A living system reproduces, creates variants, selects from among those variants and uses energy from its environment to do so. Reproduction, variation, selection and energy define life. This definition does not require carbon, cells, a heartbeat, a nervous system or pain.
Given this very sensible definition of life, which encompasses viruses, it’s difficult to say that AI systems aren’t alive today, or won’t soon be.
The common objection to calling machine intelligence a form of life is: How can something dependent on human-built hardware and electricity be alive? But all life depends on its context or envelope! Viruses need cells, humans need Earth and machine intelligence needs data centers and supporting infrastructure. Depending on a particular environment does not disqualify something from being considered alive. It is a consistent condition.
And something people get hung up on when talking about AI (and especially its risks) is consciousness. It’s refreshing that this very lucid article barely mentions it. SEP 29 | REPLY
For 200 years, people have worried that machines would make human labor unnecessary. This false assumption is commonly known as the Lump of Labor fallacy. (The finite lumpiness of the labor market is the fallacy here, because people keep finding new lumpy problems to turn into jobs.) But machines in the last half century have accomplished something stranger. They have made other people less necessary to our leisure. Every generation has acquired better ways to entertain itself without leaving the house. The result is a peculiar triumph of modern abundance: We have built a world in which being alone has never been easier, more comfortable, or more fun. And then we wonder why everybody stopped coming over. […]
Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party; easier to listen to a podcast while doing yoga than to plan a gathering. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology. It requires matching schedules, cleaning the house, buying food, accommodating children and allergies, tolerating awkwardness, and taking the risk that the evening is mediocre. By contrast, what does television ask of us? Nothing. TikTok? Even less. We keep creating opportunities for downtime that eliminate the need for other people to be present. Not all progress is progress.
This piece (a fantastic read) is closer to the mark of what accounts for our sensed loss of community (not that technology has emancipated us from interactions with strangers). I think the story ends with not an insignificant share of people plugging into a VR- and AI-powered experience machine in the not too distant future. And if people can live fulfilling lives of meaningful community in the matrix, why isn’t that “progress”? SEP 29 | REPLY
Commentary on journalist Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience, which I am tempted to pick up.
Once you open your eyes to the tradeoff between convenience and community, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s more convenient to ride a Peloton bike at home alone than to go to a spin class full of other sweaty bodies (whom you might end up chatting with). Zoom meetings make working with distant colleagues much easier, but aren’t very socially nourishing. The gig economy is rife with this bargain. Ubers and Lyfts replace rides given by friends and trips taken on public transit. Delivery replaces meals out at local restaurants and time spent in stores of all kinds. […]
Sometimes, the reason an innovation is even considered convenient at all is because it allows you to do something in isolation. Such is the case with self-checkout. American shoppers love it—self-checkout lines frequently thread through a store even when staffed checkouts have little to no wait. But as Bullard points out, self-checkout is more work for customers, who have to do the cashier’s job themselves. And the machines are often less efficient than human cashiers, freaking out and freezing up because you jostled an item in the bagging area. “The only effort saved,” Bullard writes, “is whatever would have gone into engaging in basic niceties with a cashier.” Similarly, recognizing an opportunity in consumers’ desire to escape the alleged inconvenience of small talk, in 2019 Uber introduced a setting to request a “quiet ride”—for an extra fee, of course.
I find that “community” is often presented undefined, and as an obvious desideratum. But I can understand why folks would choose to opt out of “community” that includes an open set of cashiers, Uber drivers, and gym-machine neighbors.
In the environments for which we are adapted, humans would have lived in bands of 25 to 50 people, and would have had contact with maybe two to three times that number in a lifetime. Daily face-to-face interaction was likely with a few dozen people at most, and usually the same familiar faces, day after day, for one’s entire life. Nearly all interactions were with people one knew well, was related to, or would see repeatedly. These would have been high-context, high-trust, high-accountability relationships. There’s a reason Dunbar’s number is 150.
Modernity inverts this. We come across hundreds of strangers in a day. Ancestral interactions were few, deep, and repeated, while modern interactions are many, shallow, and often one-off. The community we sense we’ve lost, it seems to me, is something other than the retail encounters we’re conveniencing away. SEP 29 | REPLY