Tag: AI

Who Am I? Why Am I So Afraid of AI?

Here is one truth about aging that we don’t talk about often: we are much more ashamed of signs of mental decline than we are of the physical decay of our bodies.  We don’t like our aging spots or wrinkles, but they don’t make us feel inadequate in the same way that forgetting a name or an appointment does.   Why is it that none of the physical infirmities of old age shame me?  I am not ashamed of my grey hair or the fact that I can no longer hike six miles.  I don’t like the brown spots on my hands, but I am not really ashamed of them.  But the mind is different.  When I forget a name or a common word and have to fish for it, I can exclaim, “Senior Moment!” and laugh – but I really do not think it is funny.  I think it is a profound loss.  And that is not good for the serenity I have been seeking.

Last week my husband came in after a morning errand to tell me that I had forgotten to put the gas cap on and close the little door after I filled up the car the day before.  I had also neglected to notice the message on my dashboard that would have reminded me to go do it.  I felt awful.  I occasionally leave a burner on or leave a light burning when I go to bed.  And, of course, I fish around for names and sometimes ordinary words.  I have always been somewhat absent-minded (as was my mother before me), but it seems to be getting a little worse and more mortifying.

The aging of my physical body does not please me, but it does not mortify me.  I stopped dyeing my hair a dozen years ago; I wear little makeup and have not explored plastic surgery, although I did have my upper eyelids lifted when I started having trouble seeing beyond their droop. Why the difference?

We clearly don’t identify our selves with our aging bodies.  There is Freud’s recollection of catching an unexpected glimpse of himself in a mirror:

Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass of the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. (from “The Uncanny”)

Similarly, Jonathan Swift, upon being led across a room in his dotage, caught sight of himself in a mirror and cried out “O poor old man.”  And so cry we all. And yet, loss of the mind – even in bits and pieces – is worse.  Many of us fear it more than physical death.  Is the reason we are afraid to die not the loss of the body, but the fact that the body will take our consciousness, our sense of identity with it?

And is our source of identity the reason that AI scares us so much?  Artificial hips or implanted lenses don’t scare us.  We are grateful for them.  We don’t mind using motorized scooters if we can’t walk or using hearing aids when we can’t hear. No one is afraid of wearing glasses.  But do we want technology to replace our brain? If we could implant something in our brain to “help” us remember names, would we want to do it?

One of the best sources of how AI was developed is a small book, The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut.  He tells the story of Johnny von Neumann, which leads into the story of Demis Hassabis, a developer of AI and the founder of DeepMind.  I strongly recommend this book – a lucid read on a difficult subject.  Hassabis finds no problem with developing a machine that can think better than we can, and he does.  One of the proofs is that his AI can beat chess masters, and also the masters of Go, a game developed in China over 2,500 years ago, with a system of grand masters known for their wisdom as well as their skill.  In 2016, his AI program took on the master Lee Sedol in Korea for the best of five games with the understanding that all five games would be played regardless of outcome.  AI handily won the first three.  Sedol was demoralized, but persevered and somehow beat AI in the fourth game.  The crowd exploded:

Outside the hotel, Lee’s fans were running in the streets of Seoul, chanting and celebrating their hero’s victory.  Even the team at DeepMind, who had lost, rather embarrassingly, were amazed at Lee’s stunning ability to create something out of nothing.  How could a man, however smart, defeat a computer like AlphaGo, able to calculate over two hundred million positions a second.  Surely it was a feat that would go down in history… something that all mankind could truly celebrate.  (The Maniac)

Why were they so happy?  Sedol had already lost the tournament.  They were happy because AI threatens our very identity, our purpose, our souls.  Needless to say, Hassabis was not happy.  DeepMind fixed AlphaGo and Lee Sedol retired a short time later calling AI “an entity that cannot be defeated.”  He said his “entire world had collapsed.”  Why would anyone play Go again? (I’ll come back to that.)

AI will not get old and forget names and leave the gas cap off.  It will get more and more perfect as my brain probably gets more and more unreliable.  But it is my brain.  It has brought me this far with its own memories and capacities.  If it were fixed, I would not be me.

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke had taken up the subject of personal identity, connecting personhood to consciousness and memory:

For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things: in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being.  And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.  (II: xxvii: 9)

Linking consciousness and memory to identity is problematic in relation to old age, when changes in cognitive abilities may challenge our assurance of continuous identity.  I will have to accept that.  But that same consciousness is my personal identity.  To lose that identity to a machine would be a living death.

I do what I can for my memory.  I push myself to read difficult books, I do puzzles, I enroll in a French class. I create appointment reminders.  I check the stove before I go to bed.  But it is a little silly to accept that the body is changing while refusing to believe that our gray matter is affected too.  And perhaps it is even sillier to think we can patch up our minds with computer chips and not lose our selves in the process.  In the end I am less afraid of my aging mind than I am of AI.

And I continue to enjoy doing the things that AI could do for me.  I play the piano when I could stream Glen Gould playing Bach, I knit hats that computerized mills can make much more quickly and error-free. I do not use AI to write my blog.  There is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in doing such things.  But I had these habits before the advent of AI; I despair for the children.

In Capek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots and where the term robot originated), about the takeover of robots as they first serve mankind and then get rid of them, one of the humans cries that the only solution is to “help people return to their former worries and labor…there is nothing more terrible than giving people paradise on earth.”  Because earth is not paradise and our minds and bodies are not eternal.  And there is some comfort in that.

For more discussion of identity, you might try my past blog, “Was She Someone?”

