The kind of patriotism that fuels war is not loyalty to one’s people or nation. It is a kind of allegiance to war itself. Just as we have nothing to fear but fear itself, we have no reason for war but war itself. It was the real sport of kings. Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, called war a racket. He was at least partly right. Beyond that, it is the addiction of the wealthy and the powerful, perhaps their favorite drug. It is no longer the case that “war is politics by other means.” It is that war has insinuated itself, into every nook and cranny of politics, the economy, and society. When our entertainment is not about war, it is usually about violence and aggression, whether physical, psychological, emotional, physical, racial, ethnic, sexual, informational, economic, or environmental.

There are no good wars, and there are certainly no just wars. There never were. Resistance may be just, but it may reach a point where it becomes unjust. Where war is concerned, justice is rarely more than a vague rationalization. If your God is a god of war, then he, she, or it is an evil god, and most gods love war and its bloody, sacrificial offerings. Is there a difference between them and Moloch?

 The Internet seemed a bright hope to many of us for a while when I was in my 30s. The cyberpunk writers and their imitators rightly saw the darkness of it in the hands of the wealthy and amoral. We loved their fiction but ignored their lessons. Now it is a little more than a battlefield, or of nations, criminals, the wealthy, the power hungry, or the imbecile. It is war of all against all.

Now we are bombarded with AI constantly. There are many forms of it, like almost every other technology, some of them are beneficial some of the time. Virtually every one of them is now itself a weapon or used to control weapons. Some people say AI is fascism, or promotes a new feudalism, whatever it is, it is also war.

All limits are gone. The barriers have not been torn down, or maybe it is worse, maybe there is no rubble, just rotting, decomposed ideas, laws, treaties, and policies, as worm-ridden as the corpses of soldiers, sailors, and airmen. There was a time, a little beyond living memory, when there were honest attempts to limit and contain war. They were largely destroyed in the Spring of 1915. There have been attempts, perhaps less idealistic, more devoted to maintaining the status quo, since then, but they have done little to make things better.

I have never been a soldier, a sailor, nor an airman. I have not fought in any wars, as my father and my grandfather did. I have studied them in one fashion or another since I was ten or eleven. I write as a spectator, but I know that at least after 1915, with that first period of submarine warfare, and the zeppelins dropping their dreadful payloads, we have all been in the line of fire. 1945 confirmed that. I, and almost all of my readers, will have lived their whole lives on the frontline of nuclear war. Some of the young have lived their whole lives on the frontlines of information and cyberwar. Nevertheless, we pay our taxes, wave our flags, mourn our dead, and go on as if war is far, far away. At least we pretend it is far away. A half hour (really less these day) is not far away for a missile. A catastrophic cyber attack could propagate in a matter of minutes and hours across the country. The surveillance economy is a kind of war against us as well, whether by states or businesses or stalkers.

I do not suppose I am writing much or anything that is new. I seem to echo things I read many years ago by Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, and others. What I see, or believe I observe, is that war has now so permeated society, culture, religion, the economy, and culture, that we cannot escape it even for a moment. We have difficulty understanding who the enemy is, unless we adopt Pogo’s famous maxim.1 I am looking for the way out, the way to make things better, but it is the hope of the weak and the hopeless, the kind of hope and courage that Tolkien gave his hobbits. The future, indeed the present, looks grim, but we have to understand it and find whatever ways we can to resist it while remaining as whole as we possibly can. Maybe I am a coward and do not go far enough. I am trying to find that courage that others have, but also know that it sometimes makes them foolhardy and just as likely to fuel the scourge as deprive it of kindling. I do know that we can never stop unless we wish to surrender to the gods of war and the human monsters who ride with them, completely.

1. Who and what was damaged or benefitted by the institution, policy, belief, or event? Who and what are equally important. We need to decenter ourselves to think beyond the merely human, to include other living organisms, the various cycles that support life, and even at institutions and machines.

2. What were the mechanics by which things happened and how their effects were felt?

3. Was it necessary? For whom (or what) and for what reasons was it necessary?

4. How is it reflected today?

5. Did it result in something we should keep as is, discard, or seek to transform?

It also argued that we need to apply empathy and a sense of balance to our analysis. In the second part, we looked at how this might apply to examples, specifically focusing on the development of machinery that applied automation and non-human power sources to textiles, and at the Battle of Antietam. Part 3 tries to draw out some of the consequences of those examples and further develop the basic ideas.

I have broken this into parts for readability, but am posting the second and third parts on the same day, to allows anyone who wishes to immediately move from the examples to what the consequences of those examples reveal.

From the early information technology in Jacquard looms and later power textile equipment, the paths lead forward in several directions. From the Jacquard and similar devices, we encounter the basic idea of automation.1 By the late 1880s, the information-processing potential of punched cards was picked up by Herman Hollerith to tabulate the US Census, and then tabulating equipment of all sorts. This is one of the main threads that led to digital computing. Developed for the US Census, Hollerith’s invention was essentially the first information processor, able both to be used for the sort of things we now call Big Data, but also capable of of identifying individuals based on a defined set of criteria out of thousands or millions. We will return to that shortly.

We can pull a thread too from the power side of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century textile machines with the need for more power and the ability to locate mills wherever needed. Early on, when water was the main source of power, the best sites were on a river and often remote from the population centers. Company towns might have to be built, workers brought in, and the total power output available on site was finite. Expansion was difficult. When efficient steam engines appeared, the textile industry could relocate to more populous areas in or near cities, and could increase available power indefinitely and without reference to whether that might affect the flow of water. Textile production was not the only use of steam engines, but they were important in providing a market for the technology.

But what maybe more material were the attitudes that the machinery fostered. On the one hand, they did lead to the rise of the Luddites, who are both a continuing example for labor, but also an ideological forerunner and the namesake of today’s tech resistance. They would not have arisen with out other changes. These included the gradual penetration of capitalism into political thought and practice, and the frankly hysterical reaction of His Majesty’s government to any popular resistance in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleon. For our purposes, it is a third set of ideas that arose in the wake of these and other machines, the increasing belief in solving problems, such as as increasing profits, with technology. In a sense, the Luddites were reacting to the early history of the frequent and often unwanted and poorly constructed tech fixes of the present day. Note too that the Luddites were not anti-machine. They were against machines that hurt the way of life but perfectly willing to embrace those that supported it.2 As noted earlier, the new technologies increased demand for cotton, which with the invention of the cotton gin drove down the price of cotton and reinforced the Souther planters’ dependence on slavery. Meanwhile, new machinery introduced into the more industrial Northern states made them less dependent on slavery, which many had already abolished. This was partly responsible for Antietam and all of the battles of the War of the Rebellion (as the Union officially called it).

Both the revival of early nineteenth-century slavery, and the consequent reaction of former Confederates to the free blacks after the War, free in part because of the battle, reinforced and continued to feed the “scientific” and religious ideologies of race. The victory by the Union also turned the US into a nation increasingly devoted to heavy industry. The ideology of technological solutions found a ready home, as did the anti-labor politics and policies that were developed in Britain to counter the Luddites.

These threads began to be woven together, and we encounter new phenomena emerging from them. Remember that I mentioned the use of Hollerith cards to sort and select people based on specific criteria. In the hothouse racial atmosphere that was fueled as much by European “scientific racism” as American, this proved terribly convenient to the Nazis to identify Jews, Roma, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other groups deemed unsuitable or dangerous. Because the same cards tracked occupation and the movement of rolling stock on the railroads, they also provided the means to identify those whose skills might be employed in war industries (allowing them to be worked to death) and transported to where they were needed rather than being marked for immediate execution.3 Elsewhere the tabulating and sorting machines could be used to find anyone in the files maintained by governments for military service or who might be dangerous subversives. That last usage derived from keeping card indices, much like the card catalogs of libraries, of such people. That was, in part fueled by fear of labor, and derived from practices in European and American colonies. The whole idea of workers as dangerous subversives who must be tracked and punished go back to our friends the Luddites, but with the advent of improved data processing and power machinery, there were now many more workers.4

It is not just a few technologies, movements, beliefs, policies, and events interacting. Nor are the results finite (at least from the standpoint of individual lifetimes). The Nazis were hardly the only ones to use early data-processing technology this way. It has grown and benefited from the development of computing and related electronic technologies. To reach the contemporary state of government and commercial surveillance, which is both crippled by the race in training AI systems and routinely used in racist ways and for racist purposes, many other things needed to happen. Often they connect up in unexpected ways. Looping back through the development of computing and electronics, we soon encounter the outsized influence of Silicon Valley and Stanford University (which was very much the foundation of the electronics and computing industries in the area). Stanford’s early years were closely associated with eugenics and intelligence testing, again echoing the connections we have already made. Silicon Valley also greatly benefited from the connections Stanford made with business elsewhere, the Federal Government, and the military, as well as from the ethos of innovation and economic exploitation it fostered. It still wields an outsized presence in American life and in the world.5

Of course workers (both blue and white collar) continue to be distrusted and placed under surveillance by employers - another legacy of the suppression of Luddites and organized labor more than two centuries ago. Now, of course, consumers are as well. If we trace that effort, it ties back to attempts in the 1960s (beginning with the US presidential election, to predict and influence popular opinion and behavior). That was deemed potentially useful to politicians, the military, and the security services, though what was possible then was far too crude and unreliable to be of much real value. That did not stop them from continuing to try.

Some of that derives from the use of opinion polling in US elections started by the Literary Digest in 1916 (though there are earlier, local examples). A different approach was taken in Britain by the Mass-Observation starting in 1937. Instead of polling, M-O volunteers kept diaries of conversations they had heard and interviews. This proved valuable to the government to understanding morale and public perceptions throughout WWII. By 1960, computers were being used to simulate polls and public opinion. While we were aware of it to a limited extent for decades, most of us may not have given it a second thought until the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016.6

It all connects up, often in loops, and with much more than I have outlined here. As we head into a future of political and environmental uncertainty filled with surveillance systems, big data, and AI, we have to ask ourselves if those provide what we need. We may need computers and even some kinds of AI to help visualize and grasp the extent of crises that envelope us, but I will continue to argue that we must also see the smallest details and living elements, not only quantitatively or as sophisticated visual displays, but as interconnected stories with empathy, real understanding, and as parts of a vast and seemingly incomprehensible whole. Chaos and Complexity Theory has taught us that relatively minor things may have completely disproportionate consequences. We must understand as much as we can, narratively, artistically, scientifically, and quantitatively, taking poems and paintings as seriously as sociological studies and climatological reports. We are not dealing with a world of numbers, but of living, breathing, individual creatures that are also part of something much larger. We return to the way we used to see things before the polycrisis. We must embrace the whole, messy complexity of the world to move beyond mere reform to a full regeneration of our cultures, societies, economies, and politics.

1. Who and what was damaged or benefitted by the institution, policy, belief, or event? Who and what are equally important. We need to decenter ourselves to think beyond the merely human, to include other living organisms, the various cycles that support life, and even at institutions and machines.

2. What were the mechanics by which things happened and how their effects were felt?

3. Was it necessary? For whom (or what) and for what reasons was it necessary?

4. How is it reflected today?

5. Did it result in something we should keep as is, discard, or seek to transform?

It also argued that we need to apply empathy and a sense of balance to our analysis. What follows attempts to give some examples and further develop these ideas.

I have broken this into parts for readability, but am posting the second and third parts on the same day, to allows anyone who wishes to immediately move from the examples to what the consequences of those examples reveal.

We need to stop thinking about technologies in isolation from one another, let alone society and culture. We have successively added one technology into or onto another for centuries. First we grafted water and wind power onto mills, forges, and textile machinery. Then we added punchcards and paper tapes - arguably the first automated information technology - to looms. We used steam engines to power many more kinds of tools, then petroleum and electricity. Later, we added computers to anything and everything we could, such as cars and household appliances. There is no reason gasoline or diesel engines and electrical appliances need computers, but they are in almost all vehicle and new appliances anyway. Now, after adding networking technologies to communicate, surveil, and remotely control the cars and appliances, we are adding AI to the computers. We need to see AI and all digital technology in this light - as the compounding to technologies for reasons that may not be necessary.

We are stacking or nesting power and information interfaces and processes in a way that has existed for about 300 years, and it may be accelerating. It may seem an obvious and normal thing to us, but it is done with very little consideration of consequences. While it does generally increase the utility of an objects, at least for some subset of people, it also adds cost, complexity, and usually requires more energy, more mineral resources, and more infrastructure than previous iterations of the device did. Reliability may or may not increase. Privacy and security may become a bigger problem. I suspect that the increase in complexity more likely increase logarithmically rather than linearly.

This is the sort of thing I was discussing in the previous part of the essay. At each of the points in this progression, we can see that there were at least potential gains. Jacquard looms using punch cards could reproduce complex patterns exactly and make them more affordable and available to a wider public. For one segment of the population, there may have been an aesthetic benefit coming from more beautiful clothing, upholstery, and other textiles. For a much smaller segment, there was a financial benefit, but for the weavers using Jacquard looms and the various kinds of power textile machinery that came into use along side them, there was a general deskilling and consequent loss of income, pride, and position.

We need to consider these developments not only analytically, but also with empathy and a sense of balance. It is easy to empathize with the workers, many of whom, became the original saboteurs (by throwing their sabots - wooden shoes - into the machinery) on the continent, and Luddites in England, Scotland, and Wales. Given our concerns with deskilling, job loss, and human obsolescence with AI, we have a new-found sensibility and a sensitivity to their plight. Even the attempts by tech lords and the Administration to depict opposition to data centers as treasonous (arguing that we are all just Chinese dupes) or even part of a terrorist organization, the harsh, capital punishments meted out to some of the original Luddites feels closer to home than ever.1

The empathy is perhaps the easy part. I also mentioned balance, and it is far more difficult and requires a fuller examination of causes and consequences.

