Month: October 2024

Work. Nobody likes it. Sometimes we classify it as doing what we love, but for most people, work is doing what we don’t want to do. However, there is something deeper at stake here. Not only does work carry with it value – both to ourselves and others – the removal of it, sometimes through “technological innovation”, is often the path to both our manipulation and the fragmentation of society.

Firstly, lets be extremely clear. Working is still a formality in the lives of most. We need money; rentiers need labour. We hope that within this socio-economic relationship that people are being treated fairly. But what of our “free-time”; our “relax time”? It is here that a war of sorts is being waged. After a hard day’s work, should we not have available to us a time for relaxing? Certainly, rest is important. God himself rested and designated a whole day for us to do so too. Rest, and family and friends time. A period where we can strengthen our relationships with others, grow spiritually, slow life down. Except, that’s not happening, is it? Instead we are locked into screens and virtual communities, while our local communities flounder. We are becoming strangers to each other. Relationships are not being strengthened.

What has happened is that our relax time has been hijacked in a fashion. The issue is that even in our relax time, we should be working on our relationships, and perhaps working to improve ourselves spiritually through activities like book reading. This should in fact be pleasurable, and not like work at all. However, in the modern day, a plethora of distractions assail us, such as access to mindless, continuous social media reels. These other activities seem like less work, coming with plenty of small dopamine releases, which bring with them addictive behaviour. What is happening is a rewiring of our brains. We are being taught to seek the path of least resistance, taught to seek shallow goals, particularly through social media’s combination of bitesize information, and infinite content (think doom scrolling). This rewiring also has the effect of increasing perceived labour costs for other activities, such as socialising and reading, activities that in the past would have been viewed as pleasure, but are now deemed “work”. Yet, if we can avoid the social media bitesize dopamine addiction process, if we can leave it for good, we will find that reading a book, and strengthening a relationship becomes easier with practice. We need to exit from a process that is dumbing down our mental faculties, creating addiction to the irrelevant, and destroying our relationships. How can we begin to find God if we cannot even find each other?

So, certainly if you are reading this, then perhaps you have made a decision to begin to claw back your independence and free thought. Perhaps you will exit from social media, perhaps even the internet at large. But how do we help others to also make the exit? Everything is being transitioned to the online space. Our phones are starting to become indispensable to our infrastructure, as well as our social interactions. The people are online. They are not there spiritually in physical communities any more. How can we begin to transition away from bringing technology, and temptation, with us everywhere? How can we convince others to do the same?

In freeing ourselves, we also need to be careful to not create a war. Those individuals making the choice to target our dopamine structures are themselves at the behest of internal conflicting forces as well. Their dopamine also needs balance; needs direction. We must also remember that even an article is written in such a fashion to keep your attention through dopamine, and rhythm based structures,capturing not only your imagination, but also your physiological processes. This body-spirit axis works together as long as we are directing it in the right fashion.

Well, what is this direction? St. Mary’s Press has released a document of ethics in business which is illuminating, revolving around Catholic Social Teaching. In implementing business practice, we must keep at the forefront of our minds the wellbeing of the other. When we think on this, we can begin to see all of the irrelevant and detrimental industries we have around us. Spiritual growth of the individual and their communities should be paramount. People need to be given the opportunity to grow, and hopefully this will naturally lead to God, and also peace in their lives.

But this will take work at an individual level – we need to break the addiction. Then at a community level, we need to rebuild. Let’s remember and remind ourselves how to work effectively again, and reclaim our relax time.

As we begin to enter the new age of Artificial Intelligence, we can perhaps make a few observations:

• Artificial Intelligence is incredibly useful
• Artificial General Intelligence, where the AI can match or better any human output, is a long way off.
• People may not need AGI to manipulate a populace.

I was reading an AI discussion on a prominent tech forum recently, and came across the following quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune:

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

Firstly, I was taken aback at how far ahead of its time that quote was. Secondly, I wanted to analyse why men turned their thinking over to machines in the first place.

Why are we using AI (which is a different question to why create AI)? 

I think that what is happening here is something of a vicious cycle, whereby our brains are locked into a diminishing process.

Firstly, human beings, by and large, have an aversion to performing tasks that they do not want to do. Human history, then, has been full of inventions to automate the mundane. But it has also been full of inventions to automate the inefficient. Here’s where the lines start to blur, though. In the modern world, are we beginning to confuse the two?

It is mundane to repeat a thoughtless task when an automated solution is available, unless there is something in the outcome that you seek (eg. the gym). However, I believe a mistake in the current age is that, as consumers, we are grouping into the mundane some tasks that have outcomes that we should be seeking. For instance, I could spew out this blog post a lot faster if I used AI to prompt me on topics to use, style to write, well, lets just even say write the article itself. But in that, something human is lost. We lose authentic reflection on reality. Not only may we miss something that is useful to others, we also miss individual human progress in the contemplation of one’s own and others’ existence. I would say, the path to God. If we can’t reflect on our own existence, and that of others, then contemplation of the higher spiritual topics is also neglected, being replaced by rampant consumerism.

Writing a blog is just one example of a creative output that we are relegating to the mundane. There are surely many others. 

But why are we doing this? Here’s where things begin to get tricky. It’s not just an aversion to work, but is also reflected in how we are grouping and organising data sources, as well as how we are forming/disbanding groups in the real, physical world.

These global, centralised, social media outlets then, are not just rewiring our minds, but are also rewiring the local environments.

And so, going back to the original point, we don’t even need AGI to control a populace (to its detriment), we just need The New Newspeak, which rewires our brain into consuming bitty information, and normal AI, the tool which prompts the brain into classifying into mundane, those works that were previously seen as gratifying, both for the human populace, and for an individual’s personal development.