[I]t is striking how far [many] critics are from contending with the aspect of [AI] technology that ought to be most disturbing to those of us who write and think about culture: its potential to undermine the concepts and practices that make it possible to have coherent ethical discussions over things like the environmental impact of new technologies or economic inequality in the first place. This prospect can nevertheless be felt in the coining of new pejoratives for contemporary culture—“slop,” “enshittification,” “the great zombification”—some of which predate AI but are multiplying in its wake. Such terms surely seem hyperbolic to some, but in at least one respect they merely hint at the most troubling possibilities. Indeed, our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period in our own society of which it may someday be possible to say that “nothing happened.”
That reference to a time when “nothing happened” is from Jonathan Lear’s book Radical Hope, where he tries to understand the story of the last chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups, as it was recounted by Frank B. Linderman, and Plenty Coups’s effort to face “the end of their traditional way of life.” (It’s briefly described at the very beginning of the link above.)
The editors continue:
As the concepts that had previously organized their lives eroded, so did the Crow’s capacity to act, collectively and personally, in ways that carried meaning for them beyond that of furthering their survival. […]
Technological efficiency has long been one consideration among others in such deliberations, but critics have always warned it should not be treated as just another competing value system. The potential of AI to compromise the very concepts through which we hold ourselves and others responsible for our words and decisions shows why. If we fail to insist that certain kinds of decisions—whether in personal, political or professional contexts—must come from human beings, words like fraud, authenticity, and deliberation will cease to mean anything we might recognize today. […]
To the tech founders who speak gleefully of human beings as the “ultimate resource,” or applaud the “merge” of man and machine in our posthuman future, humanity itself is the primitive tribe that must be sacrificed for some greater—though almost comically underspecified—good. In this vision, it is not this or that set of ethical concepts that must be overcome for the sake of progress, but the allegedly limited faculties of intellect, imagination and practical reasoning—faculties that are the preconditions for our having shared ethical concepts at all.
Quite remarkable that the editors at The Point would invoke this. I think they’re right to reach for something more drastic to compare AI to, but even I would like to (quite unradically) hope this risks being too dramatic.
Sadly, I don’t think it’s wrong. Mostly, anyway.
Let’s recount a bit from Lear.
Around 1855, when Plenty Coups was nine years old, he went to a mountaintop to fast and pray, seeking a dream-vision. Prayers for the Crow often began with “Pity me!” So when no dream-vision came, he cut off part of his finger to invoke pity. “Plenty Coups told Linderman that he knew he was following a tradition in which other Crow warriors in previous generations had ‘sacrificed their flesh and blood to dream.’”
For the Crow … humans have a meaningful place in a meaningful world. Not only is the world populated by spirits, but there is a single God, Ah-badt-dadt-deah. Given this worldview, when a Crow had a strong desire or a wish, there was reason for him to hope that his desire or wish had come into being because the world itself was slightly out of kilter. Going off into the mountains to pray to God to “Pity me!” was a way of drawing the spiritual world’s attention to one’s plight. In a dream-vision one might be visited by a spirit who would explain just how the order of the world would be adjusted so as to gratify one’s wish.
And Plenty Coups did have a vision, one interpreted by the tribe “not merely to predict a future event; it was used by the tribe to struggle with the intelligibility of events that lay at the horizon of their ability to understand.”
Dreams were regularly used by the Crow to predict the future. People would, for instance, wait for a vision in a dream to tell them it was a propitious time to go into battle. But young Plenty Coups’s dream was of a different order. It did not predict any particular event, but the change of the world order.
I won’t recount the entire vision here. They understood that the buffalo were going away, that their way of life was changing if not coming to an end, and that the way to avoid disaster was to become like the chickadee.
“Listen Plenty-Coups,” said a voice. In that tree is the lodge of the Chickadee. He is least in strength but strongest of mind among his kind. He is willing to work for wisdom. The Chickadee-person is a good listener. Nothing escapes his ears, which he has sharpened by constant use. Whenever others are talking together of their successes and failures, there you will find the Chickadee-person listening to their words. But in all his listening he tends to his own business. He never intrudes, never speaks in strange company, and yet never misses a chance to learn from others. … The lodges of countless Bird-people were in the forest when the Four Winds charged it. Only one person is left unharmed, the lodge of the Chickadee-person.
The dream called for “chickadee virtue.” But it isn’t so straightforward. On the one hand, this virtue drew on resources the Crow knew well. “The chickadees were known by the Crow … to be especially powerful. A chickadee once told Pretty Shield’s grandmother when she was a young woman that ‘there is great power in little things.’ And the Crow well knew that offending a chickadee led to a bad outcome.”
On the other hand, the dream-vision represents a kind of “reason at the abyss,” as Lear puts it. Being virtuous within well established cultural norms is one thing.
But the dream-advice to become a chickadee is being given in full recognition that upcoming events will be extraordinary. There is a storm coming that will blow down all the trees but one. And nothing is said about what constitutes the wisdom of others, what their successes are, or how one should learn from them. In particular, there is no first-order advice that one should simply pick up the skills and values of the white man. Indeed, there is no first-order advice at all—unless “learning to listen” counts as first-order behavior.
So Lear describes Plenty Coups as “radicalizing a second-order virtue” in the chickadee-person. “The only substantive commitment embodied in the chickadee virtue is that if one listens and learns from others in the right way—even in radically different circumstances, even with the collapse of one’s world—something good will come of it.”
Lear goes on to describe the “disadvantage” that a courageous, virtuous person would have if that person’s world were coming to an end.
If we think of the virtues, or human excellences, as they are actually taught by cultures across history, it is plausible to expect that the virtuous person will be ready to tackle the wide variety of challenges that life might throw his way. It is unclear that there is anything in such training that will prepare him for the breakdown of the form of life itself. We would like our ethics to be grounded in psychological reality. Thus whatever flexibility is required of a virtuous person, it ought to be something that can be inculcated in the education and training of a culture. But a culture does not tend to train the young to endure its own breakdown—and it is fairly easy to see why. A culture embodies a sense of life’s possibilities, and it tries to instill that sense in the young. An outstanding young member of the culture will learn to face these possibilities well. The situation we are dealing with here, however, is the breakdown of a culture’s sense of possibility itself.
Somewhat humorously Lear adds that a culture is not likely to say “These are ways in which you can succeed, and these are ways in which you will fail; these are dangers you might face, and here are opportunities; these acts are shameful, and these are worthy of honor—and, oh yes, one more thing, this entire structure of evaluating the world might cease to make sense.”
Having learned the virtues in a world that was breaking down, and then having to apply those virtues in the world that did break down, this requires a more radical sense of hope, anticipation, training.
So you can see why the editors at The Point reach for Lear and Plenty Coups for aid. I’m going to leave it here for now, and hopefully come back and say a little more about why I think it’s the right example to look at but also why, even cautiously, and without diminishing the “storm” we are facing, it may be saying too much.
