Tag: utopia

AI and Utopia – An Old Folks’ View

Advocates of AI often talk about the utopia this new technology will bring about – no more drudgery at the office or factory, no more housework or financial planning, no more medical conundrums.  When experts are asked how people will fare in the face of having nothing to do, you get something like this exchange between Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who recently published a book called Deep Utopia, and Spencer Klavan, a classics scholar and podcast host:

Bostrom: You could have the A.I.s and the robots doing basically all economically productive tasks.  You then have a leisure society where there is no longer any need for humans to work…. It would obviously require some cultural transformation and adaptation.  But ultimately, I think we could easily imagine living in such a world.

There are already various groups of people that don’t work for a living that you could look to for inspiration.  Young children don’t work for a living.  They seem to have a good life…

Klavan:  It depends if you aspire to live like children.

Bostrom:  Then we have retired people…. They go around traveling, spend time with their grandchildren.  They have hobbies.  They watch movies.  They golf.

So we elders have become the models for AI utopia.  To boot, all our infirmities will be cured by AI so we will live much longer, giving us many more utopian years of watching movies, seeing the world, and playing with the next generation of great-grandchildren (who will probably prefer their robo-nannies?).  I have lots of questions.

Who is going to pay for all this?  Companies who are investing in AI so that they can reduce wages are not about to foot the bill for us all to go golfing, are they?  And, whatever kind of income we might have for the very, very long retirement that AI longevity will provide for us, will we have enough money to pay for cruises?  We already do not have enough younger workers to support Social Security, and I very much doubt that robots will contribute to either Social Security or Medicare since they won’t be earning anything.

But even if all the rest of it worked out, what kind of world would we have?  This generation is not the first to worry over this problem.  Competing utopian narratives in the nineteenth century either had technology actually giving us something like utopia (think Bellamy’s Looking Backward) or creating worlds where technology had had to be banned to make life livable (Butler’s Erewhon or Morris’s News from Nowhere).

The twentieth century longshoreman and homespun philosopher, Eric Hoffer, addressed the problem about the end of work after he saw how new machinery handled the large rolls of newsprint that used to require great strength and skill by the dockworkers.  He labeled the problem “automation” and wrote a notable essay about it in his book The Temper of Our Time, Hoffer talks about creating big universities of a sort for people who don’t have to work to give them projects and purpose.  Hoffer was an autodidact himself, so this was his idea of utopia.  One could do worse.

But what if what you do really has no purpose?  Mathematicians are surely pondering this now that AI has blown up the profession, but we should all be thinking about it.  What if AI can shop for us better than we can shop for ourselves and produce hand-crafted furniture quicker and better than we possibly could?  I still knit hats and sweaters even though the finished products surely cost more and take more time than what I would find on sale on the internet.  And what will we do if we have even more time?  We know that we will never play chess or Go as well a machine – so are we just pretending?  Does that make these things games within games?  Ezra Klein warns: “That a machine can beat a chess grandmaster has not meant the end of human beings playing chess. But humanity’s sense of purpose and control and primacy is a harder and more ineffable thing to replace.”

I like games.  Every day I do five of the NY Times puzzles and occasionally enjoy a game of cards.   It is fun to test our skills and distract ourselves temporarily from the mundane problems of a life.  Games make exercise more enjoyable and are a sociable way to spend time with others.  But what does it mean if all of life is a game?  Here’s one problem with games – they are simply a way of killing time.  Isn’t time too precious to kill?  Is this what we want?  But, if everything else is taken away, what else is there?

Does it make a difference what kind of games we play?  In his remarkable book, Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse differentiates between finite games, where the goal is to win, and infinite games, where the goal is to keep the game going forever.  For instance, if the goal (as in Monopoly) is to amass the most wealth, we might cut down the forests.  But if the goal is to keep our world going forever, it would be part of the game to save the forests.  And perhaps we would be wondering what kind of game AI is playing and thinking seriously about whether the rules of an infinite game would allow for AI.

But I resist calling life a game, and if the pundits are looking to retired people for models of how to live when we don’t have to work, maybe we should think very closely about what the utopia of our retirement is or should be.  As Jeanette Winterson says: “the question ‘How shall I live?’ is fierce.”