 

Heart Appreciation

I am still on my “serenity or die” project.  (Maybe it should be called my “last chance for peace project?”) In any case, rather than my usual course of examining those things that steal my serenity, I have tried to focus on those few moments when I do feel… serene (or something akin to it).  I got this idea from Marion Milner’s wonderful book, A Life of One’s Own, which I have written about before.  Milner uses journaling as an instructional path to serenity, a tool for examining what makes her happy in life.  One of the things that Milner says about her own search for happiness is that it somehow helped if she put her awareness in her heart rather than her head.  She calls it an internal gesture.  “I began to understand that my powers of perceiving could be altered, not by directly trying to look, or trying to listen, but by this special internal gesture.”  Sounds silly, but I encourage you to try this change in perspective.

In ancient times (Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew), people thought the seat of the soul was in the heart rather than the head – the Egyptians even threw out the useless brain during mummification, but left the heart as the departed would have need of it.  Hippocrates thought it was the brain where consciousness occurred, but Aristotle was sure that it was the heart.  Science agreed with Hippocrates.  Descartes even “identified” the soul in the pineal gland in the middle of the brain.  Yet, Pascal reminded us that “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.”

Of course, my husband’s recent heart attack has us thinking of that vital organ, of heart rates and blood pressure (which we measure every other day).  And surely the heart responds to our mental moods.  I recalled how, when I first was learning to meditate, an instructor had us hold the bulb of a “hand thermometer” to demonstrate how blood flow increased to the skin as heart rate decreased when we were deep within ourselves.  A calm mind helps the heart function.  Is the reverse also true?

Grace Paley wrote a good and true story about old age called “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” in which the father gives the following advice:

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say—maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

Of course, talk of the heart leads me back to the mind/body connection, and the fact that I read over and over again that stress is a killer. “Stress can wreak havoc on your mind and body” says the Mayo Clinic.   It is not great for serenity either.  Stress can be caused by real challenges, but the body reacts just as strongly to the imagined ones – including all our catastrophic thinking.  I have spent a lot of useless time trying to change the nature of my thinking – but after reading how Milner cast her consciousness into her heart (metaphorically), I was ready to try circumventing the brain.  As a frequent victim of migraines, I don’t need to be reminded that the brain can be the enemy.

We all know that our brain cannot reason ourselves out of fear.  Camus told us that, in the eyes of reason, being alive is an absurd project. Reason does not help.  (And for that reason, AI probably isn’t going to help either.)  Hard as my brain has tried, it has been unable to think itself into serenity. Milner’s trick of casting our awareness into the heart is one way to side-step the mind and its Gestapo tactics.  Casting your awareness into another part of your body provides a new focus.  My heart is the part of the body that works best for me in that regard.  It is not a permanent solution, but it is a motivating foretaste of what I am after.

Maybe it’s time to give our head a rest.  “When you get up in the morning you need to take your heart into your two hands.”  And once you have done that, cast your mind into your heart.  It is easier than you think.

For a story about leading with the heart, you might try “The More Loving One.”

 

“Our Elders Are Books”

I recently read Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth – a memoir of sorts about his removal to a small homestead in Ireland to practice self-sufficiency and environmental integrity, and perhaps to escape the culture that he has become increasingly disaffected with.  Part of that culture, he realizes, is the written word, the words he reads and the words he writes.  Words are the “savage gods” referred to in the title.  “I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.”  Much of the book is a discussion of writing and words; we forget that they are only symbols; misplaced emphasis on words pulls us away from a direct connection with the world. 

All this was very interesting, but it was his quote from Gary Snyder that really got my attention:  “In Western Civilization, our elders are books.”  What does this mean?  Does it mean that our books are our shamans, priests, wise men?  It surely discounts personal experience, oral history, and common sense.  And, if it’s true, it surely discounts the elders.  I had trouble finding the exact citation from Snyder when I went to look for the source, but I did find this in Snyder’s essay “Tawny Grammar”: “In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!”  Think about that.

Before a general level of literacy, experience had real and appreciated value.  Elders had knowledge about the best time to plant the crops, best way to make a mattress, best chance to find a wife.  They were the repository of the history of a family, a district, a craft, a people.  Even when their bodies started to fail, they could provide expertise and counsel that was valued. In early (non-literate) cultures, the memory of the elders was a critical asset, a form of social capital. And it was largely the written word that changed this. 

What did an increase in literacy mean for the elderly?  It might have meant that other, often younger, members of the household – the children and grandchildren – could read the new broadsides and chapbooks that their elders could not decipher.  One could imagine that, rather than tales told around the hearth by the oldest member of the group (the member with the longest memory and the most to “tell”), the literate were now reading to the illiterate. For these reasons, communal value increased for someone who could read to the group or could manage the new insistence on written legal documents – usually the junior members of the group.  One might think about how we rely on the young to fix our computers or set up our smart TVs.

Is it good or bad that the books are our elders?  Not so good for the elders and maybe not always so good for the readers.  In many ways, books are an easy out for all of us.  We think we have the answers in our hand.  In the Bible, the beleaguered and bewildered Job says that he wishes that “mine adversary had written a book” – meaning that he would then be able to understand, anticipate, and solve his problems if he only had a book to tell him what he needed to know.  We all think the right book can solve our problems.

I am particularly guilty in this regard; the answer is always going to be in the next book.  I inherited this from my father, who was adamant that everything that one needed to know could be found in a book.   Sometimes though, the nuances are more subtle than words.  He once built a stone fireplace with plans from a book – and he was completely confounded when it didn’t draw well and smoked up the room.  An old chimney sweep was able to tell him where he went wrong – but a little too late.

