Subcontracting Our Minds
A Baylor colleague, assigned the task of helping one of our deans persuade the faculty to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into our classrooms and assignments, sensed opposition in the room from what he did not hesitate to call “the old guard.” He explained to a skeptical graduate student that the use of AI would come in handy, for example, if one had to deliver a speech or presentation to a city council meeting.
The claim was startling. While he had earlier made an attempt to distinguish “ethical” from “non-ethical” use of AI, he seemed never to have considered that the use of AI that he was now recommending would deprive its users of the opportunity to write the required speech themselves. He was recommending a store-bought product as a substitute for an authentically and distinctively human activity. Perhaps he should have hesitated.
We can be sure that “statistics show,” or will soon be made to show, that speakers who use ChatGPT are thought to be better speakers. Soon we will hear the inevitable praise from the professors who gave us a laptop on every desk: the use of AI represents a great democratic advance. It’s a leveler, after all, like cellphones: it brings not only equal opportunity but equal outcomes. But like every promise of effortless success, this one is empty. There will still be competition, only for the best AI programs generating speeches, which means competition in money to purchase the latest fabrications.
What my colleague was recommending, with the best of intentions, would result in the absence of the cultivation of the requisite skill, and hence the absence of that skill altogether. Telling our students to let AI do their work, or a substantial part of their work, will mean that they will never learn grammar, how to turn a phrase, how to write a compelling, arresting formulation, how to win over an audience through persuading or convincing. The consumers of AI will never know what it means to persuade, to invent, or to discover. They will fail to observe the human hopes and fears and other passions that move and motivate us. They may not even grasp the import of what the AI speech is saying. They will certainly be more liable to carry whatever unthought-through implications the AI generator unwittingly harbors.
From such AI consumers, one can expect unhappy lives of unacknowledged but desperate dependence. Their successes will be the equivalent of watching a video game and claiming to play a sport, going to culinary school and learning there how to shop in the frozen dinners section of the grocery store, or learning the “think system” from Professor Harold Hill. Professors will still be housed in various departments, but all of us will be teaching acting.
It should (but doesn’t) go without saying that the promotion of such use of AI is like putting a fungo bat in the hands of every Little Leaguer, loaded gloves on the hands of the boxer, anabolic steroids in the veins of Olympic athletes. It’s an empty promise of success, an encouragement of the selling of one’s soul to the devil. Or if this sounds too old school, let’s say that it is peak inauthenticity, the ultimate bourgeoisification of life. As Rousseau put it, for the inhabitant of bourgeois society, it is necessary “to be or to seem.” AI will hand you the means to seem—at least so long as you are delivering the speech. It will deprive you of the ability to be.
Some will call this alarmist, claiming that such use of AI will mean no more and no less than the loss of hand-working arts to machine tools and automation—something foolishly bemoaned by romantic socialists. In truth, it is much worse, since it means the loss of reasoning itself, a handing over of our minds to tools like Microsoft Copilot. Instead of broadening and deepening our students’ minds, the consumption of AI will atrophy them, diminishing our students’ capacity to think and reason for themselves.
AI is, to be sure, rapidly becoming indispensable in multiple fields and endeavors. It seems imperative, for example, that the next generation of fighter aircraft be equipped with “deep AI integration.” But the integration of AI into humanities classes? Our AI-trained students will enter the room, eyes on their cell phones, minds locked in tiny prison cells. And we, pleasant gendarmes of those prisons, will tell them to ask their phones for the words they need. A machine will logarithmically assemble the words with breathtaking speed, and the words will indeed resemble things once thought and spoken by human beings. The unspoken assumption will be that the words are superior to anything the students could have composed, and should therefore be used, incorporated, and presented as the students’ own.
AI will surely also further the path toward soulless homogeneity that characterizes so much of the modern world, the drift toward what James Kunstler has called “the geography of nowhere.” We will experience the rapid loss of the charming particulars that have hitherto been found in speeches drawn from the speakers’ own individual experiences and the admiration of how those experiences have been artfully crafted into a speech. AI will offer collections of cylinders for a music-box mind.
Once upon a time, speakers and writers were expected to be readers, for reasons well laid out by C. S. Lewis in his many paeans to the soul-expanding power of reading. The temptation to embrace AI would be a cold one had we not ceased to be readers. It is hot because we don’t read. Steven Spielberg sounded an early version of this warning against illiteracy to his audience in his speech accepting the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Motion Pictures Academy on March 30, 1987:
Movies have been the literature of my life. The literature of Irving Thalberg’s generation was books and plays. They read the great words of great minds. And I think in our romance with technology and our excitement at exploring all the possibilities of film and video, I think we’ve partially lost something that we now have to reclaim. I think it’s time to renew our romance with the word. I’m as culpable as anyone in . . . having exalted the image at the expense of the word. But only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.
In the thirty-seven years since Spielberg’s speech, Hollywood’s move toward remakes, sequels, and comic-book movies has amply confirmed his warning.
Our paltry diet of screen-based entertainment helps us realize that the acceptance of AI has been coming for a while. Long ago, we expected our national officeholders to be men and women who had read deeply and reflected more than most on our lives together and what might enhance them. Some time ago we got used to our office holders paying speechwriters, press secretaries, and ghostwriters. More recently, we got used to their reading off of teleprompters. And soon we will accept their wearing earphones and glasses with text written into them. Gazing toward the day after tomorrow, we espy the transhumanist dream of fusing human and machine, which would have us listening to a speaker’s “neural upload.”
It’s all part of automation, and of automation we have become grateful. When shown a platoon of workers with shovels digging a canal by a man who was proud of the high employment this provided, Milton Friedman famously asked why the men weren’t instead equipped with only spoons. It was a memorable quip; automation, be it with the “earth-moving machines” for which Hobbes pleaded, or with printers and QR readers, has indeed produced great efficiencies. These things deliver the goods and services that free up our time and resources.
But to what end? Back-breaking and lung-blackening tasks were taken up under the lash of necessity, and so were gladly given over to machines when they could be, thanks to human ingenuity and modern science. Those who performed them often did so with the hope that their children wouldn’t have to. But what of activities that cultivate the mind and enrich the soul? Can we, should we, not pause before we give these, too, over to machines? What of what we still call the “fine arts”—painting, sculpture, architecture, design, music composition and performance, poetry—arts that are distinctively human and that ennoble or beautify our lives? Was the leisure to engage in these arts not the very reason we sought, through technology, to overcome material necessities?
And what of those fine arts that go beyond this and offer us compelling insights into the human condition: storytelling, novel writing, play writing, short story writing, essay writing? What, finally, of philosophizing? Do we want machines doing for us what is distinctively human, reducing us, by their alleged convenience, to puppets, hollowed-out shells of human beings, mannequins of mediocrity, ersatz versions of a once exalted form of being? Do we really want to farm out to machines our capacity to think, to invent, to discover and rediscover? Are we prepared to allow the organs of our intellectual and spiritual lives to waste away while we drink the dreck that calls itself the product of intelligence?
We are crossing a threshold. Should we not pause to consider whether the house is habitable?
Image by Prostock-studio and licensed via Adobe Stock.