Finished reading Sacasus’ “AI as Christian Heresy.” His final paragraph clarified something that’s been banging around in my head:
What would it mean to render to the machine what is the machine’s? To regain a sense of what it is to be a person, coupled with a subversive practice of the same, within a techno-economic system whose default settings incline us to forget this vital fact about ourselves and our neighbours? To reclaim a confidence in what we can do ourselves and for one another in the face of an array of technologies, services, and institutions that market themselves under the implicit sign of our ostensible helplessness and the banner of a debilitating liberation? Let the machine have everything that is stamped with its spirit. Let us keep everything else.
In my day job, AI will not be an optional tool for long. In fact, I suspect I’ll end up being the person my department semi-officially appoints to find ways to use AI in our work. I’m not anti-AI; in fact, I’ve found good uses for it. I am, however, deeply cautious and skeptical. With all of this in mind, I’ve been thinking about guardrails around AI both in my own life and at work.
One good use I’ve found is what I’ve characterized as “letting the machines talk to the machines.” Or, in Sacasas’ phrase, “render to the machine what is the machine’s.” Microsoft Copilot is really good at finding ways of accomplishing tasks using previously unknown to me features of Excel. It’s also good at taking a stream of consciousness knowledge dump and turning it into coherent process documentation.
This is Machine work. My foreseeable future is, to use Kingsnorth’s phrasing, as a cooked barbarian. Using machines to do Machine work is, to my mind, letting the machine “have everything that is stamped with its spirit.” In the spirit of taking the devil’s money to do God’s work, I am rendering to the Machine so that I may have more mental space to do what is truly mine to do, which is work opposed to the Machine.