Ezra Klein reflects on AI, perhaps it will catalyze reflection on the hollowness of our current way of life

Ezra Klein just had an Ask Me Anything episode of his show, and it turns out – surprise! surprise! – that people asked him about A.I. I’ve snipped out bits of his response:

There’s been a strain of commentary and pushback from people saying that, as we think about A.I., we are dehumanizing ourselves in order to adapt ourselves to our own metaphors. There’s a point in a way that Meghan O’Gieblyn makes in her truly fantastic book “God, Human, Animal, Machine,” that metaphors are bidirectional. You start applying a metaphor to something else. And soon enough, it loops around, and you’re applying it to yourself.

You have a computer, and the metaphor is like the computer is like a mind. Then you begin thinking your mind is like a computer because you get so used to talking about it that way. And so you’ll see these things — Emily Bender, the linguist, has really pushed on this. You can see a YouTube presentation of her on A.I. and dehumanization.

And she has a lot of points she’s making in that, but one of them is people will say — and Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI said, to paraphrase, we’re all stochastic parrots with the point being that there’s this idea that these models are stochastic parrots. They parrot back what human beings would say with no understanding.

And so then people turn and say, maybe that’s all we’re doing, too. Do we really understand how our thinking works, how our consciousness works? These are token-generating machines. They just generate the next token in a sequence, a word, an image, whatever.

We’re token-generating machines. How did I just come up with that next word? I didn’t think about it consciously. Something generated the token.

And a lot of people who do philosophy and linguistics and other sort of related areas are tearing their hair out over this, that in order to think about A.I. as something more like an intelligence, you’ve stopped thinking about yourself as a thicker kind of intelligence. You have completely devalued the entirety of your own internal experience. You have made valueless so much of what happens in the way you move through the world.

But I would turn this a little bit around, and this has been on my mind a lot recently. I think the kernel of profound truth in the A.I. dehumanization discourse is that we do dehumanize ourselves and not just in metaphors around A.I. We dehumanize ourselves all the time. We make human beings act as machines all the time.

We tell people a job is creative because we need them to do it. We need them to find meaning in it. But in fact, it isn’t. Or we tell them there’s meaning in it, but the meaning is that we pay them.

So this, I think, is more intuitive when we think about a lot of manufacturing jobs that got automated, where somebody was working as part of the assembly line. And you could put a machine on the assembly line, and you didn’t need the person.

And that is actually true for a lot of what we call knowledge work.

A lot of it is rules based, a lot of the young lawyers creating documents and so on. We tell stories about it, but it is not the highest good of a human being to be sitting around doing that stuff. And it has taken a tremendous amount of cultural pressure from capitalism and other forces — from religion — to get people to be comfortable with that lot in life.

You have however many precious years on the spinning blue orb, and you’re going to spend it writing marketing copy. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with marketing copy. I’ve written tons of marketing copy in my time. But you’ve got to think about how much has gone in to making people comfortable or at least accept that lot.

We dehumanize people. And I wonder — I don’t think this in the two, or five, or 10-year time frame. But on the 25, 50, 100, 150-year time frame, if there’s not a possibility for a rehumanization here, for us to begin to value, again, things that we don’t even try to value and certainly don’t try to organize life around.

If I tell you that my work in life is I went to law school and now I write contracts for firms trying to take over other firms, well, if I make a bunch of money, you’d be like, great work. You really made it, man [LAUGHS]

If that law degree came from a good school, and you’re getting paid, and you’re getting that big bonus, and you’re working those 80 hour weeks, fantastic job. You made it. Your parents must be so proud.

If I tell you that I spend a lot of time at the park, I don’t do much in terms of the economy, but I spend a lot of time at the park. I have a wonderful community of friends. I spend a lot of time with them. It’s like, well, yeah, but when are you going to do something with your life, right, just reading these random books all the time in coffee shops.

I think that, eventually, from a certain vantage point, the values of our current society are going to look incredibly sick. And at some point, in my thinking on all this, I do wonder if A.I. won’t be part of a set of technological and cultural shocks that leads to that kind of reassessment.

Now, that doesn’t work if we immiserate anybody whose job eventually does get automated away. If to have your job as a contract lawyer, or a copy editor, or a marketer, or a journalist automated away is to become useless in the eyes of society, then, yeah, that’s not going to be a reassessment of values. That’s going to be a punishment we inflict on people so the owners of A.I. capital can make more money.

But that is a choice. It doesn’t need to go that way. Lots of people, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the economists have a new book coming out “Power and Progress” on this point exactly. It doesn’t need to go that way. That is a choice. And I think this is a quite good time for more radical politics, to think about more radical political ideas.

Klein’s interlocutor mentions Keynes’ famous essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Here is part of Klein’s response:

And we know, over and over again, that humanity actually does go through very profound shifts in what it values. Now, it doesn’t do it in any given 90-year time frame, but it does do it in terms of the shift from monarchies to more kinds of democracies and more kinds of political systems.

Did it in the shift from hunter gathering to monarchies and cities. Did it in the shift to agriculture. Religions create a lot of this. I think just like — I have no predictions here, but I think that the question of how religions, both old and new, interact with dramatic changes here in the world is going to be very, very, very interesting.

And I think a lot of them have a lot to say about these questions of how we value human life that is simply waiting there to be picked up. I did this episode on Shabbat not long ago about Shabbat and rest and the idea that a day of rest is the day that should be the way the rest of the world works and that the Shabbat practice, in its radicalism, is a profound critique of the values of our economy as they exist right now.

I can imagine that becoming much more widespread, that becoming a much more profound practice and cultural not just artifact but challenge in the kind of world I’m describing.

So I don’t believe in utopias, just in general, but I do believe in change. Now, it’s not going to happen — I don’t believe typically change happens so quickly that, between when I am 38, as I am now, and when I am 50 or 55, that we’ll have stopped having this overwhelming ideology of productivism, nor that I will stop applying it to myself. I have completely imbibed the values of this culture, and standing outside them to critique them in a podcast is a lot easier than not weaving them through my own soul.

But I don’t think the fact that Keynes was wrong about how much we would work and what we would want means that these kinds of shifts don’t happen. I think that a longer view should make that look pretty different to us. And you never know when you’re on the cusp of a world working quite differently than it has in the past.

As always, there's more at the link.