Letter #223: What’s Not Computer

Impactful changemakers disrupting the salad industry, and other wordgunk.

Dad,

One of the under-appreciated things about AI language generators like ChatGPT is that they justify my policy of ignoring most emails I receive. Every day my inbox gets firehosed with marketing campaigns that sound just like a robot wrote them: strings of pre-formulated phrases stitched together into something that resembles English without requiring even a moment of original thought. “How digital influencers are disrupting the salad industry.” “An impactful changemaker shares her inspiring story.” These emails feature the kind of copypasta dreck that might as well have been cranked out by a machine designed to produce the least surprising word possible in every situation. And they were like that long before such machines actually existed.

Now the bots are taking their rightful place as generators of anodyne wordgunk, outstripping even creative writing MAs in their capacity for platitudes and inanity. Some people watch this happening and think, gosh, the machines are writing like people! I draw exactly the opposite conclusion: the people were already writing like machines.

My point is this. The people confusing AI with sentience were already thinking about sentience like a kind of primitive software run on simian wetware. As you point out, the architects of our computerized world mostly believed that, in the words Donald Trump used to describe Elon Musk’s Tesla cars, “everything’s computer.” This is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you assert at the outset that everything is computer, you will lose your capacity to understand or even see all the things that aren’t computer.

This situation is described with absolutely uncanny precision in the psalms. Psalm 115 describes the psychology of “idol-worshippers,” i.e., those who make silver and gold statues that look like people and then pray to them as if they could actually hear and respond. “Those that make” these statues, the psalm says in most translations, “shall become like them.”

What an odd thing to say, you might think. Unless you realize that, thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew language, the line can be faithfully translated another way: “those that make idols are becoming like them.” I’m fairly convinced the switch to the present tense makes better sense of what’s going on here. The people who think they can replace a living relationship with a manmade artifact are already operating as if life itself is just the product of mechanical processes like smelting, or sculpting, or coding. So our AI worshippers, like idol worshippers, were already in the process of trading their humanity away for inputs and outputs before they ever trained their first LLM.

Not coincidentally, this similar to what Plato says about replacing human memory with external hard drives—i.e., with books. It’s not enough to upload the information somewhere: the books can’t understand it, and unless you read them and talk about them, neither can you. From wax tablets to smart tablets, there’s no end of tools we can use to help us with the task of being human. But at the end of the day, if we don’t do the task ourselves, no one will.

Love,
Spencer