Search

Note: This article is part two of a two-part series. You can read Part One here.

Part 2: The Digitization of Life

In our previous segment, we concluded that the current debate around digital technology and AI is saturated with much hype and surrounded by confusion; most people have a hard time evaluating the ever wilder claims concerning AI’s ability not merely to replicate but vastly to exceed human activity and thus render us useless. Although the panic about humanity’s extinction through AI has subsided somewhat, predictions about job losses remain strong. Elon Musk recently opined that in ten to twenty years, AI and robotics will make work an “optional” preference. Musk’s prediction should worry Christians, who have traditionally regarded work as constitutive of human dignity because it reflects God’s own character (John 5:17).¹

The sensationalist futurist historian Yuval Harari similarly claims that job loss through AI will produce an unemployable “useless class” that will require universal income and constant virtual entertainment to keep them “occupied and content.” According to Harari, this option of retreating into virtual reality is nothing new, since that is the basic function of religions: 

What is a religion if not a big virtual reality game played by millions of people together? Religions such as Islam and Christianity invent imaginary laws, such as “don’t eat pork,” “repeat the same prayers a set number of times each day,” “don’t have sex with somebody from your own gender” and so forth. These laws exist only in the human imagination. No natural law requires the repetition of magical formulas, and no natural law forbids homosexuality or eating pork. Muslims and Christians go through life trying to gain points in their favorite virtual reality game. If you pray every day, you get points. If you forget to pray, you lose points. If by the end of your life you gain enough points, then after you die you go to the next level of the game.²

Harari is professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Let us hope for academy’s sake, that Harari’s thoroughly ahistorical misrepresentation of religion as digitized opium of the people does not represent the current scholarly level of religious studies. He seems not to notice the deeply dualistic, scientistic, and indeed gnostic metaphysics that frame his understanding not only of religious practice but also of reality itself. 

Ironically, however, Harari’s bizarre understanding of religion points us to the heart of what really matters in our engagement of modern technology. His view of religion as virtual reality testifies to the impact of virtual reality on his thought. His crass opposition of a value neutral, mechanistic natural order to the arbitrary imposition of value by religious folks already betrays a digitized view of reality. Harari’s religion-nature dualism takes us to the heart of what matters in discussing digital technology. The key question is whether human life, and therefore also our human identity, are embedded in some kind of meaningful natural order according to which we ought to do good and avoid evil, or whether nature is simply a brute fact or meaningless mechanism, however intricate or complex. Is there a nature (and therefore also human nature) that already holds meaning for us to discover, a reality that in its complexity and multidimensional character always exceeds our knowledge, or is reality basically like a quantifiable machine, a matrix of information that can be managed and controlled by means of the right technology? The latter view is that of the digiverse, of life conceived in computational terms. This is the very heart of the digital world that threatens to swallow up our humanity. 

Digital Technology: Not a Tool but a Way of Being

How often have you heard the line, “computer technology is a tool, nothing less, nothing more. We have to learn how to use this tool for good rather than evil”?  While sounding reasonable, this assessment misses the true depth of the current transition into a digital world. We have to understand the nature of digital technology, or, rather, recognize that digital technology is becoming nature for us, (re-)configuring our imagination and therefore our reality.³ Let us recall that in contrast to other animals, human beings to some degree transcend their nature. What is “natural” for us (contrary to Harari’s claim) is never simply neutrally given but constituted by our ways of seeing, ways that are in turn determined by the technologies that help us navigate life. It is important at this point to distinguish between “tools” and “mediating technologies.” The hammer, hairdryer, or even a printer are extensions of human activity that are limited to specific tasks. Other technical innovations, such as the printing press or the computer, by contrast, are “mediating technologies” that reconfigure our experience of the world as a whole. 