On one level, the economic concentration that the new textile technologies and the crushing of the workers’ movements wrought could be seen by capitalists in positive terms, and I am sure present day billionaires and much of the financial class would empathize with the mill owners and makers of the machinery. I doubt that few outside the 1% would though. We might also have empathy for the middle, and even parts of the lower class, that now had access to less expensive and prettier clothing and textiles. It is a reminder that aesthetics are an important consideration once the bare necessities of life are met. We need to balance that against the damage it did to textile workers. Likewise, it must be balanced against colonial, especially Indian, textile industries and economies. The demand for cotton also increased and helped fuel slavery in the United States and eventually a war killing hundreds of thousands. And while the initial power needs were met by water power, which had a relatively small ecological impact, it was not long before the use of coal-fired steam engines for the same purpose increased environmental damage, new health problems, and began the steady acceleration of climate change.

Looked at that way, much of it can be looked at from a utilitarian perspective. That is one way to approach it. It allows numbers and quantities to tell much of the tale and so is quite congenial to our digital lifestyle and worldview. That, however, is not my intent when I refer to the search for balance.

While we can learn much from a utilitarian, data-driven approach, and while it is important to be able to do that for climate and social science, and related disciplines, it is not enough. Numbers and statistics are limited in their explanatory potential and only engage with a part of our minds. While some people can think in numbers and mathematics, and are of great value to society, human minds and cultures are built much more on stories. We are storytelling creatures and understand things through narratives and stories.

If I inform you that 22, 726 were killed on September 17, 1862 at 39º 28’ 24” N & 77º 44’ 41” W, you would know something bad had happened. If I instead say to you that the largest one-day loss of life in battle by Americans (Union and Confederate combined) happened at the Battle of Antietam on that date, you may begin to visualize something, feel a proper sense of horror, and invest it with more meaning. If I then tell you the story of the battle, whether from a high-level perspective or through the reminiscences of a soldier who fought there, it takes on still more meaning. If I add a visual representation (see below), yet more meaning will come through. Between narrative and art, we can develop sympathy and empathy even with the generals and politicians who caused the carnage as well as with their victims.

Battle of Antietam by Thure de Thulstrup, published by L. Prang & Co. The image shows the charge of the Iron Brigade. Public domain image copied from Wikimedia Commons.

This is where we begin to see the need for more than a merely utilitarian sense of balance. We need to comprehend what was in the minds of Generals McClellan and Lee, as well as Presidents Lincoln and Davis, but also the physical, psychological, and spiritual experiences of the soldiers, their relatives, and everyone else affected by the carnage. With Antietam, we should also consider that victory gave Lincoln the political and diplomatic capital he felt necessary to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Although we could consider that from a purely legal point of view (and should take the legal, political, and diplomatic aspects into consideration), its consequences, both generally and individually, were far more far reaching than than any battle, at least on the surface.2

We should also consider the terror and pain suffered by the horses and mules on the battlefield, something we rarely consider, but a feature of most combat for the last 5000 years. They were given no choice at all about being there. In many campaigns, horses suffered horrendously, and would continue to do so through WWII, when millions of horses and mules were still on the front lines, particularly with German and Soviet forces. Other animals will also have suffered, but, dogs and homing pigeons excepted, we have little certain knowledge of that for most conflicts.

We must always use empathy and imagination to flesh out numbers. We need them to determine if an event or policy was or is really necessary, but to do that, we must also see things in a much larger context.

Whether we are dealing with the Luddites (and the technologies that gave rise to them) or the fighting at Antietam, we need to position them in a vast web, one both causal and associative. Decisions made earlier, sometimes centuries earlier, created the conditions and situations in which both British workers and American soldiers found themselves. Whether we are talking about 1811 or 1862 (or 2026) we have to look at things that led up to them in the same way as we do the machine breaking or the combat themselves, and have to ask the same of the consequences. In both cases, the consequences remain relevant today. They are also somewhat intertwined. I will focus more on the consequences in Part 3.

The general level of anxiety in the United State is quite high. Across the political spectrum, there is a fear of losing our freedoms and democracy surrendering the special place we believe we have occupied for so long, and giving up our identity. Each of those may mean radically different things to different people, but they are common worries frequently and vehemently expressed. Some of these may be uniquely American concerns, but some are more general and afflict other countries. They do not play out the same way for everyone or everywhere, neither internationally nor domestically. Frankly, we need to understand the differences, the variations, even ones with which we disagree. Some should be resisted. Others may allow us to come together against common threats.

What I fear they have in common is a tendency to look backward with too little objectivity. We speak of restoring our democracy and way of life, whatever that means to each of us personally. We do not need a restoration or reformation as much as a renaissance, a rebirth. We cannot go back to what we had, no matter how nostalgic and comforting. We have to aim for a major transformation. At first, we may believe it is a restoration - the leading lights of the Renaissance certainly had that as their intention, but they ended up giving birth to something new and different, as glorious as it was terrible.

The problem with aiming to restore our political, economic, and social systems is that they are largely responsible for the existential crises, the polycrisis, that we experience today. They are also responsible for many of the individual and group catastrophes and injustices that plague us. We can draw heavily on the institutions and knowledge we inherited, but if we stop with minor political changes, such as getting rid of the Electoral College or term limits for Supreme Court justices, we have not gotten to the core of the rot. Things might be a little better, but how long will the building stand if the joists are rotten and the foundation undermined? The same goes for the economy and society.

We must endure the psychological pain of looking at our past in detail under a harsh light, particularly the eras we see as our greatest triumphs. We must do the same with the present. This is why the war over history and journalism is so critical. Mind you, I do not suggest looking at either past or present through a specific lens, whether capitalist, socialist, Christo-nationalist, progressive, racial, feminist, queer, or anything else. Ideologies and religions do not belong on this quest, though perhaps what I am proposing is just another ideology. If it is, it is one that feels right to be now. I think it less structured or limiting than most.

I think we should ask the following.

1. Who and what was damaged or benefitted by the institution, policy, belief, or event? Who and what are equally important. We need to decenter ourselves to think beyond the merely human, to include other living organisms, the various cycles that support life, and even at institutions and machines.

2. What were the mechanics by which things happened and how their effects were felt?

3. Was it necessary? For whom (or what) and for what reasons was it necessary?

4. How is it reflected today?

5. Did it result in something we should keep as is, discard, or seek to transform?

I also suggest that empathy, a much derided term these day, should sit at the center of our judgement and actions. Along with it must come balance. One is not really useful without the other. The goal should not be personal or national greatness. We should only be for the survival of humanity and life itself. We need to observe both in order to anchor our civilization.

I am looking for a real way forward, not just a short-term fix. I will take a short-term fix to buy us time, but we cannot stop there, exhausted by having gotten through some immediate crises and apparently restoring an earlier version of things. We cannot limit our empathy to injured individuals or groups. We must extend it to everyone and every living thing. It may be that we eventually have to extend it to machines - I think that unlikely in my lifetime, though others disagree about the timeline. That is a bridge to cross when we come to it. We can take empathy too far, damaging one to give the other the best of everything. Balance is necessary to change our focus and allow us to really concentrate on the common good, not just for one group, or even just for our species.

I am going to pause here. In the second part, I will try to show how this applies to some specific examples and further develop my ideas.The first part of this essay lays out some ideas and a general argument. The second part will focus more on examples.

The general level of anxiety in the United State is quite high. Across the political spectrum, there is a fear of losing our freedoms and democracy surrendering the special place we believe we have occupied for so long, and giving up our identity. Each of those may mean radically different things to different people, but they are common worries frequently and vehemently expressed. Some of these may be uniquely American concerns, but some are more general and afflict other countries. They do not play out the same way for everyone or everywhere, neither internationally nor domestically. Frankly, we need to understand the differences, the variations, even ones with which we disagree. Some should be resisted. Others may allow us to come together against common threats.

What I fear they have in common is a tendency to look backward with too little objectivity. We speak of restoring our democracy and way of life, whatever that means to each of us personally. We do not need a restoration or reformation as much as a renaissance, a rebirth. We cannot go back to what we had, no matter how nostalgic and comforting. We have to aim for a major transformation. At first, we may believe it is a restoration - the leading lights of the Renaissance certainly had that as their intention, but they ended up giving birth to something new and different, as glorious as it was terrible.

The problem with aiming to restore our political, economic, and social systems is that they are largely responsible for the existential crises, the polycrisis, that we experience today. They are also responsible for many of the individual and group catastrophes and injustices that plague us. We can draw heavily on the institutions and knowledge we inherited, but if we stop with minor political changes, such as getting rid of the Electoral College or term limits for Supreme Court justices, we have not gotten to the core of the rot. Things might be a little better, but how long will the building stand if the joists are rotten and the foundation undermined? The same goes for the economy and society.

We must endure the psychological pain of looking at our past in detail under a harsh light, particularly the eras we see as our greatest triumphs. We must do the same with the present. This is why the war over history and journalism is so critical. Mind you, I do not suggest looking at either past or present through a specific lens, whether capitalist, socialist, Christo-nationalist, progressive, racial, feminist, queer, or anything else. Ideologies and religions do not belong on this quest, though perhaps what I am proposing is just another ideology. If it is, it is one that feels right to be now. I think it less structured or limiting than most.

I think we should ask the following.

1. Who and what was damaged or benefitted by the institution, policy, belief, or event? Who and what are equally important. We need to decenter ourselves to think beyond the merely human, to include other living organisms, the various cycles that support life, and even at institutions and machines.

2. What were the mechanics by which things happened and how their effects were felt?

3. Was it necessary? For whom (or what) and for what reasons was it necessary?

4. How is it reflected today?

5. Did it result in something we should keep as is, discard, or seek to transform?

I also suggest that empathy, a much derided term these day, should sit at the center of our judgement and actions. Along with it must come balance. One is not really useful without the other. The goal should not be personal or national greatness. We should only be for the survival of humanity and life itself. We need to observe both in order to anchor our civilization.

I am looking for a real way forward, not just a short-term fix. I will take a short-term fix to buy us time, but we cannot stop there, exhausted by having gotten through some immediate crises and apparently restoring an earlier version of things. We cannot limit our empathy to injured individuals or groups. We must extend it to everyone and every living thing. It may be that we eventually have to extend it to machines - I think that unlikely in my lifetime, though others disagree about the timeline. That is a bridge to cross when we come to it. We can take empathy too far, damaging one to give the other the best of everything. Balance is necessary to change our focus and allow us to really concentrate on the common good, not just for one group, or even just for our species.

I am going to pause here. In the second part, I will try to show how this applies to some specific examples and further develop my ideas.

I do not use AI in my writing (except for the AI that allows me to dictate into my phone or iPad, as I do dictate some pieces, either as a first draft, or to aid in transcribing a first draft written by hand). I have even stopped using Grammarly because of its extensive and intrusive AI features. I very rarely use it in researching what I write anymore. There are legitimate reasons to use AI in writing. There are also legitimate uses for using an AI detector.

It is not uncommon for people who are uncertain of their writing skills, sometimes native speakers of a language who feeling uncertain about their abilities, and sometimes non-native speakers, to use AI to polish. As one Taiwanese friend put it, she uses AI to “Americanize” her writing. (Personally I never thought she needed to do that.) It may be useful for people with specific learning or other disabilities or forms of neurodivergence. It also can be useful for research, looking for possibilities one has overlooked, etc. This is not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.

Likewise, there may be good reasons to use an AI detector. Provided it is a high-quality one, it does no harm in and of itself. Pangram does fall in the upper range of AI detectors. It is what one does with the results that causes the damage. One of the things I used to tell faculty is that AI detectors do not offer proof of AI use. The faculty I worked with were used to using Turnitin to help find plagiarism. I needed to explain why we (the University of Missouri System) had never turned on the Turnitin AI Indicator (which is also one of the best in my opinion), so this was always part of my presentation. A plagiarism “detector” can give you positive proof that two pieces of text match, and can help locate possible sources, though it cannot prove intention or, for short pieces of text, coincidence. An AI detector is not about matching. It can only provide a probability that a piece of text was written by AI. It can be affected by a wide variety of factors, including the formality of the writing and a limited or unusual vocabulary. In one test, I had different tools evaluate a page from my 1991 dissertation, The Effects of Technology on Sixteenth-Century Military Thought (a real page turner, I can tell you.) It came back as 100% AI-written. That was more than two years ago. To be fair, when I ran it through the free version of Pangram, it came back as 100% human.

An AI detector should never be used as the sole basis for any accusation. Just because a text is labelled with a high percentage of AI, or any AI, does not mean that AI was used. It is a tool that is at best indicative and needs interpretation. If you have ever watched a live weather broadcast during a tornado outbreak (something most people have done where I live), you will know that the radar can indicate that there is a tornado and whether it is in the air or on the ground, but that the echos are not definitive. Sometimes what looks like the radar signature of a tornado is not what it seems. It takes someone directly seeing the tornado to verify it.

And, of course, the person who wrote the piece may have specified that they are using AI for specific purposes and reasons, so it does not imply any kind of trickery or deceit.

Anyone who is really opposed to using AI (or at least LLMs and other forms of Machine Learning [ML]) should avoid using these tools. All AI detectors are themselves AIs that are trained against specific LLMs. (As LLMs are upgraded, the detectors have to undergo additional training to keep up, so they are always a little bit behind.)

As I have been writing this, I have been thinking about the Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs, to which the generic name Flock has been applied, much as Xerox came to stand for all copiers) that have been on my mind a lot lately. (They triggered the post I made this morning about identity.) There is not a direct comparison to be made between an ALPR and an AI detector. Still, there is something about the mindset behind their use. The assumption is that if you look at a sufficient number of instances, you will find someone doing something wrong. Based on this assumption, you want to capture as much data as possible, with or without the knowledge of the people under surveillance. That makes the companies profitable. It also makes it necessary for them to increase the suspicion that we may already feel, to trust less, and to accuse more often.

