Are we the Dodo? Shouldn't we wake up?

 '"Free as a bird", we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings'. (A. Huxley)

Victor Hugo once quoted an acquaintance of his, R. Girardin, who told him something that makes even more sense to us today: 'What is most dangerous and most to be feared is not the abyss, but the slope’. Profound words, which remind us of what Montaigne said: ‘La mort n’est rien, le mourir est tout’ – Death is nothing; dying is everything. What Girardin pointed out to the French poet (and novelist) is that while one may fear the gaping hole and the unknown that lies at its bottom, the main problem is the descent in that hole, the sliding in towards that gaping hole – that fear, that unknown, that ending.

I very much feel like this is what is happening to us with GenAI and the way people use it nowadays: commentators focus on the end times, the abyss (we will be replaced! Robots everywhere! Humanity is lost!), and in the meantime we’re sliding down that slope, unaware that we are doing so, that we are on the downwards slope: we fear death and ignore the dying. And the problem is that we are dying right now, but we behave as if we were not.

And what is even worse is that this is happening with people’s consent – nay, with people’s willing enthusiasm and consent; as the French expression goes: Tendre le baton pour se faire battre – to give a rod for your own back. People participate in the creation of their own downfall, warning others ‘Don’t do it!’ but doing it themselves. Saying (thinking?) that they know how to do it well, they know how to manage it, all the while unaware they’re on that slope and sliding down very quickly. They pretend there’s no abyss, and in fact they even pretend the slope is upwards, taking them to new heights, new possibilities, new futures.

Ah, that shiny new future, that radiating sun all the way there, if we just stretched a bit, if we just raised our hand, we could touch it it’s so close!

The Marquis de Custine, who resided in Russia in the 19^th Century, remarked in his Correspondence: ‘There is something supernatural in an individual reduced to the state of pure machine. One asks oneself what they can do with their excess of thought and you feel uncomfortable at the idea of the force that had to be exerted against intelligent beings to succeed in making them only things’. De Custine’s ‘force’ was of course that of the Tsarist State, but it’s not difficult to make a parallel with what’s happening to us all right now – except that people themselves are becoming the ‘force exerted against intelligent beings’; it’s people themselves who ‘succeed in making people only things’.

In Education, we’re rightly worried about things like learning, understanding, keeping an open mind, knowing for sure, checking, thinking, and how all this is (and will be) affected by GenAI. At the same time, those in charge of Education (and of everything in general) have already given up, and force us to use AI – they’d rather have us sign up for a GenAI-boost Workshop, give ‘guidelines’ that basically allow everything, and above all urge us to ‘Use it, Use it, it’s great!’, no doubt hoping it will cut costs, reduce the need for teachers and save money for the Armed Forces, or pay up bigger dividends to shareholders.

But what are those costs? Money now, brain later? Mass education now, no education later? Harmonisation now, no specialisation later? Ignorance now, crass ignorance later?

W.H. Auden, in his Commonplace book, quipped that ‘Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labour, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill’. Isn’t it incredible to realise that today, machines have not eliminated the need for (cheap, easy to fire, poorly paid, socially unglamorous) labour, but they sure are eliminating the need for skills, specifically Thinking Skills?

But let’s all rejoice in this, and – I repeat, the most egregious aspect of all this – let’s rejoice in our participating in it. How is it still unclear to people that they are the proverbial ‘Architects of their own downfall’? There really is no need to have read Marx to ask yourself: Who actually benefits from this situation?

The poet Edwin Muir, born on a remote Scottish island and introduced late to city life, wrote in his beautiful memoirs ‘The Story and the Fable’: ‘The 19^th century sowed the whirlwind that we are reaping. Think of all the native tribes and peoples, all the simple indigenous forms of life which Britain trampled upon, corrupted, destroyed during that time in the name of commercial progress. All these things, once valuable, once human, are now dead and rotten. The 19^th Century thought that machinery was a moral force and would make men better. How could the steam-engine make men better?’

Isn’t that THE question we should ask ourselves? How could the equivalent today – GenAI – make men (and women, and everyone else) better? Why do we still believe what we know from History to be false? Again: who benefits from us holding on to this pipe-dream, this aberration, this demonstrably false statement?

So Muir urged us: ‘The great sin is to let everything slip past in a sort of dream or stupor, aware neither of yourself nor of the world: the normal state of human life. The task is merely to wake up’.

Don’t let everything slip past; be aware of yourself, of the world; don’t live in that kind of stupor, doom-scrolling while going on about Freedom and People’s Rights and Beautiful World and Friendship and Love and Equality, bashing Trump while liking vacuity on TikTok.

Do not help make the world what it is becoming; resist: wake up.

The narrator of Greene’s The honorary Consul suddenly reflected that ‘The only questions of importance were those which a man asked himself’. We may dispute that of course but we cannot dispute the sentiment behind it: if you never ask questions, if you never have questions, and if you never ask questions of and about yourself…what are you doing?

• M. de Custine (1975). Lettres de Russie 1839.
• G. Greene (1973). The honorary consul
• V. Hugo (1900). Choses vues 1830-1848 
• A. Huxley (1958). Brave New World Revisited
• E. Muir (1940). The story and the fable