It is difficult for us, however, to recognize our formation through such technologies, because we integrate them into our lives to such an extent that they disappear from view. The philosopher Antón Barba-Kay compares such formative lenses to our use of the mirror. When glass mirrors were invented, they quickly became “instruments of neutral objectivity” that showed us what we really looked like. Yet they were not actually neutral but reconfigured our way of being as one of self-objectification: “Modern mirrors, mirrors as we know and use them, are a tool that, once invented, made neutral depiction thinkable by making it visible. By offering an impersonal view, they changed how we picture, dress, and fashion ourselves. By providing [both] an instrument and a metaphor of neutrality, they profoundly transformed early modern art, science, and philosophy. Yet it is their very transparency that makes it hard to bring their effects into view.”⁴

In short, modern technologies like the computer become the medium through which we access reality, and, by employing this medium, our sense of what counts as real is transformed in turn. Thus, the digital medium is comparable to the way language both informs and forms. While what we say is not reducible to the medium of our expression, language nevertheless does profoundly shape how we communicate, and therefore also limits what we can communicate. Digital technology has a similar power of informing our experience of the world. The power of technology to reconfigure reality for us is the meaning of Marshall McLuhen’s famous adage, “the medium is the message.” Like any medium, digital technology “tends to favour certain attitudes and conceptions of what is most worth saying, of what counts as a virtue of thought, and how to prosecute an argument at all.”⁵ McLuhen saw clearly that digital technology is radically different from a mere tool, because it reconfigures our consciousness. The digital medium acts as yet another mirror, with a similar power of quantification and “transformative neutrality; data is the mirror that, seeming only to reflect, changes our assessment of what we see.”⁶  The digital, in other words, becomes culture for us, the new normal that defines how we understand the world and ourselves. 

Now, to be sure, we have already experienced such paradigmatic reconfigurations, and they have not obliterated us. In our collective history, the most important formative shifts that installed certain kinds of mediating mirrors by which our worldview was framed were the shifts from orality to writing, and from writing to print culture. As Walter Ong has argued in his classic Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word,⁷ first writing and then the invention of the printing press fundamentally reconfigured our sense of space, time, truth, reasoning, and communication. In the case of writing, this shift came with some losses but also brought tremendous gains. For example, the Greek philosopher Plato warned, at the dawn of the literary age, that writing ossifies speech and thus tends to prematurely cast as final truth or complete what a speaker may yet want to nuance and may thus misrepresent his view. Moreover, writing also weakens memory, because we no longer have to internalize thoughts, arguments, or histories; we can always look them up. On the positive side of the ledger, however, writing universalizes memory by making it accessible to anyone with the requisite technology. In this way, writing opens up new dimensions of timelessness, of careful articulation, of tightly knit, progressively developed reasoning, along with new dimensions of verification and accountability.⁸ 

What’s Happening to Us? Assessing the Transformative Impact of Digital Technology

Hence when we assess digital technology, and AI as one of its manifestations, we have to ask: How does the digital medium shape our view of reality and of ourselves? What are the gains and what are the losses?  At first glance, the gains seem immense: infinite possibilities of transmitting information at any volume or speed; limitless interconnectivity across any distance; coordination of social movements; immediate, individual, universal online access to information and to institutions. Yet what is the price we pay for these gains? Instead of stringing together a number of specific losses incurred by our immersion in digital technology, it is more helpful to point to its fundamental reconfiguration of nature and human nature. We have to realize that the digital medium is not simply print culture on steroids but rather something radically different.

In contrast to all previous technological paradigms, digital culture radically disembodies and quantifies human existence. The two aspects are related: by reducing life itself to zeros and ones in order to turn it into computational, countable, and mathematically analyzable data, digitization abstracts from life. The complex dynamics of life that include phenomena like freedom, intentionality, and the struggle of overcoming obstacles, all disappear when life is repackaged as digital information. Even more importantly, these data are then communicated to us through devices that are designed to hide this abstraction. Especially the touchscreens of our cellphones and iPads (and now other machines as well) simulate a sense of intuitive immediacy. How easily even the smallest child can operate and derive satisfaction from a touchscreen, and how devastating is the effect when parents withdraw this electronic soother! The immediate ease of access to digital devices masks the fact that we interact with quantified, commodified “data,” with all the nuances and offensiveness of embodied encounters taken out. 

