Hollow, world! (Part 4 of 5)
On the deconstruction of community, the commodification of care, and alienation from communion.
This is part 4 of a 5 part essay series exploring of the philosophical and societal implications of ultra-anthropomorphic AI. If you missed it, read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. Find the link to the next Part at the end of this one.
Shredding the already threadbare social fabric
What nukes are to the physical world, AI is to the virtual and symbolic world.
Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens
This essay is not merely a moral protest against a handful of predatory tech companies spinning up seductive and maximally charismatic virtual lovers for lonely young men. There are issues there to be addressed, for sure. But the issue isn’t merely an individual psychological one, or one of company ethics or the need for regulatory controls. The looming issue I am pointing to is systemic and one of broad societal importance.
Let me explain. The rise of ultra-anthropomorphic AI and the epidemic of loneliness are manifesting within a very specific cultural and historical context. It is not merely that these emerging phenomena are worrying in their own narrow right—which they are, because it’s not difficult to see their implications for individuals and relationships as they converge—but more importantly because these are emerging in a time when our social fabric is already threadbare. And it didn’t begin with the COVID-19 pandemic, or the 2016 US presidential election, or even attention manipulating social media algorithms. This arc we’re on now has been a century in the making, although probably more.
American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently summarised this arc neatly when he explained having to revise his understanding of the origins of the anxiety epidemic sweeping US and other Western youth. Writing in the forward to Zach Rausch’s excellent piece on the importance of communities in childhood, Haidt wrote:
‘When I was writing The Anxious Generation, I thought of it as a tragedy in two acts: In Act I, we took away the play-based childhood (1990-2010), and in Act II, we gave kids the phone-based childhood (2010-2015). Teen mental health plunged in the middle of Act II. But as Zach and I were finishing up the revisions of the book in the fall of 2023, and Zach was running additional analyses and making additional graphs, we began to realize that there was a third act, which predated Act I and caused it: the decline of local community, trust, and social capital.’
As Haidt explains, the study and documenting of this prequel Act has been the life’s work of Robert Putnam, not least in his most famous and masterful work, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community:
‘Americans had extraordinarily high levels of social capital in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Civic groups, voluntary associations, and interfamily networks thrived in this era, giving Americans a strong sense of belonging as well as an abundance of place-based community networks. But by most measures, these local relationships began to decline starting in the mid-1960s, and accelerating afterwards. Putnam points to changes in generation as the largest cause of the decline: as the World War II cohort began to die off, the Baby Boom generation that replaced it had not shared their unifying experiences. Putnam suggests that the second largest cause of the decline was the change in communication technology that occurred in these decades as television rose to dominance and changed patterns of association on a vast scale. Jean Twenge argues that technological change is the largest single driver of generational differences… Putnam and Twenge both point to the “individualizing” or “atomizing” effect of new technologies of convenience, including everything from the car to the rise of malls to television. People stopped hanging out with their neighbours and were no longer available to watch kids on their streets. They stopped shopping locally, and had less and less time to give to local institutions and associations. Family life moved decisively indoors as the television became the new family hearth. (The arrival of home air conditioning also amplified that move indoors.) Of course, these new technologies brought many benefits to consumers, but their main effect on social capital appears to have been negative.’
Haidt then highlights Putnam’s near-prophetic assessment from a 1995 paper:
‘Television has made our communities (or, rather, what we experience as our communities) wider and shallower. In the language of economics, electronic technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at the cost of the positive social externalities associated with more primitive forms of entertainment. The same logic applies to the replacement of vaudeville by the movies and now of movies by the VCR. The new "virtual reality" helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests?’
This is hardly just an American phenomenon. It is felt by all Western nations, if not globally. We see evidence of it in our daily lives. The commodification of care has systematically shifted the locus of care roles—such as care for the very old and very young—from the family home to the market in the form of aged care and child care facilities. And who can be blamed for outsourcing the care of their kids and parents, because goodness knows a double-income household with two full-time employed adults is no longer a symbol of a liberated family whose equal participation in the workforce is merely desirable, but rather, an inescapable necessity if anything resembling a comfortable living is to be achieved. Yet it came at the cost of the fraying of social fabric. As Christopher Lasch argued in The Revolt of the Elites three decades ago, ‘instead of serving as a counterweight to the market, the family was invaded and undermined by the market’. In his prescient analysis, Lasch anticipates Putnam and Haidt’s findings and draws our attention to the true costs:
‘In our time it is increasingly clear that children pay the price of the invasion of the family by the market.’
