Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti-AI
On the mimetic machinations of the discourse.
I recently returned from a conference in the Vatican on A.I. where I was strapped to a table so that a giant bird could peck at my liver every day. To be fair, that’s how I feel at basically any conference. But this one was particularly painful—about a hundred of us were packed in a room without enough water, in U.N.-style stadium seating with name tags. Mine might have included the letters “Mr.” before my name, but I can’t remember. The people sitting on the ends of the rows were the only ones who had free access to get up. If you weren’t seated at the end, you were trapped on the inside and could only leave if everyone else who was seated in the direction you were attempting to exit from got up and moved first. That triggered a unique kind of spiritual claustrophobia for me. (“Hold up, what if I’m stuck here on the inside, and the panel becomes intolerable, and I have no way of leaving for a pretend bathroom break without asking everyone in my row for permission first?”). It gave me a type of vertigo, like leaning over the railing at the top of a skyscraper and imagining myself falling, except in this case it meant falling onto something harder than pavement. The greatest irony was that most if not all of the conversation seemed like it could have been generated by A.I.
I think one of the worst things about being in a room with that many Catholics in such a historic venue—the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, and with the self-importance that we were ‘privately invited’—is that there are several rounds of intellectual back-patting that have to happen before any real discussion begins. People must drop phrases (all good phrases, in theory) like “human dignity” and “the alignment problem”, “human ecology”, etc, with several making obscure scripture references to indicate their level of Christian basedness. Did he just quote from the Book of Revelation? My God, Man, nobody references that book!
It’s like a party at which nobody is having a good time but everyone has to act like they’re having a good time for the sake of the host.
One of my favorite books is titled How to Talk About Books You’ve Never Read by Pierre Bayard, which is what I think we’re often doing when we talk about AI. This new technology, like a book we’ve never read, is a cultural symbol that we are supposed to have an intelligent sounding opinion about. Not having anything to say about A.I. is like someone in the literary world not having anything to say about the new Sally Rooney novel.
AI is a hyperobject that nobody can see or touch—something so big and diffuse and abstract that our minds break just thinking about the different scenarios that might play out. We ponder whether it’s even real, and who we can trust about it. It’s not so different from ‘climate change’ or the early days of Covid. Everyone has to have a position. If you don’t have a position, you’re not “responsible”.
There is a recursive nature to modern liberal discourse in which each ideological stance opposes the othersf (for purposes of this essay, A.I. could stand for “Another’s Idea”), creating convoluted viewpoints. It is a kind of mimetic complexity that obscures straightforward thinking. Here are some different perspectives on AI, each with its stance and counter-stance:
Anti-AI
The anti-AI position is held by people who are vaguely ‘against’ AI, or whatever it is they believe AI to be. Like the next Anti-Woke book on the publishing slate, there will always be a market for ‘anti-AI’ positions to counter the reductionistic accelerationist positions—those who want to accelerate at all costs—because the AI hype is indeed out of control, and someone needs to be there to awake the bros in the morning when they’re sleeping, hungover from binge reading too much Pirate Wires.
Anti-Anti-AI
Anti-anti-AI means being fundamentally against the Anti-AI skeptics—standing against any attempt to question, in the slightest degree, whether when Sam Altman says something like “well we might destroy humanity but at least we’ll get really rich” that he really means it; who ask whether we might want to slow down and think about how we safeguard ourselves from developing anti-human technology; who worry that we’re constructing counterfeit persons built on new, anti-human philosophies (or anti-anthropologies).
An unbelieved truth is more dangerous than a thousand lies. And there are thousands of lies about AI and the nature of the human person. Perhaps none is more dangerous than the rejection of the simple truth that human brains are not merely complex computers.
Anti-Anti-Anti-AI
“Anti-anti” AI means a wholesale dismissal of AI skepticism or inquiry. It is effectively the accelerationist position. Anti-Anti-Anti-AI, then, is the attitude of those sitting back watching this debate play out who think that it’s entirely crazy. Anti-Anti-Anti-AI is the AI equivalent of a political independent: they stand at a distance because the excesses of the Left and Right are just too much to bear, but they delude themselves into thinking that they don’t have to take a stance.
Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti-AI
As we spiral through endless layers of “anti” stances, from skeptics to accelerationists to aloof onlookers, it’s easy to feel like we’re making intellectual progress while actually moving further from clarity. Each layer seems to distance us from anything real or useful, pulling us into abstractions and reactionary postures that may as well be written by a bot. Perhaps the real question isn’t whether AI is friend or foe but whether we can reanimate a discourse that has become a valley of dry bones, endless reactions without life.
The Valley of Dry Bones
As we were thinking and praying about the launch of the Cluny Journal—for which I’m traveling to NYC next week for a launch party—a passage from Ezekiel haunted me:
The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. Who will catechize the bots?