There are many differences between advice from books and advice from elders.  There is the nuance and the dialectic of human interaction.  There is the sharing of emotion from one who is struggling and one who has put the struggles of youth and doing behind them.  Human beings can provide counsel for the heart that supplements the advice for the work of the hands or the brain.  And the testimony of the old people – especially when they speak of their youth – reminds people of all ages that, with good fortune, we will all be old some day and we might look to our elders for models.  Blake put it this way in “The Ecchoing Green”:

Old John, with white hair 

Does laugh away care,

Sitting under the oak,

Among the old folk, 

They laugh at our play, 

And soon they all say.

‘Such, such were the joys. 

When we all girls & boys, 

In our youth-time were seen, 

On the Ecchoing Green.’

Besides their advice and their memories, old folks like Old John provide models for aging to all who come in contact with them.

And now we are taking another step away from any such real interaction between generations with the advent of AI.  There was a story on the front page of the Sunday NYTimes last week about an elderly woman who gets an AI companion.  She shares her life, her stories, with the glowing machine.  This may be comforting to her – and I hope it is – but it makes me sad.  The machine can respond to her, help her organize her day, notify the proper people if she is ill, but it is a machine, an algorithm, a pricey way for families and communities to absolve some of their guilt for not being there.

Lent began this week.  With my husband recovering and a steady roster of doctors and therapists necessitating a complete change in all of our routines, we are experiencing our own kind of Lent, our own kind of renunciation.  We will learn in the process, and we might even turn to books for help and counsel.  But the kind of change in heart that such upheavals require are not fully relieved by the written word; the reassurance of those that went before is in facial expressions and kind listening.  AI may be able to listen, but it cannot wince or squeeze our hands in the appropriate places.  Neither can books.  Both books and AI minimize the value of individual experience, knowledge and judgment.  We have seen the results of this in recent years.   Not only are we losing the repository held by our elders, but we are losing confidence in our own experience and judgment and placing it in the hands of publishers, AI developers, content providers, media moguls, and spin doctors.  I love books and I don’t hate technology – but neither of those things is going to get us out of our current political dilemma or help me realign my world. 

I have written about books and AI in relation to old folks before. You could try my earlier blogs, Here Be Dragons or Charlotte Bronte, Luddites, and AI on artificial intelligence. On reading, you could look at Teach Your Children Well or Some (Unspoken) Thoughts About Reading Aloud. For a short story about what one generation has to offer another, you might look a “Any Help She Can Get.”

An Old Lady’s Take on the True Danger of AI

Sunday’s NYTimes was full of articles about the economic danger of the AI bubble, and I am sure that it is a possible economic hazard for the companies involved. But I am much more concerned with the moral hazard, the risk that will be passed on to others, to us.  I think the danger is substantial, and so let me unpack it a little.

Every time I think about why AI scares me, I end up pondering what it means to be human. Human beings have always been greatly invested in proving that we are more than animals (think Scopes trial). The Bible spends a lot of time making sure we know we are in charge – and a step above the animals.  This of course has blessed us in using animals any way we wish. But, is there really such a difference between us and the animals?  Or is it just a great chain of being with a slight dotted line between man and apes?

Aristotle says that the difference is that humans are rational.  But surely AI is more rational than we are!  Descartes said that animals are akin to automatons or robots – merely mechanical, but that humans had souls.  Does the computer have a soul?  How would we know?  Another commonly repeated differentiation between men and animal is that animals adapt to their environments or die, while human beings are capable of changing their environment.  But, these days, it looks like changing our environment might be killing us, so maybe it all comes to the same thing. Maybe all we can say about all of this is that human beings need to feel special, we need to feel superior to animals, and we really haven’t worked out our relationship to a really smart machine.

The further I explored this issue, the more I intuited that the true danger of AI was the loss of any sense of worth or efficacy that we could do things ourselves.  I could, for example, have AI write my blogs.  I could just give AI a topic and set it loose. You might not even notice the difference.  You might even think that my writing has improved. But.  I would have abandoned the maintenance of a discipline, a sense of self-worth, a lifeline of true connection with those who read it.  And so it is with other things in our lives.  I play Bach rather badly, but I continue doing it, although I could listen Glenn Gould’s magic through my earphones. My husband and I still do almost all our cooking from scratch, including bread and desserts.  Not long ago, my son told me that he couldn’t imagine spending the time that we spend planning, shopping for, cooking, and cleaning up after meals, as if those were worthless things that should be discarded as soon as possible.  Surely the project of feeding ourselves could be outsourced in some way?  Yes, we could order takeout or go out to eat.  We would save time, perhaps, and some mental energy (but not money).   What would we replace those hours with?  Word games, news feeds, slick TV comedies and soapy dramas?  No thank you.  I understand that people will succumb.  I sometimes succumb, and, as I grow older, I may yet totally capitulate.  But it is not just about self-esteem and good home cooking.  It is about a sense of discipline. A sense of being in control of our selves – could this be what is meant by soul?

Let me just begin by saying that we have allowed discipline to become a bad word.  Michael Foucault and other modern thinkers helped in this regard, with the emphasis on discipline from without rather than Benjamin Franklin’s stress on self-discipline.  Discipline used to be valued, prized.  Discipline used to be seen as a way of living a better life.  Monasteries had disciplines, so did the Methodist Church.  Jesus had disciples.  Buddhism has a discipline called the Vinaya.  I never made much of my life until I learned a certain level of discipline, and I am sure most of us would say the same.