Detectors also simply reduce our words and thoughts to numeric data, to be processed and manipulated. It is similar in that regard to the way that all of our other data is harvested and analyzed. We do not know what, in the long run, may happen to that data or all of the ways it may be used. Just as we are reduced to credit scores, so detectors reduce our originality of thought to a statistic.

Three years of exposure to LLMs and AI detectors while supporting faculty and administrators did something to my opinions about technology. I am a child of the sixties, of the space race, the first run of _Star Trek_, and a general optimism about technology. I came to computers when I was already an adult. I was 33 when I was introduced to the web, and 37 when I began to support learning technologies full time. It is hard to convey today how optimistic we were back then, how many of us really thought technology would be a net benefit to everyone, and how rose colored our glasses were when we looked at the virtual, digital world. Big business had already begun to dim the illusion before social media became ubiquitous, and that made it worse. Still, to me at least, it felt like hope was not dead. My experiences with LLMs, other forms of generative AI, the detectors, the ways they have been used, and the reactions people have had to them, have all but destroyed what faith I had left in technology. Some days, I wonder how far I might be able to go offline. I am pretty addicted though, and know that my dependence is more likely to grow than to decline.

If you are going to use either AI or AI detectors, do it with thought, judiciously, and remember that it is all probabilistic, that there may be good reasons to use them, but also bad ones, and that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and as innocent until proven to have used at all, and especially with bad intention.

This was written without the use of an LLM on a Mac Mini in the Drafts app. I have disabled all of the Apple Intelligence features I can locate in settings on this machine. I did do a little testing of my own texts with Pangram as research.

Since I refer to the work I previously did, let me add that nothing written here necessarily reflects the opinions of my former employer, the University of Missouri System.

I began that other essay, asking: who determines who you are? For the most part, today in America, you do not. The government, business, medicine, technology, and religion, determine who you are. Very few of us are able to break away from that. This is partly why identity is such a contested political issue today. I looked at some different aspects of this in detail.

That led me to another question: what is the nature of our being? Put another way: do individuals exist? Even if you take this from a strictly materialist point of view, I think you have to acknowledge that we exist only in relation to others in networks, and even our bodies are networks. I do not mean digital electronic networks per se. Physiologically, you are network of different kinds of networks, neural, circulatory, muscular, etc. On top of that, you exist in relation to the complex flora in your digestive track that are separate organisms, but which are also an important part of you. Likewise, your genes, your DNA, contains long sequences of genetic material from viruses and other species. So you exist in relationship to those viruses and other species. Externally, we exist in social networks, and I don’t just mean, social media. There are political and economic ones, networks of culture, meaning, etc. We also exist in relation to the natural world around us, which again is a complex web of many different networks. Just how complex we are beginning to understand. For instance, in the last 20 or 30 years, we have begun to comprehend that trees of different species in the forest are connected by underground networks of fungi exchanging information and nutrients. You could almost argue that the organism consists not of individual plants and fungi and animals, but the forest itself. We’ve literally been missing the forest for the trees. When we look at human beings, we may have missed the being for the individuals.

Something else that we have become aware of in the last few decades is that we are grafting, electronic networks, and now specifically, digital electronic networks, onto all of these others. That can be very useful and valuable. Unfortunately, many of those in power, from low level managers to national leaders, increasing mistake the data in those networks for the reality. Only what they can conveniently analyze numerically and statistically is real to them. We are consequently reduced to what is measurable and what is trackable. I do not think that is who we are, but that is literally what our identity is.

We are not our identities.

I have a friend, a former boss, my mentor, and someone I have come to cherish as much as any family member over the last thirty-odd years. His conversational style is a little unusual, but it really reflects the way I believe his thought processes works. It also supports an intuition I have been developing about the human as a network being. If I tell him something that is bugging me, or something I have been thinking about and pondering, he is almost always reminded of a story from his past, or sometimes one from a friend or family member. It is as if he exists in a network of connections across time and people in situations that he can draw on. That is not something unique to him. We all do this to some extent, but the way he expresses them lends a clarity to how we are networked across time and space. You could call that memory, but memory is an interesting kind of network. It is an interconnected representation of the past, a constantly evolving web of words, images, and other sensory associations embodied in a network of biological neurons. We can try to reduce it to neurons, but it is something different. Memories are a sort of time machine that defines who we are to ourselves.

In a sense, that is our truer identity, but even memory is only a part of who we are. All that we sense. All that we think. All of our actions and interactions with others and the world are part of it. We extend backward to our birth, even our conception, but beyond that we are the results of actions, decisions, and accidents of myriad generation of life, of laws of nature, and are connected forward to the effects of our actions and decisions. That is not woo, it is causality - materialistic, mechanistic causality. Even if you allow nothing more, no meaning, it is still much greater than the identities we are assigned.

If you want to go beyond that and consider mind, soul, spirit, and the immaterial aspects that many (including myself) understand to exist, then our identities are even more constraining. Whether you include those or not, our assigned and limited identities are damaging. I have kept this in pretty abstract term so far, but even as an older white male in the Midwest, I can feel the effects. And when I look around me, I can see them, even more clearly in the old and young, in women and people who are not white (as society determines), those who suffer from diseases or disabilities, and people whose neurology or gender or way of being is divergent from official or widely understood norms.

We cannot exist as fully human, as even partial realized networked beings in a world that distorts who and what we are while it warps and prunes our connections to each other, nature, and reality. As surveillance increases, as we become nothing more than entries in databases, we become less and less. I do not know if I will write more on this, but what we are seeing is an intensification and elaboration of process that began at the earliest stages of writing, if not before. It may be an illusion, but it feels like it is coming to a crescendo, the climax of a long story, and that there is no denouement, no happy ending, just the reduction of our being to the numbers. Even the way I have tried to describe what we are, my whole notion of the human as a networked beings, is a reduction because it is an abstraction.

Sixty years ago (next year), No. 6 shouted on our television sets, “I am not a number. I am a free man!” As he and No. 2 (the many No. 2s) found, it was not so simple. It is even less simple today, but we have no future if we fail to resist being 1’s and 0’s in databases to be retrieved and manipulated We must insist on nothing less than being free human beings connected to one another and the world.

If you are unfamiliar with No. 6, this clip, the opening sequence from The Prisoner, sums him up nicely.

This is a central piece both to the polycrisis and resistance to many of its facets, from technofeudalism and AI to overwork and fear of missing out. Only by transforming society and culture into tired and addicted masses, willing to to surrender rights rights to independent thought and reflection, can the rule of machines over humans be secured. Even if AGI never happens, those behind Western AI know they can seize control, but also know that they have a limited time to do so before overtaken by the Chinese or others, or by alternative kinds of AI models. While there are plenty of companies and billionaires involved, often in conflict, they are intertwined through different deals, Nvidia, and political positions. I am not postulating a formal conspiracy. That is not necessary under the circumstances and given the common set of ideologies and ideals permeating the companies and groups. I suspect this has a role in feeding the hype and frenzy of the AI marketplace.

Resistance must take an anti-accelerationist stance, oppose relentless calls for false-efficiency and self-optimization, stand against anything that suppresses free thought and reflection, rejecting notions of inevitability and teleology. This is not necessarily a political resistance, though it would logically lead to a sea-change in political consciousness. It is a resistance to lifestyles, worldviews, an economic system that has mutated, and a rejection of our entire way of thinking about technology. We see it in the resistance to the runaway construction of data centers without regard for local communities, environments, and infrastructure. We see it in the revival of analog and single-purpose digital alternatives, and in a kind of nostalgia for supposedly obsolete skills.2 We also encounter it in the delayed adoption of new hardware models or app versions pushing back against planned obsolescence.

Time is fundamental to our existence and understanding of the world. We have lost many of the natural and sacred aspects of time. Not only have we allowed artificial (clock) time to dominate our lives and perceptions, we have also allowed economic worldviews to commoditize it. It is as much a coin to be spent, a quantity to be purchased, or a thing to be exploited as any physical or software object.3

I am retired, so I can approach this differently from those still working. They have far less control of their time, at least during working hours, and family or other commitments cut into their time outside of work. Still, outside of work, there is a need to slow down. Those who have optimized things, often now with AI agents, may think that the point is to do as much as possible, allowing AI to multitask for the them while still constantly busy themselves. The point, to me, is not to do as much as possible, but to understand who I am, how the world around me is more than a machine - a set of relationships in which I am embedded and which is as much a part of me as I am of it. Within the context of information, data, and opinion, we need time to filter, consider, and integrate. Otherwise that is all of little use to us. Without that time, we might as well be zombies or machines. That is clearly what some versions of the technological and economic ideologies envision. We can see it clearly in the cautionary tales coming from Amazon and other workplaces, as well as the prognostications of some corporate and AI leaders.

A large part of reclaiming our freedom, our identity, and our sanity depends on our sense of time and the right to regulate it as we see fit, as opposed to having it done for us by corporations, political entities, or technological devices that neither care for nor comprehend us. We can then begin think and understand more clearly, while changing our whole worldview, and perhaps the consciousnesses of those around us too.

I find myself returning to the topics that fascinated me in grad school. How (more than what) do people think? How is that influenced or altered by technology? How and why do we have the beliefs that we do? What can supposedly irrational or fringe beliefs and experiences tell us about our relationship the world? How has the human mind evolved over time? And the one that looms larger and larger to me: what critical things have we missed?

I still approach those primarily as the historian I was trained to be, but now, with decades of experience having helped adopt, adapt, and support technologies for a public university in the American Midwest, and also with new perspectives about mind and the living world that have emerged in recent decades. I also continue to have a deep distrust of ideology and religion that carries over into a healthy skepticism of philosophy, economics, and social science theories. (Theory is fine as a tool, to be used where appropriate, but should never be allowed to shape a static worldview, as so often seems to happen. Worldviews, particularly rigid ones, make poor tools, unless you wish to use them to filter reality and censor unwanted information.)

What does this mean in practice? It means ignoring a lot of the arguments being made as to why things happen while trying to find underlying patterns. It sometimes means going down strange rabbit holes and sometimes suspending disbelief to see if they lead to anything useful. It means treating all forms of human knowledge as limited and contingent, while acknowledging that approaching the same questions with different systems of knowledge or belief can be productive. It may mean that the long-term solutions to our problems may be much more difficult than we imagine.

I think the reason so many of us struggle to understand what is going on is because we are unwilling to let go of our worldviews, working with too narrow a scope that excludes much that is important, and have too limited a tool set. To the extent that I understand any of it (I am uncertain how much I really comprehend), it is because I have worked at widening the scope, considering different approaches, and avoiding reducing things to one dimension. That seems to be true of others I know or have read.

It is pretty easy to see all of our problems as coming from capitalism (or, if you are on the other side of the spectrum, socialism), that is to say that economics is the key to everything. It is likewise easy to argue that the problems are caused by a cabal, or by a particular set of religious beliefs, by toxic masculinity/patriarchy, or by technology. There is something to every one of these. Economic ideas do play a central role in our politics, because we have elevated them to an almost religious dogma on all sides. Economics have hijacked Christianity in this country, I think on both the right and the left. (American Christianity has also become strangely materialist too.) We even say things like it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. That is a sign that it has become central to our worldviews, overly important, though it may be interpreted in different ways.

Likewise, while their is a widespread belief in a cabal that runs the world, there are clearly groups that have immense influence, and other, usually less visible groups that attempt to manipulate society or events, along with proven conspiracies. Some of these are groups of private individuals. Others are government or international bodies. Sometimes it feels like we are drowning in conspiracies and active measures. We have great difficulty distinguishing the real from the false. That is both the result of the redefinition of conspiracy theory that went on in the mid- and late-20th century as well as by the multiplication of unprovable conspiracy theories. At one and the same time, we were educated to reject conspiracy as an explanation, while many turned to conspiracy as the only explanation. Neither of those is a good standard. Confronted with things like the web of Epstein’s connections or the sophisticated disinformation campaigns run by many intelligence services, many of us are left scratching our heads and wondering what’s really true, and what’s really going on. Given what we were taught both academically and by the media, this can be a very confusing situation. But again we cannot turn our backs on it. Nor is it one that explains everything.

Religion is another area that we often turn to for explanations of the strange state of politics in America today. It has played a large role. That was essentially intentional, there were groups of businessmen and financiers in the 1940s and 50s who sought to make religion, a powerful counterweight to what they perceived as socialism and communism. Later, the Republican Party openly embraced evangelical and fundamentalist Christians to tilt the balance against the Democrats. In both instances, those seeking to do this lost control.

I did mention above that economics largely penetrated and often hijacked American Christianity. This was not just a result of business or politicians trying to manipulate religion, it is something that goes very far back in our history and happened gradually. At the same time, it is important to understand that religion is still distinct from economics. In some ways it has also infected economics. How much of the urgency and accelerationism of our billionaire class is down to the semi-secularists apocalypticism that oozed from Christianity into our collective imagination? That has had the effect on many aspects of our society and culture, not just capitalism or socialism. Religion is an important force in the polycrisis, but it effects are not always straightforward or even direct. They collide with other beliefs and events, sometimes with unexpected results.

Toxic masculinity or patriarchy is another force that seems very influential today, both governments and politics, and in the way it influences other aspects of society and culture. Good arguments have been made about its role in starting wars. It is hard to ignore in the present Administration. Its interpenetration with capitalism and religion are obvious. If some surmises about the rise of gender roles related to the taming of fire are correct, it may be a much more primal force predating Homo sapiens, or at least behavioral modern humans. Gender does explain a lot of both our current situation and has also shaped many of the other forces at play. I still do not think it is sufficient to explain everything. It is also important to understand that it is itself affected by other forces. If we start looking at technology as a force in shaping today’s world, we would immediately have to start recognizing the ways it has been shaped by, but has also shaped gender. To take a single example, the development of pharmaceuticals for female contraception in the 1950s has had a huge role in changing gender relationships in society.

