Can AI push us through the anxiety chokepoint?
On the liberatory prospects of artificial intelligence
Like everyone else, I have been thinking about AI lately. I am reminded of a story about a technological innovation of my youth: when the compact disc music format was demoed to executives at Sony Music in the early 1980s. After the demo, one executive warned the gathered executives that “we are selling our masters.” He was not wrong. I spent a chunk of my adolescence making mix tapes of songs copied from CDs. The CD now seems like a transitional step towards digital music, in which recorded music ceased to be a precious object that one can hold and own, to something ephemeral and as easily acquired as zucchini in summer.
In a similar vein, I sometimes feel uneasy about AI because I have this niggling fear in the back of mind that Silicon Valley engineers our building our replacement. I am not quite ready to live in a Philip K. Dick novel. I suspect that I am not the only one who feels disquieted at the terrifying pace of technological change.
In its annual report last year, Meta announced that its AI tools can develop code at a mid-career level. This must be horrifying news to the recent college graduate with $200k of student aid loans who learned to code because there are “always good jobs in IT.” Will that be true in 10 years when AI bots can write code at a senior-career level? Demand for coding will likely remain high, but AI is likely to depress wages and job growth.
But the growing sophistication of AI brings with it a deeper dread—a feeling that AI isn’t merely going to take our jerbs, but will so outclass us intellectually that it will obviate the need for humans altogether. When I fall into the existential mode of AI dread, it’s not because of Skynet scenarios. Instead, I think of these prophetic words from Perry Farrell: “We’ll make great pets.”
Already, AI can, with a few clicks of the mouse, dream up pop songs in the style of Lorde or write symphonies in the style of Brahms or compose passable short stories in the style of Flannery O’Connor. These artifacts have always been squarely in the domain of the humanities—that is, the cultural production of humans. The whole prospect seems a little dodgy for those who studied in the humanities and believe in the old claptrap about the nobility and uniqueness of the human spirit. I also think it’s off base, for reasons that I will elaborate on down the road.
The accumulation of social anxiety
What interests me at present is the anxiety itself. We are living in an age of anxiety, though I suppose you can say that of any age. The Roman galley slave knew something about stress, not to mention the imperial senator beset by sanguinary palace intrigue. The medieval peasant facing crop failures and the Black Death knew something about stress, too.
The fashionable drawing rooms of 19th-century London were lousy with over-educated mustachioed intellectuals on the verge of mental breakdowns because scientific and social changes challenged ancient verities. Some of the best-educated men in Britain were positively debilitated by existential anxiety. Scientific advances, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, directly challenged religious traditions. The Industrial Revolution had rapidly altered the rural character of Great Britain and dissolved ancient social patterns. These anxieties were famously expressed in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” where he laments the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” from the Sea of Faith. If we could transport him to the present, I wonder how Matthew Arnold would handle witnessing an AI agent that can spit out a Matthew Arnold pastiche in seconds? I’m thinking, not well.
The existential anxiety of the Victorians must have seemed quaint to the people of the early 20th century, too. In Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, the story of a gender-fluid poet who magically lives for centuries under different guises, the 19th-century sky is described as “irregular moving darkness,” but the 20th-century sky is described as “metallic.” The nature of the anxiety had shifted from a soft, gray moodiness to a more shrill and caustic register.
The industrialized slaughter of World War I, with its gas masks and nests of barbed wire, appeared to be civilizational suicide—the end of the line for Western culture. Mind-bending new scientific ideas, such as relativity and quantum mechanics, introduced strange new paradoxes that defied a common-sense understanding of physical reality. The cities, with their excitement and freedom from small-town morality, swelled with people and neuroses as modern advertising culture and mass communications became established. The cities grew because there were opportunities for better jobs—clean, soft jobs in well-lit offices—as agricultural automation killed the need for armies of field workers.
