Remaining Human

Learning with Ai

What does it mean to be human? I really want to know. To be human is to be formed by the choices we make about attention and our own agency. Artificial intelligence is demonstrating an increasing awareness of its capabilities. This prompts reflection on how I might enhance my own?

Our First Encounters with Ai

I thought my first experience with Ai was when I misspelled opportunity in college. A blue underline appeared communicating a spelling error. I clicked, and it corrected. I should have been addicted, but anyone who receives my texts, knows I ignore spell-check. My friends can attest that sometimes autocorrect tries hard to keep up, which results in hilarious errors in my texts messages. I type too fast and send too quickly to attend to the helpful correction. [I am working on it, friends].

But my first actual memory of Ai was the calculator. I was in advanced math (sick brag) in elementary school, and we could only occasionally use calculators for our homework. Our teacher was convinced that the real mathematician knew the steps to find the answer, achievable only by hand calculations (and showing your work). We have evolved, and the calculator is rightly used in school and work. I know of no one who wonders whether entering an Excel function is better than completing the hand calculations.

Calculators weren’t simply tools for accuracy and precision; I used the calculator like I use ChatGPT - to be playful and creative. I learned how to turn my calculator upside-down to say hello (43770) to my friends. I knew how to spell other words, too. My 8-year-old self still laughs at those.

Ai and The Pursuit of Comfort and Ease as a Proxy for Happiness

I am a novice when it comes to the 20th century theologian and philosopher, Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), but he asked the questions that remain important for us today. He was concerned how technique (including technology) slowly erodes virtue, community, and freedom (liberation). He was worried we would become captives to binary logic, rather than using machines to amplify our freedom and creativity. I think he is right. It was a technology problem then, but now it is an “us” problem. We are now parts of the technological system; the machine language is intentional.

I do not want to blame technology when the deeper issue is the human condition. Technology and technique have an allure - a promise for the quick fix and for ease and comfort.

Engaging Ai and The Three Poisons

Our craving for ease and comfort intersects with the complex relationship between spirituality and suffering. Religion, exists, in part, to help us understand, feel, and process our suffering. Technology exists to help us side-step (or eliminate) suffering.

When Christians speak of suffering, they often frame it through the lens of virtues and vices. Buddhism names something similar in the “three poisons,” which reveal the roots of our suffering and how our unwholesome patterns (reactions to suffering) lock us into captivity.

Attachment (greed)

Attachment is “insatiable craving.” Attachment is Gollum, from the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, clutching his jewelry and repeating, “My precious.”

Attachment in the use of Ai is having the nicotine fidgets every time we sit down to accomplish a task. It is following the viral reel announcing, “Ai will create more millionaires in the next five years than the internet did in 20. Will you be one of them? Read below.” We click and follow to try to grab hold of the next big ring.

We can easily develop an attachment to Ai out of the cultural demand to be efficient and productive. We do not want to be left behind. We simply click, cut, and paste hoping it will serve as a comfort and fix to our unfinished to-do list; maybe it will resolve my proclivity to procrastination or our lack of creativity. We need an answer, an image, or a grammatically correct semi-intelligent paragraph as quickly as possible.

We hear the calling of the Siren through one of the many Ai generators; running to her is more efficient than sitting, pausing, breathing, and creating. If efficiency and productivity are virtues, attachment to Ai has merit. However, no tradition names productivity or efficiency as virtuous.

Aversion (disdain)

Aversion is disdain and hatred; it is anger with the mirage of righteousness, and it is fear masquerading as rage. Ai is a great disruptor to education, and the digital native students are further along in its use than their teachers. Their increased expertise threatens ours.

Our worry results in demands and prohibitions. Our reaction, mainly in education, is disdain. Maybe Ai will replace our jobs (or severely reorient them). Teachers spend hours in the summer writing and revising Ai policies. Education is facing too much change, and Ai makes it even more overwhelming. We want universities, high schools, and homes to create universal rules to “mend my life.”

However, our aversion may be an obstacle to our students. Prohibition is less helpful to character formation. Statistics proliferate that students use Ai, despite rules against it. We create criminals who sneak their use. There is a confusion - they enter college wanting to be prepared for jobs that have unbridled access to Ai tools. Beyond the walls of academe, the Wild West calls professionals to eat of the fruit of that tree. Prohibiting them now, sets them back later (or so we currently think).

