The following is part two of the text of a talk given at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, on September 19, 2023. (Part one here.) The text has been modified slightly from its original form. Thanks again to Doc and Joyce, Isak, the Hamilton Lugar School, and Ostrom Workshop for the opportunity to present these remarks. Keep an eye on their ‘Beyond the Web Speaker Series’ for upcoming guests speaking to similar topics.
As to the opening question, can we survive AI, the answer is both yes and no. Yes we can because that’s what we do. It’s unlikely we’re going to disappear off the face of the earth. But no, we will not be the same.
Every task we give over to AI will have an effect or consequence on the current situation. But whether in the final analysis this will be a good or a bad thing depends on many factors including who you ask.
Every time we amplify or extend a part of us, we correspondingly obsolesce another part. That is, in doing things a new way, we no longer do them in the old way.
Before the Linotype machine came along, typesetters were employed in great numbers setting by hand the type for books, newspapers, and other printed materials. The Linotype machine gradually took over as it made typesetters, as a profession, largely unnecessary. The work was largely automated, an army of typesetters were out of work, a culture disappeared. The same goes for so many other once-numerous and once-vital jobs. Hollywood seems to be facing its Linotype machine at the moment. We always find new things to do, and so many times labour-saving means labour-offsetting. Where will this offset labour force land?
>< : >< : ><
I want to switch to some related areas of this subject.
Let’s add the word ‘how’ into the question and play with that a bit because I think this is the more crucial question or category of questions to address.
(How) can we survive AI?
It always seems like we’re chasing our tails, that we’re creating new fires faster than we’re putting the old ones out. Does it have to be this way?
I recall hearing about a community, I think it was a group of Hutterites in the central Canadian provinces or midwest United States, who, when smartphones were new, tested them out.
They weren’t necessarily anti-technology but they were careful about the technology they adopted. They had a very close community, a community very clear on its values and on its wish to maintain them. What makes them unusual (and for me, remarkable) is that they understand the link between technology and values, that change in one means change in the other. Technology that could help them and not necessarily negatively impact their values? Great. Otherwise, not so great.
So they selected a small group or had some volunteers and they got phones and used them for a period. Later, they got together and compared notes and decided after weighing pros and cons – all the things which were made easier or more convenient versus less desirable impacts on social and personal lives. And they decided to pass.
Any person, family, or culture, who wishes to maintain some continuity could learn from this example.
Don’t assume or fool yourself into thinking that your values can be maintained through wishful thinking or content curation. These values are based on certain structures and these structures rest on foundations. Like a game of Jenga, you can remove a brick here, a brick there, but remove too many key bricks and the structure is sure to topple.
And there you are wondering where your culture went and pining for the good old days.
But what can we do?
Marshall McLuhan famously, in ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ and elsewhere, broke down the effects of technology into two major categories: personal and social.
Personally, we are individually affected by our innovations on a basic sensory and neurological level. Our senses are exposed to stimulus and respond according to the volume and quality of the stimulus, according to the makeup of our ‘sensorium’ or our senses individually and together. That makeup is going to be different from culture to culture, age to age, and as children, we have a sort of base programming of our senses depending on the nature and level of sensory stimulus we are exposed to which sets us up for life. This is, essentially, the McLuhan Theory of Communication. Everything we know, everything we are, is through the senses.
Content is not the determining factor, content is the delivery mechanism.
As children we are wide open and soaking it up. This is why I shudder when I see parents giving phones to babies in carriages. They don’t understand what they are doing.
We become what we behold.
Why the book fails against the electronic device like iPad or iPhone is the high or low barrier to entry. Give a printed book to a baby in a baby carriage and it’s going to fumble with it for a minute then start chewing on the edges. Give the baby a phone or tablet and it’s playing Mario kart in 30 seconds.
It takes years to teach alphabetic literacy, to read and write. In that process the brain and senses are formed in certain ways which lead to certain outcomes.
