In the age of machines, what makes life worth living?
“If we are not to become ever more diminished as humans, we need to remain in control of machines, not come under their control. I am not talking about an apocalyptic future; I am talking about apocalypse now.”
As I’ve mentioned, lately I’ve been reading the work of the great author and psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist. Today, I thought I’d share this crucial and lovely bit with you here, from his 2024 essay, “Resist the Machine Apocalypse”.
“No two ways about it: We are making ourselves wretched. We are more affluent than ever, but riches — and power, the only point in having riches — do not make people happy. Ask a psychiatrist. Or take a look at the face of Vladimir Putin, who has, alas, the power of life and death over millions of people and is the owner of the most expensive toilet-paper dispenser in the world. No, affluent as we are, we are also more anxious, depressed, lonely, isolated, and lacking in purpose than ever. Why is this? I suggest it is because we no longer have the foggiest idea what human life is about [emphasis added]. Indeed, there is a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all, but exist in a simulacrum of our own making.
What makes life worth living is what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul
Leaving nuance aside, and condensing three decades of research and a vast body of supporting evidence into a phrase: We are now mesmerized by the least intelligent part of the human brain. For reasons of survival, one hemisphere of the brain, the left, has evolved over millions of years to favor manipulation — grabbing, getting, and controlling — while the other, the right, has been tasked with understanding the whole picture. So conflicting are these goals that in humans the hemispheres are largely sequestered, one from the other. Our seeming ability these days to hear only what comes from the left hemisphere does not arise from the brain’s having changed radically in the last couple of centuries, though it is indeed always evolving. It’s more like this: You buy a radio set, and you soon find a couple of channels worth listening to. After a while, you find yourself listening to only one. It’s not the radio set that has changed; it’s you. In the case of the brain, it would not matter so much if we had settled on the intelligent channel-but we didn’t. We settled on the one whose value has nothing to do with truth, or with courage, magnanimity, or generosity, but only with greed, grabbing, and getting. Manipulation….
What makes life worth living is what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul — some would say, with the cosmos at large, or with God. Only in encountering the uncontrollable do we experience the world in its depth and complexity and come fully alive. The resonance we enjoy in a real relationship with a sentient other is not possible where there is no freedom, no spontaneity, no life. If we are not to become ever more diminished as humans, we need to remain in control of machines, not come under their control. I am not talking about an apocalyptic future; I am talking about apocalypse now. We are already calmly and quietly surrendering our liberty, our privacy, our dignity, our time, our values, and our talents to the machine. Machines serve us well when they relieve us of drudgery, but we must leave human affairs to humans. If not, we sign our own death warrant.”
The above is from a 2024 essay by Iain McGilchrist, called “Resist the Machine Apocalypse.” You can read the rest on McGilchist’s wonderful site.
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And for today’s prompts, I ask you:
*Where do you most experience what McGilchrist calls “resonance” - with (as he puts it) other living beings, the natural world, or “the greatest products of the human soul”)?
*What are the parts of your life that you most want to guard from AI/machine takeover?
*What aspects of your life have been improved — or diminished — by tech?
I resonate with the huge old oak tree in my back garden, and with my little sausage dog and 3 rescued/adopted cats, and of course with my daughter, who lives with me, not to mention friends and family. But I owe my good quality of life to tech: the oxygen concentrator that helps me breathe, and get about a bit; the Internet with Susan and all you interesting people, and access to virtual art galleries, museums, and the natural world. Susan, your posts and this group are high on my list of what makes life worth living. Thank you for all you do.
I used to believe in these hemispheric brain differences but when I looked into the neuroscience more recently, it seems not so cut and dried. I'm no longer convinced we can assign things like greed and manipulation, or empathy and creativity to a specific hemisphere. But if we use it as a sort of metaphor for the different abilities our brains have and that they are capable of very different functions resulting in very different priorities and responses, I think it's an interesting exercise.
Where I found myself having a little more trouble with this article was in the assumption that humans are more humane than machines.
Things like empathy, imagination, and awe, we tend to think of as human capacities. But so are domination, cruelty, exploitation and a terrifying ability to rationalize the suffering of our fellow humans witnessed in continued warfare, genocide, and torture. I've never wanted to divorce myself from the human race more than on my way out of the Anne Frank house.
Two apocalyptic films I return to again and again are Blade Runner and Terminator 2, especially their concluding scenes. At the end of Blade Runner, Roy Batty, a non-human replicant who has been hunted and treated as disposable by humans, chooses mercy, saving the life of the man who has been hunting him. Similarly, in Terminator 2, a machine values and protects human life even at its own detriment.
Before it’s too late, I think it’s important that we ask not only “What makes us human?” but “What makes us humane?” And once we identify those qualities such as empathy, compassion, and basic regard for the lives of others, perhaps the goal is not to insist that they belong uniquely to us, but to cultivate and defend them wherever they appear, and in whomever—or whatever—chooses to practice them.