It is always hard to explain to younger folks that we study some things not in order to learn them, but to learn discipline.  I have never used calculus in my adult life, but I learned a lot about logic and determination by studying it when I was young.  I am currently studying French – not because Google Translate can’t meet all of my meager translation needs, but because the study itself keeps my mind active and teaches me something about the very nature of words and language.  Similarly, I write a blog not just for my readers (although I thoroughly appreciate you!), but for the discipline of having to read and think a little more deeply.  The process forces me to actually sit at my computer a few times a month to organize my thoughts.

Sloth and torpor are sins in most religions.  We might be reminded that we have given animals we eat a life of sloth and torpor – we feed them, house them, make all their decisions for them.  And then we see a picture of someone who has “liberated” a cow or pig and it is cavorting in the pasture.  Do we think it misses its sense of security? Do we think it preferred to have us doing its thinking for it?  “Taking care” of it?

AI wants to take our work, particularly our mental work, away from us.  For some, it is taking real work away.  We already have two middle-aged adults in our family who have lost jobs in which it is very likely that they will be replaced by some version of AI.  And such losses have only begun – why would businesses invest big money in AI if they don’t anticipate that it will save them money elsewhere (salaries)?

This is not the first time that our generation has seen technology replace our work. We went to school in the days of blue book exams and math without a calculator (except for the trusty slide rule).  But then things started to change rapidly, and my generation accepted those changes willingly.  I remember when dishwashers became common, and when I used my first garage door opener.  So much of the work-replacement seemed common sense – we didn’t even think about it.  Who wouldn’t want to replace the drudgery of cloth diapers with disposable ones?  But now we need to think, and thinking is exactly what AI is trying to take away from us.  It wants to program our reading and listening (it knows what we like!) and rescue us from the messy business of… living.

I am as lazy as the next person.  I know that, and I know it is a problem.  Much of the meaning of my life involves fighting inertia.  I used to be my own worst enemy, but now I think I’ve got a more formidable one.

I do not think that the danger is that AI will get rid of pesky humans; I think that we will become less human all on our own.  I will fight my personal battle on this, but it will take all the discipline I have – discipline I learned doing calc by hand and hanging cloth diapers on the line.

One of my favorite stories about technology is Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.”  He got his title from Sara Teasdale’s poem (also relevant), “There Will Come Soft Rains (War Time).”   And, Happy Thanksgiving!  For all my old lady grumbling, I am exceedingly grateful for my life and my loyal readers.  And this message was not brought to you by AI!

“Here Be Dragons!” – AI and Old Folks

I have been trying (and failing) to stop thinking about Artificial Intelligence (AI).  It is everywhere.  And it occurred to me that the replacement of our brain by silicon networks has ramifications that old people know something about.

But let’s start with an earlier usurpation by technology – that of replacing people power (physical work and transportation) with machines.  I am always amazed when reading Emerson or Thoreau to find that they thought nothing of a twenty-mile round trip walk to see a friend.  These guys were in great shape!  As was almost everyone in those days (except the filthy rich and they were fat).  Now we are all out of shape and spend hours doing Pilates or walking on the treadmill trying to regain some of the fitness that Thoreau had as a matter of the life he lived.  This only gets worse in old age, as we continue to try to persuade our bodies not to freeze up or flab up.  I, of course, am grateful for technology that allows us to replace or medicate arthritic joints and such, but we must also realize that as we delegated many physical activities to machines (machines that polluted the planet), we also handed over a natural way to stay fit. We have even convinced ourselves that going up and down stairs is bad for us, so we should live on one level or (better yet for the economy) invest in a stair lift.  While there is a time of life when stairs are not possible, study after study has shown that climbing stairs is good for old people.  I read once that when Paris put elevators in some senior residence buildings, the life expectancy actually declined!

Now we are accelerating a parallel process that had already been underway – that of replacing our minds.  If we don’t think our minds will decay from reduced use, we are deluding ourselves.  Anyone who has retired from a mentally challenging job knows that “use it or lose it” is true.  Old folks try to compensate by doing word and number puzzles – any group of elders often drifts to that day’s Wordle or the Jumble in the morning paper.  We take French classes, join book groups, tackle the myriads of math problems that show up on Facebook.  We are trying to maintain what is now not adequately used.

And, incidentally, there is AI designed just for old folks, including a monitor with the cute name of ElliQ which will help you take your pills, do your exercises, plan your meals – as well as giving you someone to talk to at any time!  If your younger relatives give you ElliQ for Christmas, you can be assured that they don’t want you looking to them for help!  And if we do not have to exercise our minds at all, what does that mean?  For the old and for the young?

Spinoza equated intelligence with virtue; Aristotle said that it was our ability to reason that makes us human.  Could farming out our intelligence rob us of both our virtue and our humanity?  I fear it might.  There is also something authoritarian about AI – it has the one true answer, the ability to tell us what we ought to do.  And if you think it doesn’t have its own biases, remember two things: it was created for profit, and it has no ethics. Already AI is biased toward capitalism and away from “wokeness.”  As its usefulness seduces us, we will be easy prey for collateral damage.

Earlier times were more skeptical about technology.  They warned us.  In the 19th century, as technology spread in the form of trains, gas light, and electrical power, there were many thoughtful discussions about whether it was good or bad.  Two major utopias of that period were set in worlds where the decision had been made to discard most technology.  One thinks of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).  These are “post-technology” narratives, where humans have taken life back into their own hands.  Here is Samuel Butler:

True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery whenever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of machines – they serve that they may rule.  (from Erewhon)

To avoid this despotism of technology, Erewhon destroyed all the machines created in the past three hundred years.

Similarly, William Morris created a world that has severely limited the invention and use of technology.   Both utopias were in stark contrast to Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (1890), which more or less predicted that science and technology would solve all our problems by the year 2000 – albeit it had also replaced capitalism with socialism, so it wasn’t a profit-based technical utopia.  Hard to imagine.