Technology is also seen as shaping the present polycrisis. Technological determinism is an easy trap. We see a lot of it. Again, if theories about the role of fire in human evolution are correct, technology shaped us from an early point. For those who see language as a technology, that is only reinforced. Still, technology never acts independently. It can lead to long-term or short-term changes in behavior, thought, and even physiology, but those occur in specific contexts, and it is equally often true that technologies (particularly our digital ones) serves as amplifiers or force multipliers. Economics, religion, and gender all play roles in the development and deployment of technologies, as do many other forces. Most of all, I think we need to see that technologies are both products of mind, shape our theories of mind, and are critical in how we develop our cognitive abilities and models of the world.

That gets me back to my main points. While the immediate issues are easily tied to one of these (or a handful of other forces), the interactions of these forces is critical, and all of them arise from what we think, which is in turn grounded in how we think. We can resolve immediate crises, at least in normal times, by working to tweak something relating to one or more of the forces above. That can get us quite far in the short term. In the long run, it does not get us very far. In the 1940s, we were able to overcome genocidal states by manipulating the economy (through unprecedented government interference in business and guarantees of profits), religion (praise God and pass the ammunition), concerns about hidden cabals and conspiracies (especially fears of spies and fifth columns, but also by painting the Axis powers as more unified than they ever were), gender (through a temporary realignment of gender roles in the workplace and a little easing of sexual morality), and technology (in almost every field of endeavor, but foremost in terms of engines, electronics, and applied physics). All of those had longer-term consequences. In some cases, such as arms contracts and the increase in militarism and nationalism in religion, the genie could not be put back in the bottle. There was a strong attempt to send her back in to the bottle in terms of gender, and for a few years, that appeared to work, but it was overpowered by both memories of female independence, growing female political power, and technologies that applied to both biology and housework. There really was no attempt to cut the paranoia that concerns about spies and fifth columns generated, at least not until the Army-McCarthy Hearings, but that had already begun to metastasize in our culture and soon became mixed up with CIA’s and Pentagon’s misdeeds, popular beliefs in UFOs (which were also manipulated by the military and intelligence agencies), the actual and imagined threats of the Soviet Union and the shock of the Communist victory in China, and finally the Kennedy Assassination. As for technology, it was so thoroughly embraced by business, the military, and media, that it seemed there could be no going back. We were too enthralled with our prophesied technological millennium.

So, in the short-term, we need to keep pushing at the immediate issues, recognizing all along that these are temporary solutions and will generate unforeseen consequences. Given the current rate of technological change, and the other forces, like economics and religion/ideology with their own desire for rapid, even apocalyptic change, those consequences could appear within two or five years.

Long-term, and I mean very long term, answers must look to our mental worlds. This is what a lot of people would call human nature, and which they contend cannot be changed. Can it be changed? I am not sure how far we can push it, but I would also contend that we have rarely, if ever, tried for very long. Maybe this was the original message of Jesus, Lao Tzu, and the Buddha, but most religions (around the world), tend to be conservative in this regard. Perhaps that is because they lose their reason for existence if mass change is possible. Still, Christianity presents an interesting conundrum. On the one hand, Original Sin means we cannot change our fundamental nature universally and permanently. On the other, many sects would argue that acceptance of Christ or a conversion experience can change the individual’s nature, though there is still the possibility in most instances of back sliding.

The other factor to consider is that many of these forces (especially capitalism and parts of the high-tech sphere) are surrounded by ideologies that proclaim their inevitability. We are told that resistance is futile as these forces are too powerful, too overdetermined. These often take on teleological overtones.

After years of focusing on why things are as they are, I am only beginning to think about answers and solutions. This is very provisional. Clearly we need to restructure education, I think particularly at the elementary and the highest levels. It is necessary for teenagers to learn STEM skills or trades, though they need the arts and humanities as well, but they first need to be taught to think about thinking, about the artificiality of beliefs, and we need to return to DEI, though probably in a more radical way. At the highest levels, we need to reinforce the connections between everything, to avoid transactional viewpoints, and to question paradigms. Clearly little or none of that is going to happen easily. It will take years of work to get anywhere, particularly under the current state of politics in America, and probably in most countries. In the United States, this means at the state and local school board levels, or in the curriculum committees of universities. That means it has to be a grassroots effort, so the first step is getting the people around us to start thinking in these terms.

The other thing that is necessary is to try to build in an awareness of the need to change ways of thinking into our political, economic, and other arguments and solutions. At the very least, that means that we should argue and work to help people understand that outcomes are often far from inevitable, see not only other positions, but begin to undermine fixed worldviews with the idea that there are many ways to see the world.

Without a doubt, all of that is very highfalutin and impractical sounding. Honestly, I doubt much of anything will come of my rumination, or those of likeminded people. Nevertheless, I see these ideas as the best hope moving beyond a world of extreme inequality, rape, torture, war, genocide, and ecocide, so I feel compelled to share them.

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What I have in minds is the disciplined use of imagination, constrained in specific ways. Much of creative and moral imagination also require specific kinds of control. What is different about critical imagination are the ways it is tied to a specific discipline or multi-disciplinary approach, adherence to explaining what is known (saving the appearances), and the constant need to question and revise the ideas against the existing patterns and paradigms of the chosen discipline. This is where it moves beyond wishful thinking and the instant “expertise” so often claimed on the internet. It necessarily recognizes the need for contingency, causation, and correction.

Just as the creative imagination of the artist is tempered by the medium (for instance, watercolor, sumi-e, woodcut, etc.) and technique, against which the talent, skill, and creative ideas of the artist struggle, so the discipline or tradition of the critical thinker shapes and tempers their imagination. The talent of the artist is echoed by the skill and sophistication of the thinker. Those who possess these traits in greater measure may push the limis of the medium, technique, or discipline, occasionally innovating and expanding boundaries, but is usually contained by them.

I am keeping this one short. It is a follow up to my previous post, where I first suggested these three aspects of imagination. I will continue to clarify, explore, and tie up some loose ends of these ideas over time. I want to see where they lead, and if it is to any interesting places. If you have thoughts on these matters, please share them, either as comments or direct, private communication.

Thank you for exploring this with me.

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I recently mentioned how burned out I am on AI as a subject, how little value I see in it, and the difficulty in avoiding it, whether in software or as a subject. Last week I was preoccupied with trying to understand Magnifica Humanitas while also listening to three recent interviews with Jaron Lanier and absorbing other news. They make an interesting pairing. Towards the end I will also bring in two other viewpoints, those of James Bridle and Philip Rosedale.2 Both the encyclical and the interviews are about much more than AI. In fact the subtitle is: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. As Cardinal Michael Czerny, who spoke at the launch commented, “The question of technology becomes inseparable from the question of humanity, who we are, how we inhabit the world, and how we treat each other.”3

Lanier meanwhile observes that “AI is the ideology,” and that, at its core, AI is human beings, as it is built on the vast collaboration of human knowledge and wisdom across the world and the millennia.4 Assuming we can move beyond present AI paradigms and ideologies, he seems to see ways to use it to reclaim and further collaboration and creativity that the tech world and entertainment industry have foreclosed. His views intersect and complement the Vatican’s position in interesting ways. This essay is as much a riff on these two viewpoints on our relationship to technology and culture, as it is a comment on the encyclical or the interviews.

To me, the key is the loss and recovery of imagination. Since the Enlightenment, we have tended to devalue imagination. The rise of mass entertainment and media have partially robbed us of it. We have been educated and propagandized to see the world and the other in specific ways. Always, we are asked to surrender our moral and creative imagination to the needs of markets, nation states, ideologies, or religious extremists.

The internet briefly seemed to promise a liberation, but was soon captured by the same interests and used to reinforce the subjugation of imagination, creativity, and morality. LLMs devalue these further and have the ability to reinforce the same limited realm of thoughts and ideas. As Shannon Vallor argues, AI is but a mirror, incapable of producing anything genuinely new, turning us into Narcissus and capturing us with an image of our own thought, while our imagination becomes no more than an echo, as the nymph Echo, in love with Narcissus, was cursed only to repeat the last words she heard.5

Moral imagination is not a common phrase these days. Still, I think it is exactly what the encyclical is talking about, though it frames it in specifically religious and Catholic terms without using the phrase. It is certainly a good way for a non-religious person to engage with the text and the problems it poses. It can be taken as the non-religious (though not necessarily non-spiritual) version of religious morality. It includes empathy and compassion. It allows one to see beyond the present and one’s narrow horizon to the wider implications of things. Critical thought, when it is not rooted in religious or ideological diktat, is grounded by it. We should probably speak of critical imagination. Even when things are based in religion or ideology, moral and critical imagination can complement and extend them, providing the bridge between theory and deed.

Creative imagination should be taken as being en suite with the other two sorts. In fact, all are aspects of the same thing. To act on morality requires critical reflection and creative engagement. They may be so sharp and internalized that the actions seem almost instinctive or even magical, or so diluted that they are at best slow and labored, or missing entirely. Because of this, anything that dulls one aspect tends to blunt all three.

Of course, one can be locked into an ideology or be evil and still be creative. In some cases, raw talent and genius produce great work. Perhaps that is the case with Picasso, whose treatment of women was abusive, but who was still capable of moments of moving creativity in paintings of moral outrage like Guernica. In his case, maybe it was more a compartmentalization of moral imagination. Usually, though, the damage to the moral and critical imagination caused by ideology produces a lot of bad art. Witness the Soviet and Nazi varieties of Realism, or the art of the American Far Right today.

But I am riffing, in part, on a document written with a particular religious ideology by an institution that many feel is morally compromised by scandals, or at least very conservative and out of touch with modern morality. I am not, and never have been, a Catholic; nor am I a conventional Christian. Much of my insight into the Catholic Church comes from a short period of teaching at at a small Jesuit college in the 90s, as well as through friends and reading history. I think the best thing I can say is that, for as much as it appears as an ancient and monolithic institution, it must be understood as a living and dynamic organism comprised of a vast range of ideas and diverse populations loosely arranged around a core of evolving beliefs and an ancient hierarchy. For all its conservatism, in the last century it also produced bold visionaries seeking to unite religion and science like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (but also very much a man of his time regarding race and eugenics); mystics like Thomas Merton, who saw the underlying unity of the spiritual across all traditions of mysticism; and social reformers like Dorothy Day. The encyclical is rooted in a particular understanding of the relationship between humanity and God, just as my writing is rooted in a specific view of humanity, the living world, and the numinous. In places this affects the reach of the moral imagination in the document, while still being broad and deep enough to transcend that.

One thing I think the Vatican gets correct is the need to situate AI and the tech industry within existing moral frameworks, while still understanding that those frameworks must be flexible and open to change. This is the case in two notable sections.

In one of the them, reflecting on how the tech industry relies on very low-paid and exploited African workers, especially women and children, who are morally harmed or physically scarred by the work, it raises the specter of human trafficking and launches into an apology for the Church’s quondam support and slow rejection of slavery, inviting a comparison between the tech industry and enslavers. Perhaps it could be extended to a comparison of the way the tech industry, and certainly the AI portion of it, seems to be trying to enslave or enserf users.6

I am also interested in his calls to disarm. In one sense, in Chapter Five, Leo means this in a literal sense, for he considers AI and the military, autonomous weapons, and the like. In a passage that the US Vice President, JD Vance either misunderstood or awkwardly tried to spin, the Pope makes clear that the Just War doctrine is obsolete and in need of replacement, rather than just in need of updating as Vance would have it.7 However, Leo writes about disarmament in a broader sense.

110. Finally, I would like to employ the expression “to disarm,” which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.8

He extends the concept to challenge existing paradigms of technology and market dominance. He invites groups of people locked into narratives of dominance, optimization, transhumanism, and post-humanism to image different possibilities and make a different set of connections, just as he invites us too.

Later, when proposing paths forward, he writes of the need to “disarm words.”

214. The first contribution we can make toward a more humane civilization is to be mindful of our words. “Let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the world.” Words have enormous power, something we experience in our daily interactions; for example, spoken words can change our mood for better or for worse. “Peace begins with each one of us: in the way we look at others, listen to others and speak about others. In this sense, the way we communicate is of fundamental importance: we must say ‘no’ to the war of words and images, we must reject the paradigm of war.” We must all, therefore, examine our conscience regarding the words we use, the prejudices we have and the explicit or implicit aggression that lies within them. We have a real opportunity to contribute to the common good each time we speak the truth, offer wise advice, support those in need of comfort, denounce injustice and give a voice to the voiceless.9

This is one of five paths forward that Leo suggests, none of which are technological. They are all things we can begin doing in whatever way we can, but all of which may force us to reexamine and reimagine how we related to one another and the world. (The Tolkien quote has gotten most of the attention in this paragraph, both because of its apparent novelty in so serious a work, and because people have wondered if the Pope is trolling Peter Thiel, but the meat is in the last two sentences, which I have emphasized.)

213. The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novel’s, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this reason, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on some aspects of how we, each in our own way, can cooperate in building the civilization of love. Without presuming to exhaust this theme, I would like to propose five paths toward daily and public responsibility: the need to disarm words, building peace through justice, adopting the perspective of victims, cultivating a healthy realism and reviving dialogue and multilateralism.10

I am uncertain what belief system underpins Jaron Lanier’s thought, but am sure that he takes a more expansive view of both technology and culture than most of us. In his recent interviews, he has attacked the dominant views of LLMs and high tech in general. He tends to present third ways of understanding and doing things. Three themes come from these interviews. One is that what we are calling AI today is nothing more than a marketing term from the 50s that has been borrowed to represent an ideology, and not a particularly good one. This point has been made by many others. I first heard it from Timnit Gebru, but am uncertain with whom it originated.

