I won’t pretend that I have a sophisticated understanding of AI or a nuanced idea of where and how it can be safely used. I do, however, have some principles that will guide my own personal approach to the technology. And, unsurprisingly, they can be found in a passage from Wendell Berry (from Life is a Miracle):
And so I would like to be as plain as possible. What I am against–and without a minute’s hesitation or apology–is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
Creatures before machines. That’s the crux of it for me. Machines are useful tools, but the health of creatures is far, far more important. We are in the age of unconstrained machines and we creatures are suffering for it.
And in this age of unconstrained machines, the old boundary markers are unimportant. What matters now is not whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or atheist or pagan. What matters now is this: are you on the side of life or are you a servant of machines? As a leftist pagan, I find more in common with some traditionalist conservatives than I do with mainstream liberals–despite having more agreement with them on the traditional political topics. Many mainstream liberals seem perfectly content to serve the machines and nod sedately along with whatever the “realist” technocrats say is necessary.
Creatures before machines.
Creatures before machines.
Creatures before machines.