collective conscious; protecting personhood
There are two streams of life technology effects profoundly.
Our “collective conscious” as a species is that slow, diffusive process of change we witness when innovation becomes embedded in institutions, economies, and cultural roadways. “Individual personhood” is that rapidly evolving, small-scale change in the lives of all citizens of a developed nation. These are the macro and the micro. The R&D that eventually breeds new systems versus the practical that over quickly produces changed people.
When I argue for an emerging tech’s implementation in healthy ways, for example AI in its ability to adjust our aperture, I am a techno-optimist about its implementation in the collective conscious of a society.
The production of new proteins and the ability of LLM’s to decode animal language are prospects (now made real) that excite me and encourage my enthusiasm for future, positive disruption.
The addition of a new super-powered chatbot in the lives of business people, teachers, and teenagers brings me only longing for stronger foundations of personhood.
A healthy vision of the implementation of technology respects the boundaries of the home, increases the value of holistic human beings, and relegates devices to their proper place as tools not augmentations.
Innovations in medicine should not encourage an MD to bring his stethoscope home to bed. The negative effect of this device was charted by Stanley Joel Reiser in its separation between doctors and patients (and their own trained intuition) as the latter became seen as unreliable in the face of quantifiable data from a machine. Imagine the adoption of a technology like this in a doctor’s personal life. As the counselor must put away the cognitive-behavioral therapy they apply each work day, so must the doctor neglect diagnoses and prescriptions for every problem they face in their marriage and friendships.
These are examples that map onto the adoption of our most pervasive technologies today. As the television transformed participants in democracy into audiences of democracy, social media and smartphones transformed customers of products into consumers of their product’s subtle ideologies.
As intellectual and business paragon Andy Crouch says, “magic is simply technology plus a dream.” In the case of digital technology like smartphones, social platforms, and AI, that dream is man as god. What we have found in every attempt to blend the limitations of man with the capabilities of technology is a regression. Homo deus, in reality, becomes homo machina. The efficiencies touted by software peddlers only serve to decrease the friction between a person offloading part of their brain to a device. The sum total of our outsourcing to technology is a new, digital humanity that feels unsafe without Apple Maps, cannot remember a phone number (or much else compared to the comparative savants of centuries past), and requires social mediator platforms to be their diplomatic representatives in a world too afraid to be vulnerable, authentic, and loving towards each other.
A healthy vision of technology in our world sees our creations for what they are, not what we want them to be. AI is a tool to solve challenges that match the scale of AI’s brainpower. It is not an article writing servant to be used in place of lacking minds. Smartphones are supercomputers, cheaply made to create a workforce that can collaborate on problems with low startup costs. They are not devices to bring with us to bed and create an illusion of the perfect life from their efficiencies.
When I think about the future of technology, I have a deep desire to see our collective consciousness as a global people ethically transformed as the march of justice continues on. All this can happen while individual personhood remains intact amidst the technological explosions happening around us all.