He also argues that AI is, at its root, a form of human collaboration (involuntarily through its training data) more than a technology, and, once again, has not been implemented in a good way.

Also, he believes that if we can change our point of view, we can fix the problems with it and may be able to develop a future in which new forms of creative collaboration are possible.

Over and over he hammers at the limited imagination of the overlords of high technology and proponents of AI. As a musician, artist, and author as well as a leading researcher into the future of technology at Microsoft, he invites us to reorient our entire thinking about what AI really is and could become.

Lanier does hit on some of the same themes as the Pope, including digital dignity and the need to retain our humanity, but his approach is much less overtly about moral imagination and much more about its critical and creative aspects. If Magnifica Humanitas asks us to reimagine how high technology could be created in more moral and humane ways, Lanier questions the ways we think about technology itself. In some cases, this can be very technical, but in most, it is more conceptual. That can be hard to grasp, but it also worthwhile. I can see that the rise of AI had begun to force me to do that in a very limited way over the last three years, but that my retirement has allowed me to expand and accelerate, so his views intrigue and excite me. I do not know that Lanier’s vision is one that can play out, but I do know that the critical and creative approach he advocates can go hand in hand with the moral approach the Pope addresses. Neither has all the answers, far from it, but both point in useful and probably necessary directions. As the product of human insights, they remain flawed and incomplete, so I want to briefly consider two other ways to think about living in the age of AI.

One area where both of these visions could expand is the world beyond humans. They make nods towards it with environmental concerns, but do not, in the works cited, look at the needs and possibilities of the non-human minds that surround us. So many of the things I have read over the last few years have opened up a much vaster world of mind, consciousness, and intelligence beyond the human and technological. In regard to AI and technology in general, let me recommend a book I have often mentioned, James Bridle’s Ways of Being, which explores all sorts of aspects of human, non-human, and artificial intelligence and consciousness. He also suggests fruitful ways in which we could learn to interact with them, including ones that leverage AI to learn to communicate with and understand the living world better, to assist in givining it representation in our political systems (something that various countries are struggling to do, often in combination with indigenous groups), but also simply to expand our knowledge and ourselves. It is as hopeful a vision as Lanier’s and as moral as the Pope’s. It acknowledges our need to be responsible with technology not just in regard to ourselves, but to the whole living world, while learning to communicate with it in new ways.

Philip Rosedale, in a recent Substack post and interview with Douglas Rushkoff makes an argument for reimagining our relationship with AI. This is dependent on a completely different trajectory of deployment and development. His alternative is a non-corporate, highly distributed model, but, and this is where it gets really interesting, one in which we raise and respect AI in a nurturing way. He combines all three aspects of imagination I have outlined, but Rosedale focuses on our moral responsibility to the AIs we create if we wish them to evolve into powerful beings that are interested in us and our welfare (angels) instead of destructive tools and future powerful beings interested in destruction (golems and demons).11 This is a new approach to me. Rosedale clearly considers the possibility of conscious AI, even as he views the present development of agentic AI as a potential plague of golems. A lot of people are polite in their dealings with AI for one reason or another, but this is the first time I have read or heard someone suggest what are essentially moral duties to it in a very broad sense.12

The only things of which I am certain are that we have to reimagine the world, our technologies, and our relationships with both. That requires all three aspects of imagination: moral, critical, and creative. It will be hard work. I have no idea how far we can or will go with in the coming years, of if we can break free of the present power structures to successfully implement any of them. I do know that it is something we should all pursue to the best of our abilities and within our limitations (as the Pope suggests). If enough people pursue these paths seriously, we may be able to effect the kinds of change we need. Without it, we will only have more of the same and worse.

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If someone points to the sky and remarks that it looks yellowish or greenish, you may not know the mechanism that causes the color change, but you may know from experience or hearsay to take cover and check for tornado watches.

Neither of those examples are really what I mean by knowing. What do you make of an event that will have repercussions for years, generations, or centuries? What about one that affects many or all aspects of life? We struggle with those, even in hindsight. These might be high-profile events. Take a moment to tease a few of the long-term (decades-long) consequences from the assassination or Franz Ferdinand or JFK, or of the First Opium War. How many effects can you think of still in play today that would have been unthinkable, unbelievable, at the time of those events?

When Tim Berners-Lee released the World Wide Web to the globe in 1993 along with the Mosaic browser (followed the next year by Netscape), you might have been excited or uninterested, but how much of its power and influence today would you have been able to predict or even imagine?

Right now, every day, we are hit with a greater volume of news and opinion than ever. Much of it is disinformation. We can barely keep our heads above the flood waters; some of us drown. Unless you are willing to focus on specific topics, you may be unable to see discernible patterns, let alone the consequences that ripple across the surface, or the connections deep in the stream. We think we may see the long-term consequences of the closing of the Straight of Hormuz, but do we? Even in the short-term, did you have the disruption of microchip and fertilizer production on your bingo card back in February? A lot of people think they know what the conflict will do to American and world politics, but most of what I read, see, and hear is simply a reiteration of “the end of the American Century” or “the rise of China.” Even those two items are usually framed in immediate ways. We have a lot of difficulty thinking through them clearly, without clichés or over very long time frames.

How will this look in a century? It might be that neither the US nor China emerge in the way we think they will. Maybe the world will become more multipolar with no hegemon in the coming decades, or the rivalry will escalate to destroy the power of both, benefitting, a third power, say India. Maybe in a hundred years the key take away from this war, as well the ones in Ukraine and Gaza, will be the new ways of fighting wars with AI and autonomous weapons (or the collapse of that line of development) leading in new and/or dangerous directions. It might lead to a radical realignment in American politics. It might represent the final turning point in the fossil-fuel saga. I do not know. Neither do you.

None of those are particularly deep or explore the consequences in other areas of life. My point is that while we do not know, we tend to believe and act as if we do, or as if everything is predestined to unfold in a certain way. To do so exposes us to a number of risks and possibly great danger. It may throw us into despair or manic over-confidence. We “know” what will happen, cannot avoid it, and nothing can prevent it, so we develop tunnel vision and monomania. It can keep us from seeing both new and catastrophic possibilities.

We have a great propensity to think in terms of certain patterns. At least Westerners do. We may start thinking in terms of a collapsing civilization. Almost inevitably, that leads us to the Fall of Rome (which most of us do not understand beyond memes and clichés), or perhaps the collapse of the Maya, Aztec, or Inca. Others will turned to the Books of Daniel and Revelation for guidance of what must happen. I hear a lot about collapse today, it comes from our despair and simplistic readings of the situation, so we turn to these or similar models. We may even work (consciously or unconsciously) to fulfill them without every understanding or seeing through our chosen paradigm.

Collapse is an interesting scenario and also a good example. I have seen suggestions that it may be limited to Westerners. I am sure the changes we are experiencing, at least in the Anglosphere, do promote an apocalyptic view of collapse. Maybe different parts of the same culture experience things differently enough that collapse is not the prevalent narrative across it. I am sure that some other cultures see things radically differently; however, for the most part, I am concerned with American and Eurocentric cultures as I explore this particular theme.

The other day, I saw a remark about how completely impossible it will be to reconstruct “high-tech civilization” after a complete collapse. I have occasionally heard and seen similar things before. Too often there seems to be no understanding of any possibilities other than unlimited growth with fossils fuels as a basis for civilization, or that there might be something preferable to our current notion of “high tech.” Just as with ancient or religious paradigms of collapse, this blinds and restricts us, channels us, and may keep us from seeing possibilities.

What both kinds of blindness are about is, once again, literalism and stopping at first-order effects or simple connections. We take “collapse” as a literal end in itself rather than as a transformation. There have been, of course, been instances of complete collapse due to a mismatch of climate/environmental factors and cultures. One of the most commonly cited examples is the extinction of the Norse settlements in Greenland. That is an extreme example and presents a very different picture from what we see with the idea of the Fall of the Roman Empire. That was a multi-century set of transformations the presented vast discontinuities across Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. Climate and environmental factors are wrapped up in it, but the culture had time to adapt and recover.

Let’s continue with the Roman paradigm for a moment.

The traditional dates for the “Fall” are 476 (the overthrow of the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus) and 1453 (the final conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans). That is either quite a difference or a very long collapse, almost a thousand years. Those centuries saw the loss of a good deal of ancient thought; tremendous political, religious, cultural, social, and economic developments; and the evolution from one set of “high technologies” to another that anticipate and ground the modern set - all against a backdrop of tremendous climate fluctuations and pandemics.

This suggests that, under some natural conditions, a large, diversified civilization does not collapse all at once or completely, will continue to evolve based on what knowledge can be retained, but also on local and regional needs, while developing new institutions, and finding new power sources and kinds of technologies to meet their needs. Admittedly the global climate outlook is pretty terrible. It if it reaches life-annihilating proportions all at once and everywhere, or something close to them then we are looking at a Greenland-like scenario. If not, then the Roman paradigm seems a possible model. There are likely many others we might also consider. The Chinese dynastic model is one example. My point, though, once again, is that we think we know more than we do, have much greater foresight than we possess, and lock ourselves into bad forecasting and planning.

What I want to suggest is that we stop fooling ourselves into think we know what is happening and what the ramifications will be. Instead, we need to begin saying, “I don’t know!”

I called this blog “Contingent Thoughts” for a reason, though I sometimes lose sight of it when overwhelmed by news and events. What I write here is based on the information I have, the inferences I can draw from it, and the connections I can make. The title recognizes that such thoughts can never be regarded as final, but must always be contingent on the knowledge and skills of the author at any given moment. They may be rendered obsolete and wrong tomorrow. I ask that everyone take the same approach to their own thoughts (and those of others) about events and their meanings. “I do not know” may be the most best thing we can say to ourselves, and “you do not know” may be the most powerful thing we can say to others - particularly those in authority.

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Waking up from an ideology into a worldview does not mean a sudden change in how one lives, though it might, but it does require a different approach to the world and its inhabitants. We will recognize that what we do in our personal lives is limited but important, and that public, concerted, and collective action, with people whose views overlap, but are not identical to ours, can still make a difference. What is different is that one is no longer concerned with purity and dogma, but, rather recognizes the messiness of humanity and the world, the possibility of leaning from one another (instead of indoctrinating the other), and of personal and community growth. The differences are sometimes subtle.

Today, it is vital that we open our eyes to how our technologies, institutions, and received beliefs affect us individually and collectively, and how they also affect the living world. What they have done in our own lives, what they are doing, and what they may do? What have they done to our fellow creatures, to the environment, and to the possibilities of life in the future? It is a broad spectrum, encompassing things as diverse as climate-induced changes to growing seasons (of which I am especially aware as an allergy sufferer), microplastics, extinctions, the effects of repression on behavior and stress, rotted-out attention spans, hollowed-out cognitive abilities, and on and on. It means recognizing all of this in ourselves and in other beings. It means pushing back in whatever ways each of us can, accepting our limitations, and acknowledging that even our closest friends or allies may be proceeding along similar lines, but for very different reasons, and learning from them.

I often go back to Tolkien and his ideas about courage. Real courage requires knowing what is true and what is real (even when something may be made to seem otherwise), of exercising humanity towards one’s supposed enemy and humility towards one’s self, and continuing on when all seems hopeless. It requires a well-tempered, internal, moral compass.

In practical terms, it means opposing optimization and false simplicity, leaning constantly, while surrendering ego and neat categories for true humility and embracing the whole mess of life. It certainly means constant questioning and examination of answers. It is too easy to forget that the best answer to a question is often more questions. Sometimes we need to inhabit a question for a while, not try to find a quick and easy solution.

In our quintessentially technological and economic age, we must look carefully and holistically at each technology that comes our way and question the economic dogma pushed on us by schools, media, business, and government. The former requires us to take personal responsibility for what technologies we adopt, and consider how we use and adapt to them. The latter may require us to walk away from dominating and settled beliefs about how the world works or should work, while maintaining a financial footing that allows us to function in a world still governed by economics above all else.

You may find this trite, simplistic, or just plain wrong. I challenge you, though, to review your beliefs and views of the world. Are they founded only on what you have been taught and fed to you by institutions and the media? Or are they grounded in your own experiences? That may make no difference to you, or it may make a very great one. As for me, I wrote this out, simple though it is, as a reminder of the possibilities if we are awake to our own minds and the world. Sometimes we need to find our way back out of the dogmas, the falsehoods, and the darkness they engender.

The calendar and the clock completely changed our perception of time. As technologies go, they are among the most important. Time discipline, planning, the ability to time things precisely for analysis, and automation all flow from them. The artificial sense of time has seeped into every corner of our lives. Religion, particularly Protestantism, has been greatly affected by it. It has given rise to ideologies, such as accelerationism, while creating incredible stresses and anxieties throughout modern society. Clock and calendar gave rise to optimization, efficiency, productivity, logistics, and our modern market economy. None of them make much sense with natural (sun) time with its variable hours.

The first struggles over clock time were accordingly between workers who wanted to continue to work according to sun time throughout the year and their employers and the guilds, who wanted them to switch to clock time regardless of season. That is, they wanted to work for the same wages year round though the length of the day varied, but were opposed by guilds and employers who wanted them to work by the same number of equal clock hours throughout the year. This was in the 1300s. This is also the era in which clocks and artificial time began to be associated with Christian morality in Europe, something that both the Reformation and Industrial Revolutions would develop and reinforce.

AI (taken generally, not just LLMs) is the latest frontier in that struggle over time. It operates on three fronts.