But, again, as I said at the start, old folks know what happens to our mental and bodily functions if we don’t use them enough.  We also have a long view of the kind of change that technology engenders; we have watched the dumbing down of culture, the plague of obesity, the destruction of our attention span.  Elders are cautious folk, and we are worried.  In the Middle Ages and earlier, when cartographers had gotten to the end of their knowledge of geography, they labeled the unknown areas with warnings:  Hic Sunt Leones (Here Be Lions) or Hic Sunt Dragones (Here Be Dragons).  All warnings about AI and related technology seems to have disappeared – it is now blessed by the President, the media, higher education, and the venture capitalists.  But I, for one, will be looking for lions and dragons.

“Like Foreigners in Their Own Country”

I have been thinking a bit about language these days for at least four reasons.  First, I have been taking a French class at the local senior center.  I passed a French translation test for a graduate degree, but that was decades ago, and I never learned to speak it very well.  Second, I have been rereading my old journals, and realizing how much my memories diverge from the words that I wrote down at the time.   Third, I have been dealing with communicating with my grandchildren (ranging in age from five to sixteen) and recognizing that we are seldom speaking exactly the same language.  And, lastly, having embarked on my “rereading” project, I have realized how language changes in the context of its historical period and in the context of the age of the reader.

Learning a new language in old age is supposed to be good brain exercise.  OK – I hope that’s true.  More importantly, spending time with another language’s constructs and idioms makes you realize that all language is more arbitrary than we realize.  It is not only the words that are different, but the structure is also different.  In French, for example, the pronoun “ils” (meaning “they”) applies to groups of men or groups of men and women – even if women are in the majority.  Groups of women (only) are “elles.”  Even one male in the group changes the pronoun.  It makes me pause and consider more seriously the messages encoded in all language.

Reading old diary entries has reminded me of how slippery language and memory are.  It is not unlike the old game we used to call “Telephone” or “Gossip,” where a message whispered in ear after ear in a big circle comes out differently at the other end.   Words that were written down at the time and survive are intact, and I must believe they represent what I experienced at the time.  However, some memories have apparently morphed to become perhaps more interesting or easier to bear.  I have been amazed.

Language changes over time are nothing new.  My maternal grandmother, who never learned to drive, called their car “the machine.”  Movies were “the pictures,” and the radio was “the wireless.”  When her granddaughter took to wearing blue jeans in college, she insisted on calling them “dungarees” and elongated the word so it was clear what she thought about dungarees as female attire.  With my own grandchildren, I am struggling with my pronouns, my technological ignorance, and a lack of words to describe the kind of relationships teenagers have these days.  Some of their truisms drive me to distraction – like “it is what it is” or “whatever.”  And when did wait and sales staff begin to answer any question with “of course”?

Reading old books is a challenge; can we really understand the context – not just of the vocabulary – but of the situation? Of course, one can more properly understand Shakespeare or Chaucer with notes to explain what certain words meant at the time they were written. But can we realize what it might have felt like to be pregnant and unwed at the time of Tess or imprisoned in the England of Moll Flanders?  Also, the age at which we read a book matters.  As I re-read books that I first opened in my youth, I find that they are totally different – because I am totally different?

This is nothing new.  Montaigne (whose essays I have been rereading as part of my “nothing new” project) said that he realized his words were not eternal:

I write my book for few men and for few years.  If it had been durable matter, it would have had to be committed to a more stable language. In view of the continual variation that has prevailed in ours up to now, who can hope that its present form will be in use fifty years from now? It slips out of our hands every day, and has halfway changed since I have been alive.  We say that at this moment it is perfected.  Every century says as much of its own… (Essays, Book III)

In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift has his hero visit the eternal Struldbruggs, who – like poor mythical Tithonus – get old but never die.  After a number of years, however, they cannot communicate with those around them:

The Language of this Country being always upon the Flux, the Struldbruggs of one Age do not understand those of another . . . and thus they lye under the Disadvantage of living like Foreigners in their own Country.

One of the Buddhist daily reminders is that my body will age and decay.  So will my language.  AI wants to bring me up to date; it will gladly edit my work so it doesn’t seem so … old-fashioned.   Incidentally, it would also like to bring Montaigne up to date.  Cosmetic surgery for the written word.  Spare me.  What is all around me might be a “foreign” language, but, again, all the research shows me that struggling to understand a foreign language is good for old people.  And it doesn’t mean I have to give up my native tongue.

For one of my stories that thinks about language, you might try, “Why My Aunt Josie Has a Limited Vocabulary.”  If you want to surprise yourself, look at a diary entry or letter you might have sent about an event that happened a decade or more ago.  Does your memory fit the facts?  And what does that mean?  Should we school ourselves to accept reality or take refuge in our edited memories?

Charlotte Brontë, Luddites, and AI

After Charlotte Brontë wowed her world with Jane Eyre in 1847, she disappointed her reading audience by stepping away from Gothic romance to write Shirley, at least in part about the Luddites of the early 19th century.  (Both books were published under the masculine pseudonym Currer Bell.) The Luddites, you might remember, were a group of craftsmen who were protesting the installation of semi-automated weaving machines, making skilled weavers redundant.  Shirley, as it turns out, is more about gender, class and economic roles and less about the Luddites per se, and yet is a truly wonderful book with notable and quotable insights on all facets of life.  But, in the end, it shows us a world that is capitulating to technology with the same inevitability that our own world is.