And the invasion continues across our suburbs, whose sprawl and remoteness demand that we work even harder to purchase at least one if not two private vehicles to traverse that growing expanse of pedestrian-hostile ‘stroads’. And lucky that, because our shopping centres are increasingly comprised of sparsely distributed big box stores sprouting in concrete stacks on cheap remote lands to which we must drive, hermetically sealed in our private sanctuaries, through the suburbs in which we live anonymously next to each other, purchase our treasures, and return the same way. We do not serendipitously encounter another living soul along the way. The entire process can be conducted without a single human interaction. We probably even scanned and bagged our own goods at that store, which had decided on our behalf that the efficiency dividend gained through self-service checkout mattered more than offering entry-level employment to a young person. And we wonder why our young people “try to avoid face-to-face interactions in favour of texting or social media” because they “feel less vulnerable”? And as those same children, now older, once vied for our attention, we stared only into shiny black rectangles, rendered pitiful addicts from First Contact, and now have the gall to wonder why some of those kids would be more comfortable talking to a soulless but attentive AI bot?
The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman coined the term liquid modernity to describe the period in history wherein capital dissolves social and communal bonds. We are living right in the thick of it. We have been for decades. And we stand, most of us likely oblivious as the ultra-anthropomorphised AI mothership, a design of our own making, descends fast upon our society to shred whatever strands of social fabric still remain.
Show me a fragmented society, and I’ll show you a people who have accepted the slow and systematic vanquishment of opportunities for communion in exchange for mere convenience.
Our alienation from communion
Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and, lo and behold, it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.
L .M. Sacasas
Kurt Vonnegut suggested that "we are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane”. I would suggest that this idea can be made ever more clear with the following addendum:
Our ideas are humane only to the extent they preserve opportunity for communion.
In modern English, the word communion has religious connotations, but I’m invoking the term here for its original Latin meaning, wherein commūnĭo meant fellowship, mutual participation, a sharing. Fellowship itself means ‘a body of companions’, with ‘companion’ literally meaning ‘one who breaks bread with another’ in Old French. Implied in all of these words then—communion, fellowship, companion—is the assumption of a collusion between two or more sentient beings in possession of qualia to come together to share an experience and, most importantly, to know that an experience has indeed been brought forth in each. To commune, to break bread together, to be a good companion for another, are all suggestive of a kind of intimacy that is only possible in this world between beings who feel and experience the world as a self that relates to other selves. We cannot commune with a non-sentient thinking machine any more than we can commune with a microwave. If there is no subjectivity, there can be no intersubjectivity. For there to be a mutual sharing of experience, there must first be two or more who are capable of experience.
This is why there is no such thing as a ‘companion robot’, only a companion-like robot. And in the long-run, such products will prove as healthful and sustaining as “food-like products”: they are surely edible, even pleasant tasting, but they are also devastatingly devitalising, sucking the vitality from within, first at the individual’s body, and eventually flowing over into the systemic level and devitalising the entire community body. The opportunity to commune with others, to share subjective experience with other conscious beings, is what maintains vitality in every domain of human experience, even when these experiences are uncomfortable. These relationships are the very stuff of life, from the mother-child bond nourished by the sound vibrations that carry her voice through uterine walls to unborn ears, the rapport between a teacher-mentor and willing student, the jovial banter between colleagues that enlivens the workplace and propels us with a common goal, or the love shared with an intimate companion. These moments are the reasons we live. To give these moments over to machines is to vanquish these opportunities for communion, and to strip life bare of these opportunities is to devitalise life itself, to devitalise community, and the families and organisations they comprise.
