With all the claims and confusion around AI and what it can and might do, it’s instructive to turn to a thinker such as Jacques Ellul, who wrote extensively about the effect of technology on our lives, long before current developments. While not writing about AI specifically, Ellul’s thoughts on technology are helpful for alerting us to the complications of technological advancement.
Ellul was a French thinker, a theologian and philosopher whose insightful and sometimes counterintuitive works explore modern society and its relationship to Christianity. Ellul wrote a series of books on technology, famously beginning with The Technological Society, but as is often pointed out, Ellul was concerned as much with what we might call technique as technology, the effect of thinking of people as machines, beginning with the industrial revolution and continuing to the ideology of business and the likes of thinking of brains as types of computers.
Ellul’s work appeared largely before the proliferation of computers but during the period of post-war urbanisation, with the rise of advertising, consumer goods and TV. It was prophetic and counter to the twentieth century celebrators of technology. Of course, for his trouble, he was criticised by some as a backward-looking technophobe.
The effects of technology gone awry are all around us, from environmental catastrophes to toxic social media to nuclear threats to the blossoming issue of AI and copyright, and there is a clear indication that we need more discussion about how we put our technologies to use, rather than just assuming technological innovation is inherently a good thing. Ellul wisely noted that while technology is not itself good or bad morally, this fact has meant that we tend to think of it as beyond judgement, which means we aid its unrestricted proliferation. Such is its momentum that one of the issues of our age is how we restrict it, social media amongst children being just one example.
Ellul was concerned about how the use of technology influences the way we think humans should run their lives. (Think of how we are encouraged to ‘maximise’ our time, including our leisure time, and even about the word ‘downtime’, the use of which suggests a period of necessary servicing before we resume our conveyor-belt existence.) His writing can have a touch of hyperbole, but he argued that the order central to technology is somewhat different to the idiosyncratic way nature progresses, and by letting technology influence the way human affairs are run – through models of efficiency and schedules – we lose some of the spontaneity and rumination that make us human. Ellul was also concerned about a loss of choice and autonomy – of technology being foisted upon us. (It is no surprise Ellul, like Orwell, saw links between technology to totalitarianism.)
Ellul argued that it is not so much the technology itself but the ideology that pushes technology that is the problem. Technique is linked to capitalism’s hunger for profit and growth, but there is also the ideology of technological innovation for its own sake. We see this in AI: tech companies build AI models with little discussion of whether using them to replace human workers might actually be a bad thing.
One interesting aside in Ellul’s thought is his argument that one of the effects of technology in the past two centuries has been the proliferation and priority of images over text. Ellul sees this as another dehumanising move, as he argues that our interaction with images turns us into spectators rather than conversationalists, an interesting take when one thinks of the proliferation of images through smartphones, and the lessening of long-form text, which has been accompanied by a sense of degeneration of relationships.
Ellul’s Christian faith was not explicit throughout his critique of technique, but it did inform it. He took from Christianity ideas about what it means to be human and criticised even the Church when it seemed to be infected by machine-age techniques. He criticised Billy Graham for the business-like model of his evangelism. Ellul felt that proper Christianity, at its core, was against herd behaviour.
Historian Robert Skidelsky has recently written about similar issues (in the books The Machine Age and Mindless), arguing that the danger of what he calls the ‘machine age’ is that rather than seeing ourselves as part of nature, our use of technology makes us think that we relate more to machines, which lessens the value of individual identity and means we are wrapped up more in a cocooned human world, since machines are our creation anyway. Like Ellul, he argues that a focus on technology means we lose sight of purpose, as technology is all about means.
On the question of whether AI will become conscious, which seems to be almost an obsession, Skidelsky writes that we are both under- and overestimating the potential of AI. At times, we fail to see how much we think of ourselves as like machines, to our detriment, but at the same time, thinking that machines (AI) will become conscious like us is mere ‘projection’. (This is more the case when we still don’t understand what consciousness is.)
Srini Aarayanan, one of the authors of The Neural Mind, has also commented on this recently, explaining that AI is trained entirely differently to the way human minds grow, it lacks emotion, and does not interact with the world or humans the same way we do, because human minds are embodied. He notes that the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was invented not to suggest computers are like minds but to underscore the difference.
Skidelsky argues that the question of what AI can do is not as important as what it should do, and what it should do is entirely up to us, and how we choose to use it: will it be a tool of business to replace people and make more profit for an elite few? Or will we use it to enhance human flourishing by making decisions about the extent of its saturation? Both Skidelsky and Ellul write that we can’t unlearn our technologies, but we can decide how and when to use them.
Nick Mattiske blogs on books at coburgreviewofbooks.wordpress.com and is the illustrator of Thoughts That Feel So Big.