In 1976, when Hoffer was about 74, he published a series of short essays called In Our Time. Having witnessed the turmoil of the sixties, he thinks we have learned something:

And we have grown wiser.  We now know that affluence is a threat to social stability; that the adult’s failure of nerve is more critical than the young’s impulse toward anarchy; that righting wrongs is a perilous undertaking which needs a tightening of social discipline; that a sense of usefulness is more vital to the quality of life than abundance or even freedom.

A sense of usefulness is more vital to the quality of life than abundance or even freedom. Think about it.

I have written about games and utopias frequently.  If you are interested, you might look at “Retirement as Utopia” or “Huxley’s Last Utopia.”

 

Retirement as Utopia/ Life as a Game

Residing in a household where there are diverse reading preferences, I sometimes find myself catching enthusiasm for a book I would have never come across on my own.  Thus it was that I picked up The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia by Bernard Suits.  It is a book of philosophy – a very strange book of philosophy – wherein the speaker is, surprisingly, Aesop’s grasshopper (from “The Ant and the Grasshopper”).  Now, Aesop’s moral was that we should work hard like the ant to prepare for winter and not play around all summer like the grasshopper.  Suits’s Grasshopper, however, thinks that play is the thing – or, specifically, games are the thing.  And Suits spends much of the book on proofs and definitions concerning games, all of which are more interesting than you might think, though not the parts that fascinate me the most.

What I am most interested in is Suits’s chapter on utopia (as he defines it).  What would we do in a world where all our needs are met?  Basic physical requirements met, no need to earn a living, no need to prove ourselves?  Here is what Suits says:

For I suspect that playing (genuine) games is precisely what economically and psychologically autonomous individuals [read adequately housed, fed, and medicated without working] would find themselves doing, and perhaps the only things they would find themselves doing.  (165)

Now, the Grasshopper admits that people might do things like chop down trees or till gardens for the “fun of it,” but claims that our relationship to those things would change.  They would become games or play, and we would be happier for it.

Bear with me.  If a sufficiently funded retirement (and I mean sufficient to cover the basic costs of life sustenance, and not necessarily six cruises a year) can be thought of as a kind of utopia, what would it mean to think of our lives in terms of games, in terms of play?  Believe it or not, I think this is a serious question.  Would you be happier if you didn’t take life so seriously?  I’m talking about the day-to-day stuff here; this is not an argument for trivializing climate change or anarchy.

When we “play” games, we win and lose and still look forward to the next game.  It is not the end of the world if my husband beats me at gin rummy or a grandchild beats me at the very first level of a video game (as grandchildren always do).  I accept the terms of the game, including the fact that I might not win, and still enjoy playing it.

Camus said that the fundamental question in the face of life’s (seeming) absurdity was whether to commit suicide.  And once we decide to live (and he assures us that is what we should decide), we must somehow create meaning in a (seemingly) meaningless or absurd life.  Isn’t this what we do with games, with play – create some kind of pleasure and meaning from defining the terms under which we will play and then viewing the game in a positive manner?  Mightn’t life be easier if we could think of it as some kind of game?

When I was working, I always regretted that I could not take my work life less seriously – I could have worked longer and enjoyed it more.  But in work, one is less able to define one’s own rules, decide which games to play.  I have more latitude now, but am not sure that I am really taking advantage of it.

Now I am aware that while all work and no play can make Jack a dull boy, the reverse is also true.  That is why it is not just play, I am talking about, but games, where there is the pleasure of striving, but perhaps in a more joyful sense.  Think about playing a board game with friends.  You know it is not serious, but you lose yourself in the play of the game within the limits of the rules.  You don’t consider cheating to win; you don’t stay up at night over misplayed cards (unless you are a championship bridge player) or think you are a better person because you won.  You take the game as it comes and do your best and enjoy the experience.

The theologian John Dominic Crossan says that games are like life in that they have limits.  In life we have all kinds of limits – death being the major one:

I would suggest… that game is a very serious practice session for life and death, or, more precisely, for life towards death….  It is the joy of finitude and the laughter of limitation…. Game teaches us to enjoy the limitation posed by the game itself.  To destroy the limitation is to destroy the game.  Imagine baseball with as many balls as the pitcher wanted and as many strikes as the batter chose. (5)  The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story

The laughter of limitation.  I am reminded of Spinoza, my favorite philosopher, who says that “cheerfulness is always good and can never be excessive.”  Cheerfulness comes from joy and brings joy.  And looking at life as play would seem to be a joyful exercise.