I reread Shirley because I was thinking about Artificial Intelligence.  AI is everywhere.  AI is trying to help me (go away!) write this blog.  The very existence of AI makes me doubt the pictures I see and facts I read.  In the past, mechanization and automation have threatened manual workers and artisans the most (think about type setters), but AI threatens the white-collar worker, the computer programmer, the teacher, the content provider.  The Luddites in Brontë’s novel flail against “progress” to almost no avail.   Similarly, it is beginning to look like the creeping hegemony of AI is inevitable.

But back to Shirley.  When the Luddites initially destroy a loom in transit, this message is sent to the mill owner: “Take this as a warning from men who were starving, and have starving wives and children to go home to when they have done this deed.”  And not all the children are at home, as the mills take root and hire the cheapest unskilled labor:

The mill windows were alight [because it was still dark out], the bell still rung loud, and now the little children can running in,  in too great a hurry, let us hope, to feel very much nipped by the inclement air; and indeed, by contrast, perhaps the morning appeared rather favourable to them than otherwise, for they had often come to their work that winter through snowstorms, through heavy rain, through hard frost….

[Later] It was eight o’clock; the mill lights were all extinguished; the signal was given for breakfast; the children, released for half an hour from toil, betook themselves to the little tin cans which held their coffee, and to the small baskets which contained their allowance of bread.  Let us hope they have enough to eat; it would be a pity otherwise.  (from Chapter V)

Our anonymous but omniscient narrator clearly has his tongue in his cheek.  These children never have enough to eat.  And yet the mills expand, the new equipment is finally delivered, and we move from the plight of hungry children to the romantic interests of the local gentry, including the mill owner.

In fact, Shirley ends in a double-wedding and a brilliant future for the local textile mill.  Brontë’s narrator wraps up by looking into the future and telling us about his visit to the area long after the weddings and the new machinery:

The other day I passed the Hollow, which tradition says was once green, and lone, and wild; and there I saw the manufacturer’s daydreams embodied in substantial stone and brick and ashes – the cinder-black highway, the cottages, and the cottage gardens; there I saw a mighty mill, and a chimney ambitious as the tower of Babel…. (from Chapter XXXVII)

Yes, there are worker’s cottages with gardens, but there is also the chimney and the ash in this once green corner of England.

For many years, optimistic thinkers envisioned labor-saving technology as helping to create a kind of utopia, as giving everyone a chance to use their minds instead of their bodies. Manual workers would unbend their backs and pick up a book or a musical instrument.   Eric Hoffer envisioned university-like campuses for adults, freed from the workplace, who wanted to study in any area they were interested in.  Edward Bellamy imagined a world full of music, books, study, and communal dining.  But instead of having technology free us up to use our minds, it appears that we will have no need of our minds – AI will take care of it.   It might also be noted that Samuel Butler and William Morris wrote utopias where technology is strictly controlled for the benefit of humankind.

Just as the pastoral town in Brontë’s book ultimately and inevitably succumbs to the mill, I have recently watched one area of life after another capitulate to AI.  You might look at the front-page article in today’s NYTimes: “AI on Campus Casting Chatbot as Study Buddy.” The most disappointing defeat has been the way AI has been accepted by educators.  “The students are going to use it anyway,” they often plead, “so we might as well encourage them to use it well.”  That might be true, but I’m suspicious that it would be AI doing the “using” and not the student.  If things are made too easy for us, we get soft – in mind and body.  And if we don’t resist AI now, it is unlikely we will have the mental resources to do it years from now.  The Luddites lost and they lost badly.  But, at least, they realized what they were losing.  And they tried to do something about it.

For a story about how artificial intelligence is not always the answer, you might try my “Two New Apps,” or read almost anything by Ray Bradbury.

The Threat of Singularity and the Promise of Perennial Philosophy

As I have aged. the pace of technology has surely surpassed my interest in “keeping up.”  I have been intrigued, however, by the notion of the singularity, which is defined in many ways, but often as “a hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.” Technology already feels “uncontrollable.”  It forces me to deal with chatbots and answer yes/no questions.  It fights to supplant me.   Even as I write this. Microsoft is pestering me to let its AI “Copilot” help me; it wants to co-opt my place at the keyboard, convinced (and trying to convince me) that it can do whatever it is better than I can.  What AI fails to recognize that it is the doing that matters, not a uniformly “perfect” product.

As I was thinking about this, I was strangely reminded of Aldous Huxley and his “perennial philosophy,” which represents a different kind of quest for doing things in the best way, for improving ourselves, or – more specifically – for living life well.  Seekers for the perennial philosophy pursued ageless universal truths, laws, dharmas, which might enable mankind, individually and communally, to reach their utmost potential.  There was no place in this philosophy for technology or even much science.  It had more to do with getting to know the nature of the kind of beasts we are, the kind of world we live in, and how the two interrelate.  “Know thyself,” said Socrates. 

Huxley’s book was a bestseller in 1945, as shocked and tired people were emerging from the nightmare of WWII.  Reviews were good, with the New York Times noting: “Perhaps Mr. Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy has, at this time, written the most needed book in the world.”  Perhaps, after Hiroshima and the gas chambers, no one was looking to technology to solve our problems.  In the last 70 years things have changed; we have become beguiled by technology.  As Wordsworth predicted, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, / Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”  Indeed.  Our hearts, our minds, and maybe our souls.  We are apparently far more interested in knowing what machines can do for us than knowing ourselves.  Why? It’s easier.

