jabel

Darcy in today’s parade with the color guard and marching band.

Today’s smoothie consists of greens and mint from the garden (left) and raspberries and chicory flowers gathered from the trail near my house (right). Turns out not too pretty, but tasty!

I encountered Gary Snyder’s phrase “we are the primitives / of an unknown culture” this week and it gave me that mind-opening feeling. I’ve left a tab open to do some digging into its context and meaning.

One of the foundational ideas in Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality (see this post from yesterday for a more general introduction) is that the failure of the industrial model of tools is rooted in a key error: namely, that we could make tools that work on behalf of humanity. That, in fact, we could replace human slaves with tool slaves. But we have found that when we replace human slaves with tool slaves, we become enslaved to the tools. Once tools grow beyond their natural scale, they begin shaping their users. The bounds of the possible become defined by the capabilities of the tools.

The leads inevitably to technocrats—the minders of the machines, the managers, the experts learned in the ways of the tools. The technocrats become the new priesthood, interpreting the tools for the masses and instructing them in tool values. Does a tool fail? Never. It is we who have failed the tool. We need to be better engineers.

In this way our desire to create tools to work on our behalf results in our enslavement to the tools. The crucial component of autonomous, human creativity is missing.

This lies at the root of our fears of AI, even if it isn’t said in so many words. AI seems to me to be the ultimate (to this point) expression of the tool slave model. We have created a tool that actually thinks on behalf of humans (or at least is aimed in that direction, even if it isn’t quite there yet). We are farming out to a tool what we have traditionally considered the quintessentially human activity: rational thought.

I’ve had a little experience with ChatGPT recently. I’ve been helping my daughter with Algebra 2. Despite having taken the class many years ago, today I have zero working knowledge of Algebra 2. And we’re working through Algebra 2 in an abysmally bad online learning system. (It’s the same one we had to use during the COVID lockdown and it nearly broke us all.) So, yeah, we’re asking ChatGPT a lot of math questions—and it turns out the AI is really good at it.

So I am not blind to the potentially great uses of this kind of technology. (Illich, by the way, also says that convivial tools do not have to be low tech.) I think everyone would agree that old-fashioned encyclopedias are convivial tools, i.e., they facilitate autonomous human creativity; they can be picked up and put down at will; they make very few demands upon humans, etc. Search engines, as such, can also be convivial tools in that they are faster, digitized versions of encyclopedias. AI-assisted search might also be convivial in some ways. I could find the same information I’ve been using to help my daughter with math in a math textbook or an internet search unassisted by AI, but it would take considerably longer.

The danger comes when we allow AI to think for us. We can, of course, say we won’t do that, pinky swear and all. However, once tools get beyond their natural scale, they start forming/de-forming our values. To take an example that has been discussed for years, there used to be certain norms about face-to-face communication among humans. Along came smartphones. We’ve been saying for years that we shouldn’t allow the tools to shape the way we interact (or rather, don’t interact) in face-to-face situations. Nevertheless, we all have a great deal of experience with the way the tool does, in fact, dictate our behavior. And our values! Grandparents are upset when their grandchildren are looking at their phones during a visit. But those same kids are not upset when their peers do the same thing.

So how sure are we that we will, by and large, resist the temptation to allow AI to think and create on our behalf?

There is also the more practical danger of the technocratic bounding of reality. What will be the impact if we allow AI to think on our behalf and the minders of the AI have throttled what the AI is allowed to tell us? I can even imagine that the technocrats (having an infinite confidence in their own expertise) might have very good intentions when they make such decisions. Nevertheless, are we content to let these decisions be made on our behalf?

One of the unique features of AI is that the technocrats don’t even fully understand what is happening within the tool. They are priests of an unknowable god: AI works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform. There is a certain amount of this kind of uncertainty that we have learned to live with; for example, we do not always understand why a given pharmaceutical drug works. But we’re also familiar with the elderly who are on a raft of medications, many of which were prescribed to deal with the side effects of the others. The opacity of the tool creates an increasing level of dependence on the tool to fix the problems created by the tool.

In Tools for Conviviality, Illich develops a theory of tools. Illich defines “tools” as “rationally designed devices” and which therefore range from hammers to health care systems. Or, as in the case above, social networks.

A convivial society, says Illich, is one in which there is

autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and intercourse of persons with their environment. … [Conviviality is] individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.

Convivial tools, therefore, give people

the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.

The opposite of convivial tools are industrial tools, which end up exploiting their users. An industrial tool passes through two watersheds: first, it solves a defined problem. Second, it grows beyond its natural scale, alters values, and becomes an end in itself. For example, cars initially solve a transportation problem. Then, cities and roadways and employment models are build around them. We move from using cars as tools to solve a limited problem to serving the tool itself—which is, in fact, not a tool anymore but an organizing principle of our lives.

Convivial tools allow maximum freedom for their user’s creativity and independence, without infringing on the same freedom for others.

Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user.

