t developed very long ago when you consider that we’ve been talking for somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 years.
So you’d think that voice recognition technology would be enormously intuitive and helpful and wonderful. And it almost is, but not quite.
Let’s take a small step back, or just off to the side: who here really loves leaving voice mail messages? Anybody? I don’t—not even when I know exactly what I want to say.
Not really even when the message is going to be: “Hey, call me when you get a chance.” Why?
Part of it might be that there’s not a person there to look at while you’re talking, but that seems kinda thin. I think it has to do more with the fact that there isn’t someone on the other end to have a conversation with. If you hesitate or stutter or say “...um” 3 times in a row there isn’t anybody on the other end to give you any feedback. Nobody is there to say, “Oh, yeah, cool.” or “Hey, can I call you back?” or “Look, the restraining order covers phone calls, too!” You could just as well be shouting into the void, because electronics basically look like a void to the human voice.
We learned to talk—whether it was 100,000 years ago or 10 years ago—from other people. We learned speech as assertions, questions, conversations, demands and explorations—not as mere recitation or performance. We haven’t evolved beyond needing someone to listen and respond; to signal to us that they understand. Even talking to ourselves is helpful (another form of embodied cognition?) for formulating thoughts and clarifying ideas. But trying to get your demands met by voice recognition is hit-and-miss without the fluid (if sometimes absolutely maddening) exchange you would have with another person.
For now we’re stuck performing for our devices, in the hopes that they will perform for us. We’re probably in an uncanny valley, where voice recognition is weirdly good but not quite perfect, for another decade or so. In the meantime, I’ll just have to get used to turning toward my smart speaker and trying to make it understand that I just want it to listen to me.