To assess current digital technology properly, we have to return to the mirror analogy we mentioned earlier. The digital medium is the strongest invisible shaping force we have yet experienced in human history. It fuses our access to reality with a way of being in the world. We redefine ourselves and our personal interactions with others in the image of the machine.  As Barba-Kay puts it, “digital technology is both a new tool for measurement and a new medium of being in touch with others.”⁹  Digital technology is fast becoming our new normal. In this digital culture, “our tools become coextensive with our habitual acts of consciousness—such that the kind of creature we are becomes a technological issue and choice. If the Anthropocene marked the point at which we more or less mastered the elements to human purposes, the digital era marks the point at which our own thoughts and acts will come to be defined by the uses of digital technology and by our self-interpretation in light of them. Technology will no longer be one force within the broader horizon of human nature and culture, it will provide the terms of the horizon itself.”¹⁰ 

So what? What’s the big deal about this shift of horizons? The big deal is that imperceptibly our attention becomes reconfigured as computational. The digital medium quantifies our attention. And attention, we must realize, is the evaluating aspect of our access to reality. We pay attention to what we deem worthy of attention. The tragedy of digital culture is that it reduces what counts to the countable. Digital technology fuses a tool of measuring with our access to reality, thus reducing our life experience to what is quantifiable, accessible, and expressible by digital means. As a result we become increasingly disincarnate, removed from an embodied way of life. The computational world of algorithms accustoms us to shun the normal aspects of organic life and trains us to expect the smooth ease of non-differentiating immediacy and sameness that characterizes data processing. The digital medium has no room for the human person of flesh and blood. According to the Christian tradition, we were created as psychosomatic wholes, designed by God to grow into full humanity only through the collaborative struggle of body and spirit, a struggle that defines all true learning. Authentic humanity is only won through the spirit’s incarnate struggle in organic life, in flesh and blood. The digital medium, by undermining or even removing these fundamental elements of life from human existence, strips us of our humanity. To resist this loss may be the most important task of educational institutions like Regent College. 

Crippling the Spirit: Writing in Literary and Digital Culture

The difference between digital and embodied culture will become clearer if we extol for a minute the benefits of written reflection: print culture opened up a gap between personal impression and reflective argumentation through careful, evidence-based reasoning. Academic writing in the humanities used to be the highest expression of such reflection; it is still what we encourage when teaching essay writing (or at least I hope it is). Essay writing thus intensifies and formalizes the movement of the human spirit we call education, leading out of ignorance into a clearer, broader understanding of things. Essay writing is not some abstract mental exercise divorced from life. Rather writing manifests our existential struggle of coming to understand the world around us. It is by means of this struggle that we realize our humanity. We orient ourselves in the world by encountering what is yet alien to our minds and by integrating it into a meaningful framework that allows us to “see” things in a meaningful context. Through careful dialogue with the foreign, weighing its claims, we integrate it into our own frame of reference, and thus end up enlarging our mental horizon, locating ourselves in the world, and growing in the process. As any student knows, this process is laborious and often even painful, requiring self-discipline, stamina, and sustained personal investment. Education is hard work.

It is true that writing as a form of abstract reasoning also lifts us above the immediacy of life, but it does so in a more healthy way by encouraging reflection that will enable us to re-enter life with greater wisdom. Human writing, after all, is the formalized manifestation of the spoken word; and human language is the very medium by which our embodied spirits orient themselves in the world. Unlike any other animal, human beings have Logos. With this deep insight, Aristotle recognized two key aspects of our humanity. First, we are beings who need to account for what is and for ourselves. We are answerable to ourselves and others, and ultimately to God. It is by stating that something is the case, by seeking out how and why things disclose themselves to us, and by answering to others that human beings orient themselves in the world. Second, this truth seeking and self-justifying occurs in language. Thought is in principle a monologue with ourselves that always already seeks the dialogue with another. Language is the very medium of thought and both are in turn the way in which we embody in our flesh the Logos. For Logos creatures like us, language, thought, and reason belong inseparably together as the means by which we carve out our existence. We just said that education is hard work; we can now add that language is part of that work. Our struggle for the right expression is our existential struggle of realizing our humanity, of maturing as persons, of finding our way in the world. When we try to formulate our thoughts, when we try to find the most fitting word, and when we search our linguistic traditions to find more adequate ways of expression—this is the work of becoming human, of learning to "see" through listening and speaking. 