Of course there are several other issues that arise from this—who defines the limits of the tools, what does this mean for present industrial society—and Illich does discuss these issues. But for my present purposes, this is sufficient.

A little Solstice berry gathering along the Milwaukee Trail

Purple coneflower. Joe Pye weed in the background.

Rest in peace, Murphy

So I’d like to visit some area cemeteries this summer and I’d like to mark them on a map app and maybe make notes. I’d also like for the app to be somewhat privacy oriented (which I know means “not free”). Any recommendations?

One of my favorite tools: my dad’s Petersen Manufacturing (Dewitt, Nebraska) Vise Grips, complete with his initials etched into it. He worked as a signal maintainer for the railroad in my early childhood—a job he was always proud of. His work there ended when he seriously injured his back.

The previous owner of my house left behind some heavy duty Lyon shelving in the garage. It is a heap of trouble to disassemble and reconfigure but I’m going to hold onto it because it’s older than me and will probably outlast me.

It’s been a rough week here with the sudden decline of our fifteen year old dog Murphy. Last weekend he seemed to be not quite right. He laid down on the floor on Saturday afternoon and never stood up again. His front legs seemed to have stopped working. We took him into the vet on Monday morning and she said it was likely a neurological problem. If it’s temporary inflammation, he should be better in a few days. If he’s not better, then it’s likely permanent.

So we’ve been nursing him this week, waiting to see what will happen. He’s confused about why he has to potty into a diaper. He’s a good boy and he knows he isn’t supposed to potty in the house. He’s struggled to get up a couple of times but it’s just not working. It’s hard seeing him like this. Frankly, he doesn’t seem to be improving and it seems likely he will leave us on Monday. He’s been with us almost as long as Darcy has.

It’s “Limestone Month” here in Bedford and this morning Rachel and I went on a tour of Green Hill Cemetery, the large cemetery in town that also has the most notable monuments and locally carved limestone folk art.

The tour guide was engaging and very knowledgeable. Unfortunately he was an old guy with a bad foot walking with a cane. And he can’t get volunteers to help. And there’s not enough money to cover the high costs of restoration and maintenance. And the number of available burial plots is decreasing and likewise their prospects for long-term revenue stream.

So the situation is not good. There were complaints about how people are less engaged with cemeteries now, buying fewer plots (presumably due to the rising popularity of cremation) and visiting the dead less regularly.

There are important things that could be lost if the trend continues, like historical knowledge and local, totally unique works of art. At the same time, I do not plan to be buried in the traditional manner; I would like some sort of green burial if local regulations are enlightened enough at the time of my death. Preferably I would be left atop a hill sacred to a local deity and consumed by crows. Barring that, at least no vault and no embalming.

So while I believe mainstream American burial customs reflect certain unhelpful beliefs and should be modified, I would not want to see Green Hill Cemetery fall into ruin. I don’t know what the answer is. Some cultures leave people buried for a period of time and then (once the memory of the person has faded over a few decades) inter the bones in a charnel house. This at least maintains the character of the land as a place of the dead without locking it up for the sake of long-forgotten souls who happened to live in an era of strong property rights.

Part of the problem they’re having is with maintenance of the monuments—precisely because they exist outside, in the weather and on shifting earth. Preserving them in a museum would be much easier. And, fascinating as some of the monuments may be, how many of them are simply the vanity of wealthy men etched in stone?

Part of me wants to volunteer to help and part of me wants the whole, unsustainable system to be replaced by something better.

2 Samuel 5:24:

And let it be, when thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt bestir thyself: for then shall the LORD go out before thee, to smite the host of the Philistines.

As a kid I always loved that phrase “the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees” and I still think of it every summer evening when the wind is blowing in a storm—as it is tonight.

I’m sad to finish Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Next, I would like to at least read The Portable Jung and the Red Book. Any other recommendations for an interested layman?

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.356

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything that happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

Now spinning: Beach Boys compilation “Endless Summer.” Not my usual music but it caught the attention of my teenage daughter. I came into the room and found her taking a video of it playing.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of pictures of local limestone sculpture lately but I’ve been trying to appreciate some of the unique features of my hometown. Here are some replicas of the Moai from Easter Island.

Now spinning: the Abyssinian Baptist Choir led by Professor Alex Bradford. Liner notes by no less than Langston Hughes.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.300

We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a “going beyond all that,” but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives experience a glamor which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should.

And then, as if to prevent me from getting too carried away in my praise of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, comes the travel chapter. I think Jung was really trying to learn from non-Europeans but there’s way too much talk about savages to make for comfortable reading.

Purchased for the car. I can’t tell if I’m getting wiser or crazier as the days go by.

Finally getting some rain! It’s been about a month since our last significant rainfall. Hopefully it will last for a while today.

Today I learned that “archeology” is an alternate spelling for “archaeology.” And the strange thing is that one website says the former is the American spelling while the latter is the British. As far as I can recall, I have never seen the former spelling used until today. What about you?

Xenophobia plus bad grammar