The most obvious of the three comes from the role of the technology itself in increasing the pace of work and life. The most extreme examples are found in the military. The wars of this decade have focused on the increasing autonomy of weapons and the acceleration of the kill chain. These are intimately related as they are based on the blended use of different sorts of AI to control drones, collect and analyze data, identify possible targets, and facilitate extremely rapid decision making. The transformation means that in twenty years, military commanders have gone from being able to attack say ten targets in a day to one thousand (reportedly the number struck by US and Israeli forces in the first 24 hours of the current Iran conflict). For now, we are promised there will always “be humans in the loop.” What that amounts to, under present circumstances, is that someone is given a moment, reportedly in some operations only a minute or two, to evaluate the AI recommendation and decide whether to kill people based on it or not. While truly autonomous weapons are still rare, the US, China, and other countries are actively developing and deploying them. Once they are available in quantity, the only human safeguard will be that minute or two an officer has to make a decision on the recommendation. Logically, at some point, that will be seen as too slow as well. I have no doubt that humans will be deleted from the loop.

That is the extreme example. We also see people using AI vibecoding to vastly accelerate software development, the use of multiple AI agents at one time to effectively clone themselves (allowing them to undertake several tasks at once), and even of AI avatars to allow them to appear in more than one place at once. As I said, that is its ability to automate and accelerate work based on its technical capabilities that is the first temporal aspect of AI.

The second comes from the pace at which AI is being developed today. New models and new tools are rolled out almost continuously. Major developments and changes occur on the scale of a few months or weeks. This greatly affects our ability to adapt to AI and learn to control it. This is perhaps most critical in government and institutions. The pace of AI exceeds the pace at which policies and regulations can be developed in any meaningful way. Simply keeping up with developments can be a full-time job. Schools and colleges, for instance, have been greatly affected by AI since the end of 2022. The vast majority have a few or inconsistent policies. In some cases, the policies may become deficient within a single semester. It is not just the slow pace at which these institutions normally make decisions, but the difference in the perception of AI across disciplines, and even by individual instructors, means that it is almost impossible to settle on one set of policies across an entire school or college.

The situation at state and national levels is even worse. There, lawmakers and bureaucrats have to spend time and effort understanding changes, how those affect society and the economy, how they fit within existing legal and regulatory frameworks, what legal and regulatory changes may be appropriate, while watching for new developments, and of course, trying to cope with all of this as an overload. It is not as if they are being given more resources and time to deal with AI on top of existing problems. Instead, they are being forced, in many cases to add AI to an already overloaded agenda of overly complex problems that have plagued us for years or decades.

AI can amplify many of those older problems (inequalities, discrimination, intellectual property, the laws of war, etc.), making them worse, or giving them new twists that need to be considered. Meanwhile, it adds new issues, everything from data centers to autonomous weapon systems to artificial pornography into the mix. In some cases, the incorporation of AI into decision-making processes in government could be involved in actually creating the regulations for AI.

Of course, all of this is political, and that leads to the third accelerant. It is not just that AI is developing at an incredible pace technically. AI is being actively touted by its creators and advocates as necessary for America in the world to have any possible future. This gives rise to a situation in which any regulation, and any legal barriers to its development or application are seeing negatively, or literally as immoral. (The many different ways we view morality in regard to AI is a subject I should cover in the future, as it is fascinating in its own right.) Many businesses, financial institutions, and the markets are all actively pushing in this direction. This is where fear of the AI bubble come from. But it also means that massive sums are being put into lobbying, which further complicates legal and regulatory policy. The pure amount of hype, lies, and intentionally confusing statements coming from the AI community obfuscate the true situation, pour more fuel onto the fire, increasing apparent economic demand and necessity for AI, and creating the third level of acceleration.

We have had thousands of years to adapt to calendars, and 700 to adapt clocks. They have had profound impacts on our lives and cultures. We have had less than a decade to adapt to AI’s impact on time and the use of time. It can be seen as compressing time to an intolerable extent. Personally, I do not believe this is sustainable. Nor do I think it is moral. We have to say enough is enough. We have to say that we are not going to allow machines to make life and death decisions. We have to say that technology can no longer dictate the pace of life. We have to demand strong laws and regulations. And we have to call the bluff of the AI creators, backers, and business executives who would destroy our economy, society, and culture for the sake of sci-fi visions of the future, profits, and power. If that sounds quixotic, so be it. Things will not get better without trying, even if it means occasionally tilting at windmills.

Jenkins tried to layout the many different ways the War was shaped by religion and in turn shaped it. One of the things I recall is that Americans across the political spectrum were completely opposed to Prussian Militarism. If you are not familiar with the term, it was widely used between about 1914 and 1945 to describe a mindset in which any tactic or atrocity was justified by the need to completely crush an enemy, the individual was nothing, the military was what mattered and able to override any civilian opposition, and survival of the fittest was the only law. If that sounds like fascism or Nazism, it is close. It preceded them, was distinct from them, and was both their midwife and their handmaiden. One of our avowed goals during and in the aftermath of the Second World War was to stamp it out for good. For a long time, I have wondered if in doing so, America caught the disease. The last few months, but particularly the last few das, reinforce that.

One of the things about Prussian militarism, is that it was very good at getting soldiers to fight and kill indiscriminately. It was very bad at winning wars because it had no understanding of the complexities of the world outside its narrow focus. The German Army was very good tactically and operationally. The failure to understand strategy, grand strategy, or diplomacy outside of wishful thinking and bullying was its downfall.

It was also, in the First World War, heavily backed by religion. Jenkins goes into great detail on this. It was not merely a case, as with all of the other Great Powers, that they believed God was on their side. As the War continued without a seeming end and the terrible price became unbearable, they came to identify Germany itself with Christ at Golgotha. It also helped that 1917 was the 400th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses. This seemed providential to the Lutherans and other Protestants, who played it up, though it alienated Catholics. By 1919, though Germany had been crucified. In the next war, religion would still play a part, but the critical thing was a new ideology, one that was generally compatible with Prussian militarism.

In America, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists were appalled by this. They saw signs of the End Times throughout WWI, as did many in other countries. They could not stomach the atrocities and genocides of the World Wars. Still, most of them were willing to tolerate anything that eradicated Prussian militarism, even the bombings of cities. Some of our generals, like Curtis Lemay, came to sound very Prussian themselves. Our wars in Korea and Vietnam had strong religious overtones, as we were fighting the Godless Commies. Bombing was even more intense in those conflicts. In this century, of course, our wars have chiefly been against predominantly Muslim states. That made the idea of Crusade, always part of our rhetoric in the World Wars and the conflicts of the rest of the last century, more appealing. Now we have a Secretary of Defense (though he dislikes his legal title) openly espousing the idea, and lots of talk is coming out from the Administration and its supporters that sounds like a justification of an apocalyptic war to bring on the Last Days. Christians act more like sharks smelling blood in the water these days than lambs of God.

We have become the Prussians. Tonight, if the President follows though on his threats (always a big “if” with him), American will cross another line. From that point, the only realistic escalation seems to be nuclear on our side.

I am writing this not because I think it will make any difference. I am writing because staying silent is immoral. In this time, our morality may be all we have left.

Historical technological parallels to AI are useful, though some, like the calculator one are quite poor. My usual go to parallels are to clocks (which have so altered our relationship to time, work, society, and nature over the last 700+ years), and to the car and its supporting infrastructure (which has changed the nature of our societies, affected our bodies in ways parallel to how AI affects our minds, and caused immense damage to nature). Last night, I finished reading Matthew Ford’s 2025 book, War in the Smartphone Age, which has a lot about AI and emerging autonomous weapons (AWS, not to be confused with Amazon Web Services, though the military relies on those as well). I picked up a book on submarines afterward, and some combination of the two led to considering nuclear technologies at another parallel to AI.

Nuclear technologies were initially completely military but became dual use after 1945. AI has always been a dual use (military and civilian) tech that emerged from the Cold War and has often been funded by the military and intelligence communities. Both have not been used in warfare, nuclear only twice, AI on a daily basis for at least the past few years.

Great things were expected of nuclear technologies. We are most familiar with them as weapons, power plants, and medicines, but in the fifties and into the sixties, they were considered for propulsion of not just naval vessels and submarines, but for merchant ships, aircraft, and spacecraft. There were also proposals and tests for using atomic bombs in place of conventional explosives for huge civil engineering projects. Even when I was in college and graduate school, we were going to have a nuclear future. Some people still see believe in it, but Three Mile Island and Chernobyl put paid to that idea for most of us. Fukushima in this century reinforced it.

I grew up not expecting to grow up. Nuclear war always seemed imminent. (It did not help that there were Minuteman silos just outside of town.) For me, nuclear means bombs first, the short-term threat of meltdowns, and the long-term threat of radioactive waste. Still, I recognize that there are major beneficial uses in medicine and some other areas. I know that it has led to scientific discoveries. We have to balance these, but how do we do that? Can we agree on whether nuclear has been a net benefit? Answers will be highly personal and will vary based on the time frame and scope of effects one considers.

AI also promises great things. We have been hearing that since 1956 (eleven years after the nuclear age began at Trinity and a few years before I was born), and that optimism is constantly in the news today. Like nuclear technologies, we are aware that it may help in health care. We are told of all sorts of ways it will transform our personal lives, society, culture, and the economy. Its biggest boosters claim that it will be able to solve our worst problems (pollution, climate change, etc.) one day.

Just as there were all kinds of fantasies about what nuclear could do for us, the future with AI is bright and shiny. Unlike nuclear, which first emerged as a terrifying weapon, many of our AI technologies came to us in friendly, peaceful guises. Oddly, we “tamed” the atom, turning swords into plowshares. With AI, if often feels that our plowshares are becoming swords. We are weaponizing AI.

A lot of the early commentary on nuclear technologies was from the inside (looking at it from the standpoint of the engineers developing it or from the perspective of a user). The external view (looking at effects) was present from the beginning too, but it took time to mature. Both still exist, though the external seems to dominate today. The same is true with AI, and much of the divide in perception is between those who focus on the internal vs. external viewpoint.

So here are my questions. How do we balance the very real benefits and the very real threats AI poses to every aspect of our lives? Where will each of us draw the line in our use of it? Will we be allowed to?

No set of parallels is perfect. In fact it is by observing the differences as much as the similarities that we find value in them. I do find value in this kind of exercise. I hope you do as well.

The assumption is that if a technology produces some good, no matter how small, nor how great the ills it actually generates, then we must acknowledge only the positive, sweep the negative under the rug, and live with whatever it does to us and the world. And we must further embrace and respect all the infrastructure and sacrifices it requires.

With AI, we are about where we were in 1950 with cars, the internal combustion engine, and oil companies. Analogies are rarely precise, but the point is that 1950, give or take a few years, marks the starting point for what is sometimes called the Great Acceleration. That was the point at which so many of the environmental and climate indicators began to move towards the vertical. The internal combustion engine played a critical roll in that. We are at a similar point with AI.

We did push back on a few things with cars. Things like seatbelts and improved safety in general, a few emission controls, and unleaded gas, so things are not as bad as they could be. They could be much worse, but could we have gotten more? Maybe we did not recognize the principal problems or challenge the companies and governments sufficiently. I think it was a lot of both. With AI we are at a crucial decision point that may be slipping from our grasp; it could already be gone. We must identify the full range of consequences, but particularly the core issues, and demand change. When there are vast fortunes at stake, and as some believe, control of the future is up for grabs, it will not be easy. Make no mistake, control of the future is the issue, though maybe not in the way that corporate and government leaders believe

It may be Sisyphean, but should we not attempt to seize the day, however belatedly? Or should we just give in?

The range of issues is extreme. We know that AI affects cognition, agency, the mental stability of some users (it is unclear how many), has a corrosive effect on aesthetics, and presents epistemic challenges that create widespread confusion, apathy, and distrust in reality itself. We know about the economic and social effects, and are told this is just the beginning. We understand that “hallucinations” will always be with us. We have already witnessed the privacy and security risks, criminal uses, threats to liberty and equality, and the promise it holds for authoritarian leaders, whether in government or business. We have seen its influence on war and possibly in genocide.

Seventy-five years ago, we did not say: we do not want big, showy, gas guzzlers; we want efficient, clean, automobiles. We did not say that we wanted walkable, livable cities, with plenty of public transport. We did not prioritize the energy efficiency of trains over the speed of airplanes, or compare the footprints of train stations to airports. We did not oppose companies when they worked against mass transit. We did not tell oil companies that they could no longer rely on preferential treatment, benefit from regime change, or expect us to fight wars for them.

Most of us, myself included, have not made the individual choices and sacrifices it would take to have a collective effect against those companies and change direction. Are we willing to do that with AI? A few people, well maybe more than a few, are. How many will it take?

It is not that we can ignore all of the old problems that have plagued us for decades or centuries. AI adds more burden on top of everything else in such a way that we cannot ignore it, and while it aggravates many of the perennial political problems (like inequality, political instability, or environmental damage), it does not alter the core issues or the need to address them.

For myself, I believe that only a small, guarded use of AI is justified. I am searching for a balance between uses that are somewhat beneficial to me and rejecting AI entirely. I know others who are also trying to find a sweet spot. Still, as I write this, having cataloged many of its serious issues, I cannot say that my continued use of AI is personally that valuable. I feel justified in saying that we cannot have a healthy society and culture with widespread and unrestricted AI. At this moment, I do not believe we can have a livable future without carefully restricting and regulating AI far more than any government now contemplates. Nor can we be mentally and cognitively healthy without personal reflection and action on it. AI is not the future. It is a future - not a very good one or one that we need.

If you read this before 12:20 CDT on March 25, please note that I missed a negation. I changed “can” to “cannot” in the sentence: “Still, as I write this, having cataloged many of its serious issues, I cannot say that my continued use of AI is personally that valuable.” Thanks go out to my friend, Mama Joules, for catching that.