The other interesting exercise that The Grasshopper stimulates is that of thinking about what exactly utopia would look like for us?  In his book, Suits somehow assumes that the government would be straightened out in utopia (which should be enough to worry us about his hold on reality, but he is – one must acknowledge – Canadian and that might make a difference).  What would utopia in what’s left of our lives look like?  What would constitute the best life we could live?  Old folks have lived a long time; we should have some idea of what makes life… joyful.  Suits says utopia  would be people playing games.  I do not entirely agree (after all the grasshopper dies because he has not prepared for the winter), but I think if I could see life as more game-like, I might be happier.

Rituals are one of the games I play in my old age; I create “rules” within which to live my life in such a way to meet at least some of my goals.  You might look at my short story, “Ritual,” to see one example of ways in which structure can add to life and what happens when it is interrupted.

Huxley’s Last Utopia – Island

Sometimes, the books of an author’s old age comment on or continue the work of their younger years.   Almost everyone knows how Aldous Huxley thought the world might go wrong from his 1932 Brave New World; less often read is his description of a (doomed) utopian society in Island, published thirty years later and not long before he died.  Huxley describes for us a peaceable kingdom on the island of Pala, which is about to be upended by contact with and exploitation by the outside world.  Unlike Hesse, Huxley is not writing an individual’s life, but, rather, the life of a culture from its beginning to its apparent imminent demise.  And we get Huxley’s vision of how life might be lived in a society which was supportive rather than exploitive.

Huxley was heavily influenced by Buddhism, and his island culture spun out of Buddhist beginnings to a place where mynah birds are trained to call out “Attention” to get listeners to pay heed to the present moment.  Sex is open even to children; this makes for uncomfortable reading today as adults on Pala sometimes “teach” young people the finer points of physical love.  There is a large extended family structure, allowing children to move between households.  Huxley was obviously influenced by Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa on both these traits.  But the main emphasis in Pala is on cultivating mental health.  My favorite scenes involve teaching children the tricks of mind control.  They are, for instance, told to imagine different animals or people, to multiply them in their mind, and then wipe them away in an exercise to show the youngsters how they can control their own minds and not be victim to random and hurtful thoughts.  We could all use that lesson.

Drugs are presumably bad in Brave New World (soma makes you feel good, but it also controls you).  By the time we get to Island, drugs are put to better use, with all young people going to through a rite of passage that includes the use of a mescaline-type substance (called moksha) that makes them cognizant of their place in the universe.   Long passages relating drug experiences could and should have been edited out of this otherwise interesting book.  Other people’s drunken or drugged adventures are seldom interesting.

The thinking process that got Huxley to Island can be traced through his non-fiction.  Thirteen years after Brave New World, he wrote the brilliant Perennial Philosophy, where he tried to pull together the convergent ideas of many of the world’s religions (called the “ultimate anthology” by the New York Times).  It might have served as a Bible to the residents of Pala.  In 1954, he wrote the less brilliant Doors of Perception, which encouraged the use of mescaline for enlightenment.  Huxley himself asked his wife to inject him with LSD on his deathbed  in 1963.  (Sidenote: President Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis all died on the same day, meaning the latter two got very little press upon their demise.)  Huxley apparently never gave up the idea that chemical assistance was a part of the life well lived.

Huxley’s Pala is doomed, however.  There is oil on the island and the capitalists are at the door.  The people are peaceable and have no weapons, no standing army.  They are going to lose control.  So, while this is the picture of a utopia it clearly reminds us that the real world is anything but.

Here’s the thing though – the people know it is coming and they are rational enough to know they probably can’t stop it.  Their training, however, makes them sure that they will cope (“even in the worst society an individual retains a little freedom”), and, as the tanks roll in, the last thing we hear is a mynah bird telling us to pay attention.   At this point, the reader is at once deeply sad for the lost utopian vision, but heartened by the realization that, perhaps, all utopias are in the heart and the way in which we relate to the world. 

And Huxley gives us other words of truth here.  “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.”  As I read this, I could not help but think that “planned obsolescence” applied not just to appliances and cars, but to the planet that nurtures us.

Novels of old age do not usually offer happy endings, nor do they conclude that the human race is perfectible – or even good (think of Melville’s The Confidence Man).  Old people know these things.  I would not trust an old person who hadn’t realized that the Eden of childhood was not recoverable.  The question is how to live within the world as we find it.  Not to say we shouldn’t try to improve it, but denial is the worst kind of soma.