It is, unfortunately, even worse than that. Without spaces for communion, we lose—and indeed have already significantly lost—the ability to not only connect with others, but to collectively deliberate. As is the fashion today, we call this ‘sensemaking’, and our diminished ability to make sense of the world together is nothing short of an existential risk. Forget robots taking over. Or climate change. Or nuclear war. Sensemaking is the ability to collectively generate a shared understanding of the world around us so that we may decide how to coordinate with one another and respond effectively to it. When this breaks down within the individual, it creates an ineffective human at best and a dangerous one at worst. At the collective level, a loss of sensemaking erodes shared cultural and value structures and renders us incapable of generating the collective wisdom necessary to solve complex societal problems, including how we might put AI technologies to best use and avoid their worst effects. When that happens, as William Butler Yeats anticipated a century ago in a time not unlike our own, ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.’
This is not a new idea. The ancients understood that shared experience and meaning is fundamental to community. In a recent talk, the classical educator Andrew Kern named it as the Logos, the idea from ancient Greek philosophy and early Christian theology that there was a divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning. Yet they believed that there was not only a Logos in the world, but also within each of us. As Kern puts it:
‘And because we have this [Logos] in our minds, we can look at the world outside of us, and we can have a Dia-Logos with that world, and the Logos in the world can be attained by the Logos in our minds, and we can have a Dialogos with it and know it. Not only that, but because you have the Logos in your mind and I have the Logos in my mind, a miraculous thing can happen: I can stand up in front of you and with a little luck, I can take Logi—these thoughts in my own mind—and I can formulate them into sound symbols, and… I can make the air between you and me vibrate in such a way that it will hit your eardrum, and the eardrum will pass those vibrations to your brain, and your brain will turn them into a sound, but not just a meaningless sound… [but] meaningful sound. And your mind can hear what I said. And you won’t understand exactly like I mean it, but you’ll understand it well enough… This, to me, is one of the greatest wonders in all of existence. And if what I say to you is true, and if your soul receives it, and to the degree that you and I are perceiving the same truth, our souls are in harmony with each other. And we can speak to each other in such a way that we can learn how to live together. We can deliberate together. We can make judgements together. When we lose the art of rhetoric, we lose the capacity to form harmony as a community.’
When does intersubjectivity no longer matter?
‘A falling leaf is not just that and nothing more, things are implicit in other ways.’
—Nora Bateson, author of Combining
Let’s return to the thought experiment where we began this exploration together in Part 1 of this essay series. No one could credibly deny that to cook and share a meal with a loved one is an act of communion. So when is interaction not communion? When does the exchange of ‘meaningful sound’ between minds that contain a Logos no longer matter? How far down the hierarchy of social interactions do you need to go to find the point at which the replacement of an actual conscious human by a human-seeming simulant becomes acceptable?
Think about the web of direct and indirect relations you have to other human beings in your life, be it at home, at work, in school, or when you’re out shopping. Which of those human relationships exactly are ripe for replacement, can be devitalised without much consequence? How indirect or trivial does your interaction with this other entity need to be for you to care less about whether they are an actual conscious being who lives, breathes and feels as you do?
How about your child’s best friend and confidante? Or their fourth grade teacher? The caregiver at your mother’s nursing home? Your family doctor? Your therapist? Or hairdresser?
Still too personal?
Alright. How about your local librarian? The barista at your favourite coffee haunt? Your child’s school bus driver? The postal delivery person you wave hello to every morning? Airport taxi drivers? More darkly, how about the future enemy combatant that takes aim at your conscripted adult child through crosshairs? If such a circumstance had to be in our future, would you prefer them to be human, or would an automaton be acceptable?
Maybe you’re borderline on some of those.
Ok. So how about the person who makes the clothes you wear? Or the farmer who grows the food you eat? Or the factory worker who assembled your smart phone?
When does the existence of subjective experience no longer matter? When does intersubjectivity no longer matter?
Chances are, many reading this will be answering from the perspective of whether or not the richness and meaning of their own experience is somehow diminished by the replacement of these roles by simulants. Is the sense of connection fundamental to the experience? Perhaps you don’t think it’s fundamental to your experience, but ok, let’s flip the lens: Is it fundamental to theirs?
You might say we’ve lost nothing with the widespread introduction of self-serve checkouts. The relationship between human check-out operator and customer was not so fundamental to the identity and subjective experience of either party for it to be consequential, was it? And so we have the rational and utilitarian basis for optimisation. But just like the making and serving of a meal is not merely the combining and cooking of ingredients in order to fuel the body, neither is the checkout experience merely the bagging of groceries and exchange of money for goods. Things are not ‘just that and nothing more’, as Nora Bateson said in her new book, Combining.