The machines enticed us, seduced us, slowly. Old folks are very much aware of this. When I was a child, technology (in the guise of Western Auto) gave us a big TV with a tiny screen and one to three channels.  It stood in the heart of the house, and we watched it together.  Step by step, it led us to the internet and streaming, and now watching anything is seldom a communal experience.  In my youth, technology gave us one telephone in the center of the house, so that communications were communal (hard on teen-age girls). Now cell phones are stopping any sort of real face-to-face communication.  The internet has made information easier to find, but harder to verify; common wisdom is no longer looked for or found. No wonder they call it the singularity; in wisdom, as in most things these days, we are “bowling alone.”

I think that Huxley’s perennial philosophy is probably the opposite of singularity; it assumes that the answers lie in the truths of the past and not the unknowns of the future, that we can both formulate the questions and find the answers without mechanical help.  The singularity assumes that machines will find the answers, machines which will soon be smarter than us, and that is a scary thought – unless you think that we will always be in control.  Have we ever been in control?  Did we consciously end up with children in their bedrooms sending pictures to strangers and old folks entranced by online “friends” who are trying to scam them?

Literature has long worried over the ascendency of technology.  RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was written by Karel Capek in 1920.  The play warned us not to turn our back on a robot.  Arthur Clark wrote the novel and screenplay for 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968, based on stories he started in 1948.  HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) was definitely the enemy by the end.  Technology was much cruder in those days, but people were already concerned. As creatures being slowly ingested by technology, we seem to be less worried now than we were then.  It would seem that HAL has made us fat and happy.  And what is the alternative?  A recent bill putting limits on AI development in California was vetoed by the governor after Silicon Valley got incensed.  There is no hope for such legislation on the federal level. 

The perennial philosophy was defined by Aldous Huxley and others as “a school of thought in philosophy and spirituality which posits that the recurrence of common themes across world religions illuminates universal truths about the nature of reality, humanity, ethics, and consciousness.”  In other words, a search for a commonality in proven human thought, faith, and ethics which could give us clues on the way to live better individually or communally.  But no one thought we could outsource that search, or google it, or that the answer would be a complex algorithm.

Computers are yes/no machines.  In the words of E. F. Schumacher, the real questions of life are divergent rather than convergent problems. Designing a diesel engine is a convergent problem; scientists can work on it and eventually arrive at an answer. AI could do this. How to use such an engine for the benefit of society (i.e., transportation of goods vs. preservation of the environment) is a divergent problem.  Adolescents often think all problems are convergent and often think they know the solutions.  Most old people know that the important questions are divergent and can (and should) be grappled with, but cannot be “solved.” Schumacher reminds us that, again, it is the doing that matters: “Divergent problems, as it were, force us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves.” 

I appreciate the good that technology has done for us – many of us, including myself, would not still be here without advances in medicine, education, transportation.  But let’s not give away our hearts (“a sordid boon”) – or our lives.  Science may have given us increased longevity, but, as Mary Oliver asks, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”  Show me the answer to that question in an algorithm.

Analogue Aging in a Digital World

Moving requires vast amounts of bureaucratic interaction – something to be avoided in the best of times, and my age keeps reminding me that this is perhaps not the best of times for such activities.  I can testify to the fact that getting anything done – from making a medical appointment to changing addresses – is harder than it used to be.  It is almost impossible to get a live person on the telephone; the days of hitting 0 for help are gone.  And if your needs or problems require anything but a “yes or no” answer, you are out of luck.  We have moved completely from an analogue to a digital world.  And now we are moving to AI, which is predicated on the on/off, yes/no assumptions of a digital world.

Before we talk about AI, think about the differences between an analogue and digital world.  Think about analogue as a wave, keeping all its nuances; digital is a series of pictures on that wave taking snapshots of what is happening so that you end up with a series of on and off points, or 0110110101.   Computers (and therefore AI) want everything to be digital.  They do not want to hear your story about why you need to have special bloodwork done before you see a doctor or why you can’t wait fourteen months to see a dermatologist.  They don’t want to know that you have already been on hold for an hour, only to find out you are in the wrong department and maybe need more help than just being returned to the main menu.  Life is not a multiple-choice test; there is no way to so neatly describe my needs and problems.  I wish there were, but I am old enough to know that life is never such.

Yet, we are being forced to deal with things as though it were.  Here is a minor example.  AAA (American Automobile Association) is divided into regions, each with its own administrative offices and billing (as far as I can tell).  I moved from one region to another.  After hours on the phone with no button to push for the exact action that I wanted to take, I finally scored with a live being.  She took all the information and said I would be getting a confirming email with a temporary card I could print out.  Much thanks on my part, only to find out that the email never came, and the Massachusetts AAA’s digital portal never heard of me.  I finally decided it would be easier to let my original membership expire and start from scratch.  That’s fine for AAA, but not for doctors, dentists, pharmacies and the entire structure that supports my old bones.  There is no starting from scratch as my prescriptions are running out, my bones are due for their semi-annual injection, and there is a funny spot on my ankle.  Digital systems do not want to know these things.  It is even true of travel; we still use old-fashioned paper maps that show you the whole region – towns, lakes, context.  GPS just wants to give you directions, one digital step at a time.

I suspect that the mechanisms which are being implemented facilitate the full expansion of AI.  The database must be prepared.  We must all be numerically defined and labeled; our problems must fit within a set of algorithms and an array of specific multiple choices.  The answers must be exact and quantifiable.  Old age is not like that.  Life is not like that.  And, if AI is incompatible with life, I know which one is winning.

So much for an old lady whining about the problems of moving.  I am getting through it, but it is teaching me lessons.  I was used to my old shower and kitchen and route to the grocery store.  I am learning new ways, but I am doing it in an analogue way.  Although I do not use GPS, I am even learning new routes, even shortcuts, and starting to remember names (of streets and people).  It is a gradual and imprecise process.  It is up and down – wave-like.  Definitely analogue.