We are, to borrow a biblical expression, truly people of the Word, for it is by words that we live and grow. I hope this brief description of our linguistic nature makes clear why automation of writing through the use of LLMs is deadly for education. For one, we should grasp by now that genuine thought requires felt yearning for truth-discovery that only comes from a living being that can also hunger. Our analogies of thirsting for knowledge, and hungering for insight, or satisfying one’s curiosity remind us of the bodily grounding of real thought. Human thought requires a living body. This remains the principal reason why the application of “intelligence” or even “consciousness” to machines is an oxymoron. 

More important than acknowledging that machines can’t think, however, is recognizing that avoiding the struggle to think diminishes our humanity. When we hand over the task of writing to LLMs, we hand over our Logos nature, we betray our humanity by trading it in for something else. When we eschew the hard work of struggling for truth by allowing LLMs to write our essays, we willingly exit from the very existential struggle that makes us human in the first place; it should also come as no surprise that along with abrogating our Logos, we abrogate our moral accountability. This is perhaps the most deadly effect of handing the task of thinking over to non-thinking machines.

Literary culture puts a distance between immediate experience and its unreflected communication, allowing the mind to contemplate and reason through otherwise opaque and diffuse thoughts. This is especially true of the long form writing of essays or books, which requires sustained attention to, and the rigorously logical evaluation of, others’ viewpoints. This schools us in self-discipline. Writing thus helps to subordinate emotions to argumentation and also places a wedge between one’s personal identity and the argument put forward. Literary culture tends to turn attention away from oneself toward the subject matter under discussion. 

Now contrast this kind of writing with the attention encouraged by the digital medium: immediate, unreflective, emotive exchanges; logical order is no longer required for tweets or posts. Moreover, the ubiquitous presence of AI assistance, along with an AI explanation now heading every Google search result, discourages independent, comparative research. Instead of entertaining long form arguments that require sustained dialogue and verification of presented facts, internet based communication mirrors the standardization inherent in the digital medium itself: groupthink and cancellation of non-conformists have become the norm rather than the exception. This development is also aided by the digital medium. In contrast to literary culture, attention is turned from focus on the subject matter to the immediate affirmation of one’s identity—an identity that is, furthermore, unmoored from the common embodied life of those who think differently. No wonder we have seen a “viral” increase of identity politics in recent years.

Given the contrast between incarnate life and the digital medium we have described, we should no longer be surprised that students succumb to the temptation to have their essays, or good portions thereof, compiled (rather than actually created or written) by dead, soulless, mindless, and thoughtless algorithms? Especially students whose consciousness and attention have been formed by the digital medium are simply overwhelmed when faced with the task of critically assessing information and constructing a sustained logical argument. Who can blame them? Once the mind has atrophied from a want of struggle, like muscle after too much unuse, what do we expect? Having been thoroughly trained to avoid all intellectual struggle, and thus overwhelmed by the task to write an essay or book review, students turn to the ready solution on offer: Large Language Models. 

The implications of all that we have been saying should be clear. Our main problem is not the profoundly misnamed “AI.” Nor is our concern ultimate with students who can’t write very well; it is rather with students who are being trained not to write at all, or, even worse, whose “writing” mirrors that of the LLMs. Our problem is rather the atrophy and malformation of our attention, of the very personal spirit that reflects God’s image. Christians in particular need to recall the incarnation as the model for embodied life. Christ, the Logos made flesh, modelled for us what it means to live by the word. Instead of thinking about ways of integrating so-called “Artificial Intelligence” into our curricula, we should think about how we can preserve, rekindle, and foster the embodied, personal, human intelligence that alone constitutes the incarnate life of the mind. Nothing less is at stake than our humanity.