At age 15, I was a “checkout-chick”—or cash register clerk as they call it in the States. It was my first real job outside our family business. I admit, I didn’t like it much. I especially didn’t like it after getting a 240V electric shock trying to reassemble a dodgy conveyer-belt peddle that fell apart beneath my foot (because not even that was automated in the 1990s). I also didn’t like it much that they expected us young fellas to chase down, confront and man-handle any shoplifters trying to flee with valuable black market resellables like batteries and razorblades stuffed down their pants. It was central Frankston in the 90s, after all. Not widely reputed as a salubrious area and the probability of getting knifed wasn’t exactly zero. All for eight bucks an hour. But dangers aside, many might argue that some roles, like check-out operators, can be automated without significant loss of meaning for anyone involved. I readily admit, I thought it was a shitty job.
However, it was not simply a shitty job and nothing more. As a young person with zero life experience and average self-confidence, I learned about people in that environment. I struck up conversations with customers, exchanged banter, spoke with people I would never ordinarily speak to, learned new skills, and built social confidence. I learned how people worked. I learned how a business worked. I made friends among my colleagues. Eventually, when I left, I was glad, but I can see now that it was not merely a shitty entry-level job and nothing more. It may have been dangerous at times, and certainly uncomfortable, but it was also socially formative, and it was only that because of the people involved and that the role placed social demands upon me.
There is indeed a related angle here. When we so willingly outsource the meeting of human needs to a machine, regardless of how trivial those needs may seem at first glance, we also lose something else: an opportunity for someone to give. As social creatures, we need to serve. Serving is nourishing for both the other and ourselves. Research shows that other-focused people experience higher levels of wellbeing and lower levels of psychological distress and mental illness. And of course they do, because by being other-centred, we place ourselves firmly and consistently into the intersubjective space, we are seizing opportunities for communion, for the transmission of the Logos, where we see and hear others and others see and hear us us, where we offer up our gifts so that they can be gratefully received.
What happens when we are deprived of the opportunity to serve others because it is more expedient to assign the role to a machine? What happens when our experience is dominated not by serving, but only by being served? Imagine a world in which we are deprived of the opportunities to give, to commune. What does that look like?
We don’t have to look far. South Korea’s government introduced the ‘Untact’ policy in 2020 with the explicit aim to “spur economic growth by removing layers of human interaction from society.” In the years that followed, The Guardian reported that the changes across society were becoming increasingly noticeable:
‘Robots brew coffee and bring beverages to tables in cafes. A robotic arm batters fries and chicken to perfection. At Yongin Severance Hospital, Keemi – a 5G-powered disinfection robot – sprays hand sanitiser, checks body temperature, polices social distancing, and even tells people off for not wearing masks. Unmanned or hybrid shops are flourishing. Mobile carrier LG Uplus recently opened several untact phone shops, where customers can compare models, sign contracts and receive the latest smartphones without ever having to deal with a real person. Civil services too are getting untact facelifts. Seoul City plans to build a “metaverse” – a virtual space where users can interact with digital representations of people and objects – and avatars of public officials will resolve complaints.’
“Untact has made many aspects of life so convenient”, says 25 year old Seoul-based graduate Lee Su-bin.
Flash four years on from the introduction of Untact and all seems to be going great. Oh wait. Hang on. This just in from Seoul:
“A growing number of South Korea's young adults like Kim are isolating themselves from society, raising questions about the state of youths in a country known for cutthroat competition and pressure to conform… [It is] estimated about 3% of South Korea's population between ages 19 and 34 suffer from isolation… defined as having no meaningful interaction outside of their cohabiting family and work and no one to seek help from when needed.”
According Dr. Kim Seonga, an associate research fellow at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, "the most important cause is the lack of a social role”.
You don’t say, good doctor? Is that a fact?
Thank you for reading Part 4 of this 5 part essay series.
I invite you read the final part of this essay (Part 5), in which I draw the essay series to a close, examining the nihilism that lay beneath the broader set of trends clustered alongside anthropomorphic AI, and point to a potential path forward, a way of hope and agency.