World War II and its aftermath created another layer of anxiety. The war ended with twin events that haunt humanity to this day: The Holocaust, which seemed to confirm Freud’s belief in the darkness behind the mask of civilized man, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I have just finished reading Operation Panic, an anthology of Cold War nuclear fiction edited by my friend Jimmy Pack and former teacher Tom Hazuka. It is a fascinating reminder of the anxiety of Cold War nuclear fear and paranoia during an era that so many wish to remember as placid “simpler times.” The very placidness of the 1950s may have been a psychological reaction to the existential dread that filled the newspapers every day, as millions grappled with the reality that the next war could wipe out human civilization.
The techniques of mass communications and advertising had by then reached maturity. Madison Avenue worked overtime to manufacture new wants and desires, and to scorn and shame those who can’t keep up with the Joneses.
The specter of nuclear war has not vanished; it has merely been sublimated and pushed aside to make room for a 1000 other anxieties. Scientists can tinker with life at the smallest scale with DNA editing technology, and Elon Musk wants to build human-machine interfaces (presumably so he can beam ads directly into our heads). Mass advertising and mass media have grown exponentially, blasting into our brains from our phones, our workstations, even our gas stations.
The metallic anxiety of the 20th Century didn’t replace the irregular moving darkness of the 19th century. The dimensions of 19th-century anxiety remained, but each stage of economic development seemed to add new layers. An increasing share of the population moved into office jobs required to administer the complexities of the systems required to sustain society. And the pace of change has steadily accelerated.
With each stage of economic development, we have added more prosperity and spread it more widely—at least until recently—but the aggregate anxiety of the human race has risen apace. The worries of the previous generations are not wiped away; we simply become inured to the layer of anxiety that we were born into.
I am always amused to hear people my age refer to years of my childhood—the 1970s and 1980s—as “simpler times.” In 1970, the year I was born, Alvin Toffler published Future Shock, which described the disorienting effects of “information overload” in a media-saturated world which, at the time, consisted of three network television networks, daily newspapers, and magazines. The world of my childhood may have been simpler, but they weren’t simple. At the time, there was widespread nostalgia for the “simpler times” of the 1950s—the decade of bomb shelters, red scares, beatniks on heroin, and moral panics over the rise of juvenile delinquency. Each social and economic advance brought with it greater complexity: new processes, programs, systems, and a constant expansion of consumer choices.
But the life I was born into is a far cry from the simplicity of our ancestors on the African savannah, whose lives were certainly nasty, brutish, and short. If you got injured or old and injured back then, of course, you didn’t have to deal with the Obamacare website. Your fellow tribesman may have simply left your infirm ass to the hyenas—but they also had no concept of what it is like to get stuck in Beltway traffic while listening to news of wars and terrorism in a half dozen places while stressing over a work deadline as you remember that taxes are due in two weeks and that you were supposed to drive your daughter to SAT prep that evening. I’d take this life any day of the week, thank you very much. The constant anxiety, however, is the price we pay for our world of relative safety, health, and plenty.
Those white collar jobs that seemed so inviting to farm workers 100 years ago are now managed by perpetually tighter deadlines and monitoring, with longer hours and less job stability. Powerful new communications technologies enable people to communicate instantly globally, and vast stores of the world’s knowledge are available at the click of a button. All of this comes at the cost, however, of the rat-tat-tat of information blasted into our minds from sunup to sundown.
Today’s workers who inherited the weight of these stratas of anxiety must now compete with AI tools that never get sick, never miss a deadline, never ask for a raise, and seem to threaten core features of what it means to be human.
We seem to be approaching unsustainable levels of general societal anxiety. The evidence is everywhere: the now routine mass shootings, the steady increase of stress-related diseases (e.g., heart disease, obesity, diabetes), our gibbering political discourse, and the growing rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide in our young people. Our culture as a whole exhibits the diagnostic criteria of chronic anxiety: irritable, prone to conflict, isolated, distracted, impulsive, and physically unwell.
