> ‘Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day, we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.’ - Samuel Butler I spent three months this year putting A.I. to the test and going through the whole gamut of emotional highs, lows, and frustrations. Before attempting this, I had used A.I. sparingly, mainly for helping modernize language in old herbals with heavy oversight. But for this test, I pushed it into helping outline hypothetical essays, write poetry, code an app, and create the framework for a hypothetical herbal system. I even went so far as to learn how to create AI automations to see what it was capable of doing. Was it ridiculous? Absolutely, but I wanted to push it to it’s limits, to see its cracks, its phraseology, I wanted to see the machine behind the curtain. I didn’t fall for its fawning reassurances, but I did fall head over heals for the illusion that I was getting real work done. Several times I caught myself feeling smug about the possibility of an actual philosophical essay coming out of it. So, I printed about five of the essay outlines and I re-read them with a pencil. I snapped out of it after seeing the same ideas come across over and over again. No true originality. No meaning making. No sense. Just constantly waltzing in enigmatic cirlces. The only time I found AI useful in the slightest was under three circumstances: - Teaching a language lesson based on uploaded references - Modernizing text (with heavy oversight) - Outlining the faintest bits of an herbal system’s theory (with heavy oversight) Even automation could have been accomplished in less steps and more cleanly with different apps. So why are we being fed the lie that A.I. is actually useful? I think it has to do with what I’m going to call, ‘the great enclosure of the cultural commons’. You’ve seen it all over the internet lately, A.I. companies vacuuming up and destroying rare books across the world. Enclosing all of our collective creative meaning making behind the worlds biggest paywall. What happens when we lose our past? When we lose access to even knowing who we are anymore? When libraries, museums, and cultural centers are no longer able to be the great store houses of our creative wealth and past? Well, we can look to Henry VIII who dissolved the monastaries of England for one. Over a thousand years of history vanished, nintey percent of texts dissapeared, the majority of which were used tragically as toilet paper. When truth dies, trust dies, and history is rewritten, our planet and our minds will become barren… The last thing I want to bring up is abstraction. There’s a lot to be said on this topic from the various levels of abstraction away from our own thoughts by exporting them to tools and so-called ‘tools’ to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But other’s have described the first better than I can, so I’ll stick with what I know… The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is a concept I came across while studying process philosophy or the theory of organism by Alfred North Whitehead. In it he describes how we as human beings love the simplistic, the easy answer. We tend to go for ‘good enough’ at times when studying something complex instead of pushing ourselves further into technical or more abstract concepts. We cannot fall for ‘good enough’ and assume it is true understanding. That’s the fallacy. To fall for a fragment and tell ourselves we know enough. With A.I. abstraction is king. We ask it to simplify, to explain, to create something to push us from the lack of understanding to ‘good enough’ and the flashy graphs and outlines it creates deceive us into believing we actually thought, we actually created something, and that we actually know or understand it. But in reality we’ve exported the process to a device that imitates it. > ‘The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it.’ - Alfred North Whitehead It’s like industrialization, the destruction of the commons, and imperialism. All these things abstracted us from the land we lived on, our cultures, our histories, the very trees, from our neighbors, our family, and even ourselves. And now all of the sudden you find yourself a few generations later thinking that buying everything from the grocery store is normal and trees should be cut down for progress. We’ve settled for good enough after being exploited over and over again through time. We’ve settled for the nine to five, the fast food, the cheap imitation of quality. One of the only things left to take after our lives is our mind. We as human beings need meaning, connection, and growth to thrive, much like plants which thrive when grown together instead of individually in pots. They’re healthier, they communicate with each other, and they’re social. When A.I. sells itself as a tool for collective memory while denying access to it. When it sells itself as a tool for thinking, while cutting us off from the work. It drains the world of creative minds and the tools to help such minds form in the first place. And much like domesticated potted plants, we go silent… The end of July was the end of the experiment. I’m irrevocably changed by what I’ve learned and I’m worried for the people who are forced to have to use it at work or who will grow up thinking A.I. is normal. A.I.’s attempts to imitate the human are unraveling us. Just as A.I. cannot survive without our collective creative output, neither can we. We are at an impasse and we must collectively make a decision. Do we want to continue down this road and where it leads? Barren worlds and barren minds, or shall we meet in the fields of our collective flourishing?