It takes moments to become captivated by an electronic device like a smartphone, not very long to become adept at use, and in that process the brain and senses are likewise formed in certain ways which lead to certain outcomes individually and socially.
Books don’t really stand a chance.
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
I find it odd that in a society which seems to understand and value physical fitness, that it requires training and upkeep, that we don’t seem to understand that our minds and senses are the same.
While the first few years are critical to our individual makeup, the journey doesn’t end there. We know that our brains and our faculties continue to receive and respond to stimulus. We can gain and lose habits.
Like many people, I spend a lot of my time every day looking at screens. I spend time on social media, on email, typing out essays and speeches like this, teaching and taking classes and meetings. I also try to spend equal time with paper and books that I do with screens, though it’s nearly impossible.
Reading on screens is not the same as reading printed material. Both actually have their advantages and disadvantages, but they’re very different technologies which affect us, on a sensory and cognitive level, very differently.
On the screen, the light comes through. On the page, light comes from in front and reflects. It makes for a very different effect on the eye and brain. On the screen, our eye tends to skip and skim around more than it does on the page. This also has to do a bit with the font, as san-serif fonts are normally used on screens while serif fonts, those with the little ticks at the edges of letters, are more often on printed material and act to hold the eye more. The difference is that we tend to read more slowly on the page than on the screen and to slow the eye is to slow the mind.
to slow the eye is to slow the mind
It is similar with writing. I can speak at about 140 words per minute, type at about 80, and write about 40 words a minute by hand. Slowing my hand slows my mind and for someone with a racing mind, it might be helpful to know you can do something as simple as write to help slow down. A page a day, written by hand, over a week or month or more makes a measurable difference.
to slow the hand is to slow the mind
There’s a great exchange between Buckminster Fuller, W. H. Auden and Marshall McLuhan, who had gathered to ‘debate’ television in 1971. My favourite part is when Auden, the playwright, says: I wouldn’t dream of having a television in my home!” To which Marshall replies “well you merely suffer the consequences without enjoying any of the benefits.”
Auden makes a point we should pay attention to – we make media choices. We can choose not to have a television in our home. It’s an order of magnitude more difficult, but we can choose not to have smartphones in our homes. Think for a moment what that would mean for you personally, not to have a smartphone. How it would shrink your options. Would it even be worth the consequences?
So you manage to not have a smartphone – you still live in a smartphone world, surrounded by people who are under its spell, but you have some personal control at least, some say in your personal ecology if you want to think of it that way.
Maybe you’re part of a community that has taken the drastic measure of banning smartphones. It’s a pretty rough solution, simply banning a technology from the community, but while crude, it’s effective at least in a localized sense.
So there are the ‘personal consequences’ of technology. We are shaped as individuals. A blind or a sighted person naturally have different preferences, different values. What does a blind person care for visual art? Visual culture? For the colour of clothes? They naturally care more for the tactile nature of clothing or anything else than the visual. The dominant technologies of our day shape us personally and socially, and to change the technological environment is to change everything else, as surely as losing your sight changes who you are.
But what can we do about it?
We have a certain measure of control over our personal lives, and that’s the natural place to start. I think when most people are thinking about buying a new device, they ask themselves whether they can afford it, as in financially. I think we need to ask whether we can afford it culturally. That’s a much more difficult thing to consider.
The technological choices we make shape us on a fundamental level.
We are not the same.
We’re not the same people or culture today than we were before speech, before farming, before the written word, before the printing press, before the automobile, before clothing, before air conditioning, before …
We will not be the same on the other side of AI. We’ve already stepped off the shore, and are ankle if not knee deep in it.
It’s not too late to influence the direction we go in. We have a lot more agency than we might think. Just as we are shaped as individuals, and added together we get culture, our individual choices speak more loudly the more choices or voices are added.
The market speaks loudest and every dollar counts. You vote with your wallet. Every dollar you spend is a vote in favour, every dollar you withhold is a vote against.
Economic power is arguably more effective than political, drives the political. Big companies might hold big influence but you’ve given them that influence. You can make a different choice. I’m not saying it’s easy.