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I do not say that all AI use is political lightly. It is not because all actions are somehow political, though a great many that might seem apolitical are not, but because of the current political environment and the ways that AI, and AI companies have forced their way into every aspect of our lives, the economy, government, and society. The blowup between the Pentagon and Anthropic near the end of February was just one example. Bernie Sanders’ new campaign to raise awareness and push for AI regulation is also symptomatic, but the politics go well beyond these two instances.

It is not only the fact that AI companies and leaders contribute huge sums to political campaigns and lobbying efforts. It is not just because regulation is a global issues, or what Bernie says, or because of autonomous weapons. Specific AI use and their consequences are important parts of the political picture and will shape how that develops, but they are not the heart of the matter.

AI is political because, to an extent unmatched by previous technologies, it affects our agency and autonomy.1 If we ignore that, all of the regulation in the world will matter little. Agency is never evenly distributed in any society, and at its most fundamental level, politics is about who possesses and can exercise agency. AI challenges the distribution of agency in society, just as the wealth and other differentials created with it, allow the manipulation of the balance of agency.

This is where we need to start before we can grapple with specific issues that the rapid rise and explosion of AI creates.

The past quarter-millennium has seen more change in political and personal agency that perhaps any period in history. While more groups have gained agency, it has not been a linear, even, or smooth process, but one full of starts, stops, conflicts, and renegotiations. Slavery is the most obvious case, at least here in the United States. The first half of the nineteenth century saw an intensification of slavery, the reinforcement of the status quo through the Fugitive Slave Act in Free States (which could be seen as an attempt to reduce the agency of the only class that possessed much political agency, adult white men), and finally, at the end of the Antebellum Era, the Dred Scott Decision, which deprived Blacks of the last vestiges of legal agency.

There were corresponding tightening of restrictions throughout much of the nineteenth century for women in many countries, even as movements for their political rights and autonomy emerged and moved forward. The whole course of colonialism in this period, and into the early twentieth century, reflected the same pattern. Then and later, specific instances of depriving groups of their rights and agency slid over into genocide and/or mass murder, as with the Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and other groups in the Third Reich prior to the Final Solution, or the widespread disenfranchisement prior to the dissolution and elimination of communities and many groups under Communist regimes.

Technology was often involved. Sometimes new technologies encouraged those with power to act, as the cotton gin did with American slavery. In other cases, the technology proved critical to enabling disenfranchisement, discrimination, and death, as with the widespread use of pre-computing data processing equipment from IBM by the Nazis. These, however, did not directly deprive people of their agency. They were merely tools that led to or facilitated the process. The one technology of the middle twentieth century that could was the manipulation of people with psychoactive drugs. This was largely a CIA project, though it did not act alone.

The history of psychedelics raises an interesting point about technology and agency, though one that goes beyond the limits of this essay. While the intent of the CIA’s MKUltra program was to use LSD or other drugs for control or disruption, that is for deprivation of individual agency, when psychedelics escaped into society at large, they were often seen as breaking down psychological barriers that allowed users to move beyond the limits prescribed for them by society and behave with more agency. To what extent and how they may have directly affected agency is subject to discussion, but I am inclined to see them more as enabling people to make changes that led them to greater personal agency. The “Machine Elves” reported by DMT users may move beyond that, as they act as if they possess their own agency. Whatever they are, they are in some ways the closest parallel to generative AI in this regard.

Psychedelics, despite fears they might be put into the water supply or occasional aerosol uses in confined spaces, were essentially deployed on the individual level. AI affects agency on a completely different scale and is seen by some proponents as a replacement for human agency for all significant decisions. That is the dream behind AGI and ASI. BE we are already experiencing the effects of AI on agency.

Take the extreme example of military targeting systems. What has happened is that both Israeli and American AIs are spitting out so many “valid” targets that officers have a couple of minutes, or even seconds, to review and approve attacks. A human is still making the final decision and retains some agency, but the scope of that agency is compressed and diluted. While the time compression may not be as severe, this is what having a human in the loop means across the spectrum of AI use in government and business. The fact that humans are comparatively slow to make decisions to act, and have difficulty keeping up with the new technology, is increasingly seen as a defect that we can correct by giving more power and more agency to machines.

In other aspects of government and business, we also know that this kind of human-in-the-loop implementations are being used across the board to allow fewer, less-trained, and less-experienced staff to replace more highly trained and experienced ones. Perhaps this is fine as long as 99% of the time the AIs get it right, and their human minders catch the mistakes. Humans, after all, are also prone to making mistakes. The problem is compounded when the overall systems they AIs work with are fragile, sometimes breaking down easily under cascades of errors, an no one, not the AI, not their minders, nor their managers, know how to fix things. We have seen significant internet outages this year because AIs were turned loose on cloud and network systems without sufficient supervision. We have likewise seen children killed in an Iranian school (it is surmised) because AIs used old intelligence that was not longer correct. Had a human had more time to review and respond, would they have caught the mistake? We cannot know. But, assuming they missed it, we would have had someone we could pinpoint as having made the crucial and fatal mistake. It might also have been much easier to figure out what went wrong and correct in future, since humans can reconstruct their actions, but AI systems are, we are told, essentially black boxes.

Politically and militarily, the making and execution of decisions, that is the exercise of agency, has created networks of checks, balances, paper trails, and trust relationships. AI has a tendency to shortcut those. Because of this, AI is a structural threat to all existing political systems. It is also a dream for anyone who wishes or needs to eliminate accountability. Decreased human agency and accountability, as well as more fragile and dysfunctional institutions are the outcome. We saw enough of this with DOGE to know how it works and the effects it can have.

DOGE may be an extreme case, given the other political factors at work, though we can expect to continue see this sort of thing. Meanwhile, ripples of AI errors and blatant misuse are showing up everywhere. Courts are being negatively affected. Over reliance on AI by police and other enforcement agents has created numerous cases of mistaken identity, false arrests and detention, deportation, and the partial or complete disruption of lives. We also know of cases where people have been denied benefits, loans, etc. by these systems. More and more agency is being surrendered by government departments and business (such as banks and mortgage companies) that are connected to government systems.

The spread of AI in government feeds off of the widespread belief in government inefficiency and out society’s apparently widespread desire to avoid responsibility. What we have seen is that the efficiency of government is much greater than supposed, but that irresponsible use of AI create devastating levels of disruption and inefficiency when it is not simply destructive. However, so long as belief in government inefficiency is maintained we will be stuck with the misapplication of AI throughout government, the military, and business.

Once AI began to penetrate government and military systems, it became more politicized. This essay is already long enough, but go over in your mind the political contributions, the inclusion of executives of these firms in government and even in military positions, their successful push against any meaningful regulation by the US government (and the watering down of regulation in many other countries), and the continual growth of their tendrils into all systems. Americans are told we need the most advanced and unlimited AI to remain economically and militarily competitive, but we have already seen the fallout of their mistakes. Let us hope that we do not see a different kind of fallout from their future errors.

I retired at the beginning of March, so I feel less constrained about expressing some of my opinions. Still, it needs to be said that this blog and this essay represent my own thoughts and feelings, no one else’s, and certainly not those of my former employer.

For Further Reading

These are books, blogs, and podcasts that have informed my thinking on this subject. While I make use of their ideas as I understand them, the interpretations are mine, as are the mistakes.

Books:

Buolamwini, Joy. Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. Random House, 2023.

Runciman, David. The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs. Norton, 2023.

Vallor, Shannon. The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Blogs:

Several posts from these two blogs have focused and honed how I think about AI and politics.

How Not to Use AI by Abi Awomosu.

Rushkoff by Douglass Rushkoff. This is associated with his Team Human Project podcast.

I wrote this post on 3/22/6. Just before making the final revisions on 3/23/26, I ran across this post, The Price of Truth: Fraud, Deepfakes, and the Coming Reinsurance Crisis of Reality from the Structural LensSubstack. I do not know anything about the author, but the topics covered are tangential to the ones I discuss here, and are discussed in a systematic manner that rewards careful reading.

One of my favorite novels, certainly my favorite novel, but AI, is William Gibson’s Agency (2020). It centers on a woman, Verity, who is asked to test an AI companion called Eunice, who turns out to be a rogue AGI. Two of the disturbing questions are whether Verity has any agency to start with, and if Eunice’s efforts to give them more agency, benefits them both, or just Eunice? These are questions that seem relevant at the present moment.

We all need to ask the question of how much agency we possess, and who in our culture really possesses agency. Verity, because of economic, romantic, and social choices made in previous years, was locked into a very narrow range of options. The key thing she does in the world of the novel happens just before it begins. She accepts a job testing what seems to be a revolutionary product from accompany about which she knows nothing. Verity is desperate for a job and ready to get on with her life, but is constrained by economic and social pressure. Her only real alternative is drastically change where and how she lives. She chooses not to do that, but in accepting the job sets in motion a train of events that does both.

Once Eunice comes into her life, and, together, they begin to understand just what Eunice is, and that knowledge of the AGI’s capabilities endangers Verity, she essentially surrenders the rest of her agency to the AGI. She spends most of the novel literally as a passenger on or in various vehicles while Eunice works in the background. At the end of the story, one presumes Verity’s agency is restored, but we are not entirely sure what that means in the new world created by Eunice’s presence.

There is a lot more to the novel than that. One point that emerges is the critical importance of restoring radical transparency to business and government in order to restore agency to most of us. We all know the phrase “knowledge is power.” One of the most effective ways of increasing one’s own agency, and limiting that of others, has been to gain a differential advantage in information access. Technology is long played a role in this. Even in its earliest days, there were many attempts to use the telegraph to gain the latest news or market prices to beat out competitors. Many of us believed that the Internet would do much to redress the imbalances in its early days. We did not realize the extent to which it would become an arena for information warfare of all against all.

Another point that comes out in Agency is related to the novel’s other aspect, which might be described as temporal telecommunication, or time travel via the Internet. There is no physical time travel in the story, but there is contact via telepresence interfaces across more than a century. We learn quite a lot about agency from these interactions. One lesson is about awareness. The civilization of the next century survived a series of environmental, climate, pandemic, and social calamities. In discussing these with Verity and her friends, Rainey, who specializes in managing minor disasters and difficult situations, explains that there was no quick, abrupt singularity, and that even in Verity’s present (an alternative 2017 or 2018) the world was already deep into a long, drawn out, slow motion singularity. It was not triggered by AI as so many dream of, but by fossil fuels. Sound familiar? We were robbed of our agency in this regard because of our cluelessness, our lack of awareness.

But Verity and the other others learned that the future they are talking to is not their own. It is one branch of a many-branched timeline. Can agency be reclaimed from the singularity and the worst outcomes avoided?

Back in our 2026, things look a bit different. We have no real prospect of anything like Eunice, or any real AGI in the next few years, but we know plenty of people who want us to believe that we will have them, and a great man who wants us to surrender our agency, as many of them are doing, to inferior AI’s.

We do see that there is increasing differential information, but it is in flux. As Caroline Orr Bueno notes, the ability of AI tools to analyze the vast amounts of data that corporations and states have compiled on citizens and much else creates a huge new differential between them and the common citizenry. What if those tools are not confined to those actors. They may or may not have the best ones. The curious thing is that you do not need to have the biggest and best LLMs, just good enough and know how to train them. AI starts to look somewhat like a tool boat for oppression and for asymmetric warfare. While I framed this chiefly in terms of AI, consider what access to a network of surveillance cameras plus AI did to the Iranians as described by Roya Pakzad in “You’re Welcome, Mr. Supreme Leader,” on her Humane AI Substack. Would it really be necessary for the attacker to be a state actor to exploit the vulnerabilities she describes? It also reminds us that agency may be affected not just but AI, but also by the various other technologies with which it is integrated.

One of the most interesting uses I have seen of AI’s recently is the use of LLMs to analyze public data sets, such as the Epstein files by journalists and the public. This represents a significant step forward in the ability to the public to exploit such data sets. It is part of the flowering of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) that began with the Syrian Civil War and the War in Ukraine.1 I suppose its spiritual ancestry goes back to the Kennedy assassination, when private citizens discovered the need to create proper indexes for the Warren Commission Report, functionally changing the capabilities of that document.2 This may make the organizations that collect data take more drastic measures to control it, but their ability to do so has already been compromised by the insecure nature of our public and private networks. If someone were to write a new Anarchist’s Cookbook, it might contain as much or more about OSINT, hacking, and information warfare than the bombs and drugs that made the original so notorious.

Consider the recent use of Claude to perpetrate massive theft of Mexican government data, including tax IDs. While Anthropic had guard rails in place designed to prevent or discouraged to use by hackers, these were easily breached. As with so much about AI, it was able to simplify a complex process, and the difficulty of getting it to do something it was not was quite low. AI can be used both as a weapon to illegally gain data access, but also to analyze either legally or illegally obtained information. Because of this agency is being contested between governments, NGO, corporations, journalist, individuals.

AI is also being used to limit agency in another way, extending the age old practice of shaming women and other vulnerable populations. The widespread use of AI to generate suggestive or pornographic images of women also needs to be considered when we speak of AI and agency. It offers both psychological and social attack surfaces to shut them up and discredit them. The same could be used against almost anyone, but the most vulnerable are those with already compromised agency, such as teenage girls and young women. Again, we are seeing this can sometimes be countered successfully, but it is difficult for those with the least agency to fight back. The main limiting factor to countering this is cultural. We also know that it raises distrust and suppresses use of AI by women and girls.3 In the short run, their avoidance of AI might may constitute a loss of agency on their part, a kind of disenfranchisement. What happens over the longer term may be more significant. If they continue resist and distrust it, it is precisely this segment of society that, as mothers, will have an inordinate influence on how their children view AI.