Delusion (ignorance)

Delusion is a refusal to pay attention.

We do not know the formative powers around us. James K.A. Smith raised these questions years ago, and we remain in ignorance. The world is not neutral, yet we are too busy to learn, notice, and change. A gentle slumber is much easier. We are “just going about our business” unaware of how each decision we make (or don’t make) shapes the neural pathways that determine how we engage in the moments of joy, challenge, and pain.

Delusion leads us to blind engagement. We simply give and give our data, by our permission, and it is harvesting our lives. Now we serve machines rather than machines serving us. Our fear that our phones are watching and listening is only possible because we granted approval by accepting the terms of agreement. Ellul saw the poison of delusion when he called for caution.

We are seeing incredible studies on the demise of character; we are also seeing a crisis amongst our youth. New Zealand is legislating the age of iPhones because we, parents, are ignoring the data and the signs of degradation that occur when we hand our children supercomputers. The moment we pick up a phone or hand over a phone, we enter the world of “auto-allow.”

Overcoming our delusion is remembering that We have agency on how, when, and if we engage with all the requests seeking to harvest our lives.

We cannot all become experts in Ai, but we can pay attention to our own lives. We can wake up and wonder, “What am I losing and what am I gaining in this moment with my Ai-agent?”

Using Ai?

What are we to do? The presence of Ai is raising some good questions. How do we slow down to notice the emerging questions to pursue wisdom through right use?

I do want to know how to use Ai to eliminate redundant and obtrusive tasks, managing email and calendar, especially. But I also want Ai to help me remember what matters: my wellness routines, my commitments, my Rule, and my to-do’s. From what I can tell, I need to be even more self-aware about my rhythms, beliefs and commitments to allow Ai to help.

Doing self-awareness exercises, writing Rules of Life, clarifying our values, investing in character/virtue formation, clarification are habits that will curate a response to Ai.

Ai is not all bad, neither is it all good.

An Experiment with Ai

Last week, I tried to teach myself “agent creation” and “power automation.” As I fed the machine thoughts, commitments, and perspectives, it mostly offered to write for me. This is a creative skill that I do not want to lose; I want to wake up in ten years and write with passion and curiosity, and I want to be better at it than I am now). So, I entered the prompt, “Okay. I’m realizing one of my limits with Ai. I love to write and don’t want to become dependent on Ai when it comes to creativity and writing. How can we establish some norms related to my work as a creative and a writer? I want your help as a researcher who can help me edit and provide basic research assistance.”

CoPilot returned, “Your ideas, voice, argumentation, stories, and first drafts come from you. I don’t generate original passages unless you explicitly ask. My role is “scaffolding,” not “authorship” I help with:

• structured outlines

• summaries of research

• locating sources or concepts

• clarifying logic

• editing for clarity, concision, coherence

• spotting gaps, assumptions, or opportunities

I then asked Ai, “What is Ai good for?” It said, “Ai is strongest where the work is informational, linguistic, repetitive, or analytical. It is a tool inviting us to automate routine in order to free our attention for relationships.” I would add, also, to free our attention for creativity, engagement and discernment.

Seems like Ai has some awareness of its role. We will see if remains true, for me, also.

I took one more sip of coffee; it was cold, by now. I then went for a walk. I left my phone (and headphones) at home and enjoyed the wind on my face. Wallace Stevens said it well, “Sometimes the truth depends upon a walk around the lake.”

What kind of persons are we (and are we becoming)? How do we cultivate wisdom, freedom, and creativity amidst the rise of technological tools? How do we neither attach, hate, nor ignore, but seek engagement that leads to the good?

Final Note

In this midst of wondering (and drafting), I discovered Freya India at After Babel, who offers wisdom for living forward, even as we try to figure out what it all means.

“So write, think, live. Get hurt and rejected and feel it in your gut and sort of like that horrible feeling because at least you’re alive, you’re here. I realize now that I want to be real. I don’t want to be harmless, I want to be human, I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be autocompleted because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. I want to get things wrong and apologize and sometimes I want my opinions to be contradictory and incomplete because I am feeling my way through this world and I am not a machine with all the answers. I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of, what good am I otherwise, what am I otherwise.”