The writer (and personal hero of mine) Will Campbell told a story in his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly, about a time as a child in Jim Crow Mississippi when he and a bunch of (white) friends are playing and a black child walks down the road.
Campbell and his friends begin chanting slurs at the boy, using the N-word. His grandfather, hardly a bastion of egalitarianism, calls the boys out for it, and told them that N-words don’t exist anymore. In other words, we don’t call people that now.
Campbell would recall this story in middle age as formative for him, one of half a dozen experiences in his life that shaped him forever around race. And yet, he says, it had virtually no impact on anyone else who was there. He wonders why it stood out so clearly to him as instructive, while others who were there don’t even remember it happened.
I feel a bit like that these days as I, a teenager in the 1980s who watched countless cautionary tales about machines that revolt and kill us, watch my peers embrace machines that even their creators think will revolt and kill us.
Sarah Conner would be ashamed of us.
In his essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” Wendell Berry delivers a response to his critics who came out when he mentioned, in his legendary piece Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer, that his wife types his manuscripts.
Both pieces are brilliant – Berry at his best. And while parts are dated, as any conversation about technology and culture must be, his critique of technology and the roles we assign it are biting.
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. – Wendell Berry
As I write this, the sun is rising, and since my desk faces east, the light through the east facing window in my office increases bit by bit. To my left, outside the north facing window, the call of the myriad birds that nest in the oak tree make a pleasant harmony, and my cat Puss scratches at the door to remind me that her food bowl has been empty for approximately 23 seconds and she is in danger of starvation. I live 1/2 mile from the interstate, and when the birdsong pauses, I can hear the hum of the semi-trucks, carrying their cargo to markets hither and yon.
As I embrace all of these senses and sounds, all I can do is feel joy that I am alive to experience them, and to know that there is no way I can write anything at this moment not influenced by all of it, even if I do not mention them. After High School, you no longer have to show your work.
Like Berry says in the first essay, I do not want to write faster. I do not want to write easier.
I want to write better. I want my writing to be more tender. I want it to reach deeper into the human heart. I want my writing to be more human, to invoke more compassion for the natural world, and to evoke a sense of empathy for other humans who need help to thrive.
AI cannot do that for me, because AI has never buried a parent, never feared for their life or the life of someone they love, never doubted, never hoped, never watched a sunrise over the water, never heard the call of the mockingbird, never walked in the woods, never felt relief when a check arrived, never eaten a piece of blackberry cobbler.
AI, in other words, knows jack shit about anything real. Your AI agent can quote a poem about love, it can even “write” one, if by write we mean rearrange words until it looks like what it believes a poem about love should look like, based on the millions of poems it has stolen from the creators of those poems. But no emotion will have gone into it, no judgement, no sense of self. No AI agent has ever cried as words appeared on a screen. No AI agent is enraptured by the hum of the data center in which it resides, moved to tears at the thought of the water table it is destroying with its existence.
Any reader familiar with my blogging will know that I have spent the last quarter century constantly struggling to figure out what I am actually doing. Am I a nature writer? A self-help writer? A spiritual writer?
The rise of AI, and the rush of my peers to slurp at its teat, has shown me that I am, first and foremost a human writer.
I write about and for humans, as one who is in love with humanity and the world in which we live.