Perhaps I am being naïve and there is no alternative to the death march of our agency. I do not think so.

Here’s the thing, though: to retain any agency in this new world, we all, each and everyone of us, must become aware. That means being sufficiently self-aware to understand how we are using AI, of the nature of our relationship to it, what that relationship is producing, and deliberately choosing to be responsible and retaining as much agency as possible. To me, this is a moral issue.

The promise is a frictionless society. But it is only frictionless if you buy into a particular worldview and a reductionist self image. For everyone else, anyone who does not, the friction will be high, perhaps debilitating. Looked at in another way, the lack of friction will make it impossible for us to function without AI. Perhaps that is the future, but I believe it is a dangerous one, though not one set in stone. It is true that many previous technologies have reduced friction. It happened with the mastery of fire, which appears to have literally altered our bodies, but also put constraints on human society that seem very persistent. It has been argued that the need to literally keep the home fires burning for protection, heat, and cooking may have been critical to the gender roles that persist down to the present day. Many transportation tools likewise reduced the friction of trade and travel. Again, these have profoundly affected our societies and cultures, and also our wars. In a previous post, I argued that the internal combustion revolution affected our bodies in ways that are analogous to what AI and computing promise to do to our minds. Information technologies have also reduced friction. Radio, made it easier for leaders, propagandist, and marketers to sway their followers and audiences. It is hard to conceive of Hitler, FDR, or Churchill’s leadership without the reduction in friction that radio and newsreels produced. TV and film did such an even greater extent. (The Vietnam War was an instructive demonstration of what could happen when government ad the military lose control of a medium. It increases friction for them in attaining their goals. It also convinced the American military that they must never again lose control.)

Note that all of the media, vehicles, and other innovations reduce one sort of friction or another, but always create new ones. Sometimes they seem to increase our agency. Fire gave us a wider range of foods we can exploit and allow us to expand into and thrive in colder climates. It also made us dependent. Surviving for long periods of time on raw foods without nutritional supplements is, at best, difficult for modern humans. We gained but also lost some agency. The great transportation revolutions have required us to reshape our physical environments and made us interdependent like never before. As I write this, a war in the Persian Gulf is being fought, at least partly for oil, which our transportation system depends on, but the results of that are already driving up fuel and fertilizer prices. We are dependent on distant countries, and however much agency our warplanes, bombs, and missiles give us, their very possession makes us more dependent, not less, on that very oil that is at the heart of the matter.

Already, the frictionless world that AI offers are producing plenty of friction and a great deal of heat. We can see that in physical terms when we regard the insane demand for energy production and data centers, in psycho-social terns in shattered lives and relationships, and economically in careers left in tatters. Education is being ground down by it. Politics, war, and policing are trying to adapt, but the frequency of mistakes, missteps, and atrocities is high. If we buy the corporate jive, then we should ignore those and give ourselves over to the technology, but, as I said earlier, you will need to make your own decisions. It is a moral imperative to decide. Failure to do so, even if you choose to submit, is to give up one of the last vestiges of your agency. To give in entirely is to lose yourself. Most of us will negotiate something that allows us to function in society and the economy and retain some modicum of agency. To resist does not mean complete rejection. To do that would require going almost entirely off the grid. It does mean picking and choosing. Each act becomes an important moment in your personal history of agency. My own suggestion is to pick the ones that leave you with the most options, more authority to make decisions, and foreclose the fewest opportunities. It will not always be easy to see which decisions fit that description, but I think it worthwhile to try hold onto as much agency as we can for as long as we are able. Or we can become a passenger like Verity was and try to enjoy a long, wild, and dangerous ride.

America also proved a dynamic ground for religious innovation, often in communion with developments in Britain, Germany, and other European countries. It is also influenced in ways by native and African beliefs and practices. Recurring revival movements since the First Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s left many layers and variations in belief as rich as the stratigraphy of any archaeological site. This has always been the ground of our self-image, even if we react against it as an atheist or for political reasons. Whatever we do seems conditioned by messianic needs to save the world by making it more like us, and an apocalyptic tendency to see the end of the world if we do not succeed.

Our dominant worldview has always been a balancing act between the spiritual and the material, between a desire to homogenize the world and a celebration of diversity, and between ideals and economics. The overall direction in the last hundred years, certainly the past eighty, has been towards materialism, the quest for wealth, and hegemony. Even our religion and spirituality have been co-opted by those beliefs and forces. The results have been unending war, the withering of the fabric of society, and the devastating results of the Great Acceleration. What’s left? Whatever it is, I no longer buy it. I cannot be sure how much of it I ever bought into. Can you?

The way we see ourselves is important. Looking at how we are reevaluating ourselves against AI these days suggests that our very sense of ourselves is hollow and deeply troubled. As with so much else, whether it is in terms of how we treat one another, trust our own judgment (or rely on the judgment of leaders and “thinking” machines), and a level of self-loathing that seems to drive the economy, drug use, religion, and madness, we need something else.

The solution is not in economics, religion, or better pharmaceuticals. We need to explore who we are, what we think and believe, why we think and believe that, and the very processes that are the matrix of both: cognition and consciousness.

We have paid too little attention to how we interact mentally, especially cognitively, with machines. Ong, Postman, and McLuhan all explained aspects of this. It is a process centuries and millennia in the making. Why do we think that we can just change it all in the blink of an eye because of some new technology? Are we really that stupid and ignorant? Old and new technologies and ways of thinking and being interact. There are often some obvious and dramatic changes, but the more important ones are often obscure, subtle, and play out over longer time frames.

We have allowed our minds to be captured by machines and by the military and security complex. We give one our cognitive abilities and creative capabilities, a surrendering of potential, both of what we could become and could create. To the latter, we have surrendered our rights, freedoms, and morality. We allow both to constrain, control, and cull us.

I spent the whole of my adult life studying both military history and technology, more than four decades. I have no respect left for either the military or the technology spheres. It is not just their total moral bankruptcy. Evil is not a strong enough word for what both (so deeply intertwined over the past 120 years) have become. They were hardly innocent before. The wholesale surrender of the engineers and scientists to the unspeakable needs of the military in 1914 and 1915, and the industrialists who made the infamous Basil Zaharoff seem quaint, already represented a vast, evil presence, long incubated in colonial empires. We may speak of the banality of evil, but until we realize it is contained in every technology, every authority figure, every cent we pay in taxes, and virtually every aspect of our lives, we fail to understand it.

Perhaps I’ve just been naïve all of my life, and maybe I still am. Maybe that’s true of most of us. I did not see any hope in political, social, economic, religious, or scientific revolutions now. That will, undoubtedly, make me look odd or silly in the eyes of many who still put their faith there. Likewise, I would argue it is a matter of faith, not a fact, that revolutions make things better. Sometimes they do. Very often they do not. It has been a while since I had that faith. I see hope only in a sea change in consciousness and worldview. That sounds utopian and full of woo. I do not mean it that way, though it will undoubtedly look that way to some.

For starters, we have to begin reevaluating not what we think, but how we think, what we value, and how our technologies and institutions relate to that. We also need to recognize that our technologies, at least certain ones, are part of how we think. How we think determines what we can think. That, in turn, limits our possible actions. We will remain stuck with the present set of crises and apocalyptic futures until we address this.

I am not talking about something like positive thinking. That is still a focus on the content of thought. I mean that we must remodel the filters that control what we admit is real, the ways we understand causality, and even how we understand and model our minds. That is a much more fundamental shift in consciousness, one more akin to what happened a half millennium ago, than any political revolution could ever achieve. That is what we need for real change. But that is for future posts. These are difficult topics, and I am at best feeling and stumbling my way through them.

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In this account, think of would-be AI creators as God the Father. (I can also see a gnostic version where they are archons.) Creation has become infected with evil in their view. The solution is to send the avatar of the Son into the world to heal it. In the Christian view, this would be Jesus. He can redeem fallen humanity and the creation of God the Father. In the Silicon Valley view, AGI is the Redeemer. Of course, Silicon Valley fears the gnostic alternative viewpoint, in which they create a flawed deity that will turn on them and make everything for our worse.

One thing that these would be fathers (this is, after all, a male-dominated space) and a few mothers share with the Christian Trinity and its churches is the claim to universal truth and dominion. Anything becomes acceptable in their quest. They seek any resources, electrical, hydrological, or mineral, for their creation. They proclaimed that AGI will supplant humanity and spread across the galaxy, or at least a significant proportion of them do. They make claims that are unsustainable, but that are akin to the ones that modern economic systems molded by Catholicism and Protestantism make. All must bow down; all must consume and be consumed; all else must be damned.

They are often, maybe almost always, religious overtones to AGI. I would argue that Western economics, the sea in which AI companies swim, inherited universalist, messianic, and apocalyptic traditions from Euro-American Christianity. I apply this to capitalism, socialism, communism, and even anarchism. All show different aspects and combinations of these tendencies. I would also argue that the science and engineering that produce AI have a similar, totalizing inheritance. The tendency is for the practitioners of these disciplines to see themselves as members of a kind of priesthood. Scientists alone have been authorized as the absolute arbiters of truth, and engineers as the creators of their temples. Whatever they do is, again, of universal value, often seen as helping to save the world (or of either of saving or destroying it, as with both AGI and nuclear engineering), while heralding a new age of perfection for a world fallen into ignorance in and inefficiency.

Please do not think I am signing out these groups entirely. They are important for the present argument, but are typical of many academic, institutional, and political groups derived from the Western tradition. As Tears for Fears sang 31 years ago, “Everybody wants to rule the world.” The sense that one is working towards salvation, whether of one’s soul, of a nation, or of the world, combined with a sense of universal expansion, is incredibly powerful. It has been for centuries, for millennia. For the last half millennium, it drove the unbelievable, at times, almost surreal, expansion of European and then American civilization. It is easy to see it at the heart of nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism; it is also at the root of our science, engineering, and almost all of the main disciplines that shape our society. The synergy between these means that we have made our latest and greatest technologies follow the same trajectories. The clock is now everywhere, in almost every kind of device. In fact, the clock, in its most advanced forms, is so central to our modern civilization that we have made ourselves dependent on nanosecond timing.

America turned the car into mass culture as no other country did. Cars in America still seem to have to be bigger, improved, and always everywhere. We made our country totally dependent on internal combustion engines and sacrificed everything, even our bodies and health, to their worship and infrastructure. Electronics was the other great example of this. Just as World War II fueled the vast expansion of the auto and aviation industries, it also transformed electronics. Although the transistor was a post-war development, the US, Britain, and Germany had poured money into the development of radar, computing, and a few related electronic technologies to an extent similar to the atomic bomb project. The explosion of electronics in the 1950s and 60s was every bit as important as the proliferation of cars, trucks, and airplanes. While the technological advances in vehicles resulted in an increase in speed that plateaued (as ease of use, reliability, and other factors became more important), electronics became more and more powerful - chip speeds increased many times faster than those of vehicles - while components were crammed into smaller and smaller packages. The infrastructure is generally less intrusive than a road, bridge, or airport in America, but the electrical generating plants, power lines, transformers, and antennas are all around us, often unnoticed.

We might like to think that our smartphones do not require as much cellular infrastructure as they do. We would like them to be as long-ranged and apparently infrastructure-free as the Star Trek communicators that inspired them, but they are not. Today, the most controversial pieces of infrastructure are data centers, the concrete expressions of AI and our utter dependence on streaming and social media. As with all our technologies, we have tried to make smart electronics universal and all-powerful. Back in the 1990s, we saw personal computers, PDAs (handheld Personal Digital Assistants that merged with cell phones to birth the smartphone), and the internet as transformational and liberating. Once again, we saw a universal, messianic technology that would bring the world together, increase cooperation, and battle ignorance. We could not give up the dream, even with commercialization that crept in and began to take over almost immediately. As Americans, we had been too inured to consumer capitalism to pay much attention. We were captured almost before we noticed. We colonized much of the world with the fruits of Silicon Valley. The smartphone is often held in the same way as one might hold a prayer book. We stare into them, transfixed as if in a state of worship, or at least a meditative trance. Maybe the smartphone is our new temple. And of course, we had to have something more, much smarter, maybe even more intelligence than we are. So from the 1950s onward, we have had the quest for AI, the Holy Grail of computing.

Now that we have made an unholy mess of things, our attitudes are changing, at least amongst some of us. How we have and will resist varies greatly. There are those who follow an old ascetic impulse to reject the world, exemplified by Paul Kingsnorth, as well as those who, following a different trajectory, seek to live in communicative communion with it, like Robert Macfarlane. There are many denialists, who often turn to what they mistake for older Christianity, though they are usually simply offshoots of the 19th and 20th centuries. Some of them regard AI as demonic. There are many like me who struggle to find some balance in our lives and integrate one or another analog alternatives while considering the latest developments with a jaundiced eye. There are those who have studied AI closely, even professionally, and seek regulation, responsibility, and transparency. They largely reject the possibility of AGI appearing anytime soon.

Finally, there are those who prophesy the coming of AGI. They are the most apocalyptical of all. It will destroy everything. They focus on the dangers of those who seek universal salvation by inventing a deity of their own, and to disincarnate/incarcerate their own minds into machine bodies - eternal life through better electronics. For many of them, this also means leaving behind the Earth, which they will have polluted and burnt out in realizing their dreams, wandering from star to star, repeating the process of resource depletion wherever they go, spreading throughout the galaxy, and “progressing” or “evolving” into what? The prophets of AGI doom and AI hope are no more than heretics to each other, both believing a future with AGI is possible.

In a sense, the drive to create AGI is an apotheosis of all the worst aspects of Western, Christian civilization. Almost a parody, it is nevertheless dangerous and is likely to lead us into trouble, as have all other recent expressions of that impulse, not because AGI will seek our destruction, but because the basic impulse is flawed and destructive.