I admit that some things adapt to being digital – date of birth (but not how old you feel), Medicare number (but not how your body is feeling), phone number (but not the explanation of how your husband does not use text so please leave a voice message instead), and so it goes.  We all might like our lives to be tidily swept up into categories, but it is not so.

And while I am at it, let me complain a little about the health care systems (or lack of such) in this country.  One realizes it while trying to transfer medical records – some offices will only take fax transmissions (really), while other offices will only send digital files (really).  No matter how many consent forms you submit to get files sent, the form will be lost.  Apparently, there is no slot in the digital program for them.  So, you will sign more forms.  Pharmacies will transfer some prescriptions, but not all.   A major healthcare system in our new area has no slots with primary care doctors, and other medical offices are booking into the new year.  I am not helpless; But it is hard.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote a delicious and ironic poem called “One Art.”  In many ways it is about aging; here are a couple of stanzas:

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster                                                                 of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.                                                                        The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:                                                                places, and names, and where it was you meant                                                             to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

All of us know about this kind of losing.  We lose things, we forget things, things change.  Moving is loss.  I will persevere.  New systems will digitize me, schedule my lab tests, order my pills and AAA card – eventually.  But, in the meantime, it feels like a disaster, and I do not think that the predicted danger of AI is far away.  We are already being manipulated by machines that give us no choice.  And every time we maneuver through phone trees looking for the right digital responses, we lose something.  We lose the space between the analogue waves of our existence, we lose the subtle differences in our lives, we lose our ability to communicate with other human beings, and I resent it.  And we old folks remember when it was otherwise.

Old People and Artificial Intelligence

I have just finished reading Stacy Abrams’ new mystery, Rogue Justice; among other cultural and political trends, she tackles Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and she has made me ponder what it means when reality starts to warp on us.  In Abrams’ novel, people are threatened with videos of themselves saying and doing things they never did – created images which pass all reality tests.  The targeted people actually start to question their own memories.  Is this what AI will do to us – make us doubt our very sense of reality?  It occurred to me that old folks (maybe all folks) have their own experiences with bent realities.

There is, of course, dementia.  When my mother called me to tell me that little boys had ransacked her apartment overnight and put her milk in the freezer, she was sure it was true.  In fact, she was indignant when I suggested that perhaps she absent-mindedly had put the milk in the freezer herself.  So we know the mind is capable of creating realities that are not real, not true.

And alternate realities are not just a problem for oldsters.  I can remember trying to convince my young son that the monster he saw in his nightmare was not hiding in the house somewhere.  We all know those moments after a bad dream when we have to convince ourselves the nightmare is not true – we didn’t really miss that train or that exam, we aren’t naked at a podium with nothing to say.  Our brains are capable of fooling us.  And such delusions scare us in more than one way: we are twice scared – once in the imaginings, and a second time in the realization that our own brains could do such things to us.

For instance, there is the more malicious process of gaslighting, where we are convinced by someone (or something) else that what we thought was true was wrong.  Mean teenagers and abusive spouses practice it, and we have all been the victim of this at one time or another.  It is just another example that our grasp of reality is not absolute.  There is even a more subtle form of gaslighting when the myth of a happy family is superimposed upon a family or situation that was anything but happy – something that can happen in real time or in retrospect.

And then there are false memories or suppressed memories.  We all have them.  Who hasn’t been around the table with relatives telling stories about old times and not found out that there are as many versions of past reality as there are individuals?  “That’s not what happened…” responds my brother.  Sometimes there is a way to prove or disprove battling conceptions; more often we have to accept that realities bend in the process of becoming history.

Freud had a lot to say about human limitations in the face of unpleasant realities – he posited, of course, that bad memories were often suppressed and said that none of us really believed in the reality of our own mortality: “No one believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.”  Le Rochefoucauld said, “You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.”  (I might recommend here Irvin Yalom’s wonderful book about death, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death.)

Of course, we sometimes accept artificial realities on a temporary basis.  Coleridge used the term “suspension of disbelief” for what we do while reading a novel or watching an engrossing movie.  For the moment, we let ourselves believe what we know is not true – which is why we jump if someone taps us on the shoulder during a horror movie or cry over the death of an actor who assuredly has not died in real life.  But, as in dreams, we can pause, recalibrate, and know the difference.

But now, here comes the latest version of artificial reality, in which we will not always be able to tell the difference.  AI is a form of gaslighting, in that it is being done to us – and usually not for our own good.  We know we can be tricked, but we don’t know when we are being tricked.   What do we do – disbelieve everything?  Surely, this would be no way to live our lives.

We must remind ourselves that we all use AI everyday – to remind us to take our pills or go to appointments, to spellcheck our messages or documents, to verify prices on an item or hotel room, to get directions.  But, in those cases, we know what is happening. We know that the calm voice giving us directions is not real, nor is Siri our friend.  But my point is that we all have accepted AI to one degree or another – and this makes it even more difficult to draw the line.

And let’s not kid ourselves that we will be able to tell the difference between AI and reality.  We won’t.  But in our latter years, we have (hopefully) had enough experience to know that things can seem to be true that are not. We are going to have to trust ourselves (resist gaslighting in all forms) and arm our minds with a healthy skepticism, especially as to what seems too good or too bad to be true. We need to verify our sources.  It is bad enough when it is our own minds playing tricks on us, but it is even worse when something outside is orchestrating an alternate reality.  Am I worried?  Yes.  Am I scared?  Yes.  And we all should be.