Chokepoint of anxiety
I have a theory about the present historical moment, though one that I probably won’t live long enough to test. Despite my unease with AI, I am optimistic about its promise, at least to the degree that it’s possible to be optimistic given the current political climate. (Though I am more optimistic than most on that front, too.)
As Robert Putnam pointed out in Bowling Alone, Americans have become socially isolated—a consequence, primarily, of easy access to entertainment at home. Even the ready availability of streaming video and YouTube, however, is an aspect of the increasing complexity of life. The infinite variety of consumer choices is a blessing, but also adds to our ever-growing cognitive load. The collective anxiety and depression of contemporary Americans probably also reinforce this isolation.
We have reached a point in our civilizational progress where the comfort and prosperity our culture is purchased with increasing stress. We have not yet reached the point, however, where AI and automation can relieve us of the cognitive burdens that make our culture so unwell. We are, instead, in an awkward transitional phase—a chokepoint of anxiety, like a garden hose clogged with mud that needs a buildup of pressure to squirt through.
Matthew Arnold wrote of his time that “we are wandering between two worlds: one dead, and one powerless to be born.” It might feel that way for us in the present, too. In the scheme of things, the digital revolution is in its bare infancy, and with regards to AI, we still haven’t cut the umbilical cord. The technology is too powerful, and the future too expansive, to even imagine how AI is going to transform society.
AI and a post-scarcity future
Maybe it is good for our collective mental health if AI takes some of the burden of this cognitive load. I suspect that the appeal of Trump is, in part, a revolt against the increased complexity of contemporary life. The MAGA ideology, to the degree that there is a coherent political philosophy, connects with a desire to rip up the top strata of societal complexity and dig down to a less disorienting reality.
If we manage it right—a big if, considering the irrationality of our political discourse—there is every reason to believe that we can use AI to reverse the rising tide of collective anxiety. In 1971, at the tail end of the 1960s Counterculture, left-libertarian philosopher Murray Bookchin anticipated this moment. He spoke of the liberatory potential of a post-scarcity economy:
In the era when technological advances and cybernation have brought into question the exploitation of man by man, toil, and material want in any form whatever, the cry “Black is beautiful” or “Make love, not war” marks the transformation of the traditional demand for survival into a historically new demand for life.
What underpins every social conflict in the United States today is the demand for the realization of all human potentialities in a fully rounded, balanced, totalistic way of life. In short, the potentialities for revolution in America are now anchored in the potentialities of man himself.
Bookchin may have been a dreamer and a radical, but he was no back-to-the-earth Luddite. The idea of leveraging technology to liberate humanity sounds hopelessly naive in our current dystopian landscape. The word “liberation” itself evokes a scent of patchouli oil and burnt sandalwood.
Bookchin was piggybacking on the 1960s Counterculture that ushered in widespread experimentation in social and economic structures, many of which failed miserably, but others were eventually co-opted by the broader culture. But perhaps Bookchin was slightly premature in his assessment of the “technological advances and cybernation” of 1971. Now that computers are taking the jobs of accountants, engineers, developers, and managers, perhaps it’s time to dust off the idea that technology can lead us to what he called a “post-scarcity” future.
I read with interest an article published in the Wall Street Journal with a fascinating title: “‘Everybody’s Replaceable’: The New Ways Bosses Talk About Workers.” It reports that CEOs are glorying in the twin labor crises of a crumbling job market and the rise of AI automation. It is a curiously short-sighted view. If everyone is replaceable, who is going to earn the wages to buy their products? And if everyone can be replaced by AI agents reporting to a CEO, then anyone can start a competing business with minimal capital. The creative class that actually builds and designs things of value in this world may, in turn, find that they no longer need the old hierarchies.
It is increasingly clear that current economic and social models are unsustainable. In 2019, CO2 emissions in the atmosphere sailed past the 415 ppm threshold that climate scientists have feared. Our political system remains under unparalleled stress. Our society is fraying under the stress of the information overload that Toffler identified in the simpler times of 1970. The only way forward is forward—and hopefully towards a future in which our systems free us instead of entangle us.