Here’s a question for you:
What are your values?
What do you care about?
Is the technology you use likely to support that?
I ask the same of technology companies, challenge them:
What are your values?
What do you care about?
Is the technology you’re developing going to support those things, undermine them? Will it create something new at the expense of the old?
Will it create something new to improve the old?
Will the ‘unintended consequences’ overshadow the intended uses?
The answers to these questions need to inform how and why we develop new technologies, and as consumers of media, as humans individuals and with families we’d be wise to consider these sorts of questions before paying for the privilege of having our bodies and identities reshaped.
I think one of the most pressing questions of our time is:
How can we do better about ‘unintended consequences?’
Technology companies are largely made up of people who are excited about what they do and genuinely want to make the world a better place. Unfortunately, our great advances in developing technologies are not matched by a great understanding of their personal and social effects.
Changing the world is frighteningly easy. Doing it with intention toward achieving certain effects and not others is much more difficult.
Culture is largely the result of the technological choices we make individually and collectively. Especially today with the speed and scale of technological spread and effect, when it takes not decades or years or months or even days but sometimes hours for a new medium to gain a foothold.
A culture is born, supported, or dies as a result of the environment within which is exists. Like adding toxic effluent to an ecosystem, or cleaning one up, the conditions either support or undermine the nature and quality of what’s within it.
A term that can mean different things to different people, ‘media ecology’ broadly accepts the premise that, like the natural environment around us, we live within (and have, within us) a shifting and delicate ecosystem. This ecosystem responds as a whole so that if you mess with the balance in one area, you typically affect the total situation. This analogy applies on the individual and the social levels. This is obviously a much different category than ‘media literacy.’
For most of human history we’ve been as blind to it as we were to our effect on the natural environment, but as we can no longer ignore our effect on the planet, we can no longer ignore the effects of our innovations on ourselves individually and socially.
Ecology, applied to technology, is one possible answer to raising our heads out of the sands, but we have no idea what it actually entails because it’s only an idea right now.
There is so much work to be done, so many questions to be raised and answered.
My father, in his last speech, said ‘media ecology is not a spectator sport.’
It’s late to be taking media ecology seriously, but it’s not too late.
We need to understand that our technological environment is as sensitive as the natural environment around us, shaping who we are and are not on fundamental levels. Today, with the global nature of our world, it’s like the very air we breathe. The environment surrounds us all. We’re soaking in it, we’re choking on it.
To really turn things around, we need global cooperation, but as with anything else, it starts with us.
>< : >< : ><
The Food and Drug Safety Act, the FDA, were not suggested by corporations, who certainly fought tooth and nail against them, neither were they political initiatives. People were sick and dying from tainted food, sick of snake oil and its salesmen, and demanded change.
We are in a similar position today. I think we all know it’s not going great. We need to figure out what we can do about it.
Regulation seems an impossible task for a few reasons. The global nature of the situation is a big one, but the fact of the profound impact yet subtle cause is perhaps the greatest hurdle.
This is the major reason why I’m writing a book on ‘the medium is the message.’ I believe that if enough people understood that, it would be a tipping point that would force change from the top down, as when people got fed up from being fed poison and demanded change.
Marshall McLuhan, in the opening chapter of ‘Understanding Media’ in 1964 said:
“I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”
How do we anticipate the ‘personal and social consequences,’ how do we account for the ‘unintended consequences’ which tend to be quite different from the ‘intended consequences?’ We are very bad at designing things without side effects.
How do we measure our senses, our sensory balances, our sensoria?
How do we test new technologies for the effect they’ll have on our senses individually, the impact they’ll have on our societies and cultures?
The answers to questions like these may be the answers to the question of how we might take control of our history going forward.
Because they are difficult questions does not mean we shouldn’t or can’t address them. It’s late in the day to start, but they day’s not over.
Our technological choices shape our individual and cultural outcomes.
We are at the dawn of AI. Where do we want to be at sunset?