How to use, and not to use, AI
Okay, this may seem out of place. My Sunday posts are usually “religious”- that undefinable, indispensable concept we apply to some ultimate concerns but not to others.
But there are two things I’d like to say about AI:
- I like it quite a lot. I’m gradually finding more applications for it, and it can be very helpful.
- I’m seriously concerned that misuse of AI can be spiritually damaging. That’s why I think this is a fit Sunday topic. It’s not damaging because it’s demonic. I’d quit it if I thought that. I’m no demon-tamer. But there is one fairly sharp distinction between things it’s good for and things where using it can be deranging and rarely is helpful.
That said, here’s the best distillation I’ve ever seen or heard of how to use AI:
AI is an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain which can free up a lot of your time to go spend it on the right by loving other people. But we probably will screw it up by pretending that AI is your therapist, friend or lover, all of which are actually right-brain things. If you’re using it to help your right brain, you’re getting it wrong and your brain won’t be fooled. You will not fool yourself. Even if it passes the Turing test in your consciousness, in your subconscious you’ll become more anxious, more lonely, more afraid and more depressed.
I have not been using AI to do right-brain things, but neither was I thinking “Okay, having gotten all that tedious, analytical left-brain stuff out of the way, let’s do something right-brained.”
Brooks’ insistence against AI for right-brain stuff isn’t just ipse dixit. AI has no intuition, no meaning machine, no metaphysics, and all indications are that it never will. If you ask it a metaphysical question, it will do something like culling probable word sequences from college bull sessions that have been transcribed, from which it will spit out an “answer” of sorts, but not one that will prove satisfying.
This explains my sense of how spiritually dangerous it is when people take on AI boyfriends and girlfriends, or look to AI as a therapist.
So when you’ve freed up time by using AI appropriately, Brooks has six non-psychedelic ways of accessing your right hemisphere (volunteered when Andrew Sullivan, interviewing him, extolled the virtues of psilocybin for accessing meaning):
- Ask questions that can’t be Googled. This is why college bull sessions were so valuable and happiness-making. If you ask a question that can be answered by AI (meaningfully, that is; AI will always make up some kind of “answer”), it’s not a right-hemisphere question.
- Fall in love. Our becoming more left hemispheric is why more people are less capable and less interested in falling in love.
- Worship. Look for the metaphysical. If you’re not religious, figure out what it means to transcend yourself.
- Beauty. You need more beauty: moral, natural and artistic.
- Look for a calling in what you do.
- Find meaning in suffering.
I’ve almost entirely ignored Brooks’ Atlantic articles, assuming he was a male Oprah. I was very wrong. He’s a daily-mass Catholic on a mission from God and I intend to look at all his articles from here forward.
Not my God
Seventeenth-century thinkers, among whom “nearly all original philosophical minds were Nominalist,” showed that they could be quite loquacious when it came to talking about God based on reason. Apparently unbeknownst to some of them, it was no longer the transcendent God of traditional Christianity about whom they were speaking. Augustine had famously said in one of his sermons that “if you comprehended [cepisti], it is not God.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.
On a related note, something from Father Patrick Henry Reardon has stuck with me for decades now. I can’t give an exact quote, but it was basically that every Christian heresy stems from efforts to make logical something meant to be received as mystery.
There is no need to be profane, my dear boy.
‘Is it possible you don’t know where you’ve been?’
‘Now that you mention it, I don’t think we ever do give it a name. What do you call it?’
‘We call it Hell.’
‘There is no need to be profane, my dear boy. I may not be very orthodox, in your sense of that word, but I do feel that these matters ought to be discussed simply, and seriously, and reverently.’
‘Discuss Hell reverently? I meant what I said. You have been in Hell: though if you don’t go back you may call it Purgatory.’
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. Almost thou persuadest me of purgatory, Clive.
I’ve been a Lewis fan since college, though I’ve read most of his stuff so often that I rarely read it any more.
The exceptions are The Great Divorce and The Abolition of Man. The former is the Lewis book that most tangibly affected me. Lewis made it plausible that most of the day-trippers to Heaven got back on the bus to hell; I didn’t want to be like them. How that ramified is that rarest of things: something I intend to keep private.
Almost syllogistic
I enjoyed reading Martin Shaw’s latest retelling (I Saw Christ on a Hill) of his re-conversion to Christianity, settling in its Orthodox expression. It makes my own conversion (from Calvinism to Orthodoxy) look almost syllogistic in comparison.
God works in mysterious ways — perhaps especially so with dense, mythical/mystical mensches like Martin.
Shorts
- But if the mainline was merely the DNC at prayer while crossing its fingers even during prayer, then why go? (Brad East)
- It is hard to be saved if we have them; and impossible if we love them; and scarcely can we have them, but we shall love them inordinately. (St. Augustine on riches)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 