What is Lost When Technology Replaces Human Experience
There has been widespread speculation about the effects that ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence software application, will have on the worlds of business, politics, cybersecurity, and beyond. In education, reaction to ChatGPT has been mixed, with some seeing it as a potentially powerful tool for research, teaching writing, and productivity, while others fret about factual inaccuracies and manipulations, as well as possible implications for academic integrity. What worries me, however, is the possibility that ChatGPT will become another example of a technological application which slowly but inexorably distances us from the experience of being fully human.
When we consider electronic technology and media, often our worry rightly goes to its content: the abject meanness of Twitter, the twisted racism and sexism and antisemitism lurking in some corners of YouTube, the radically polar and heated political expressions, the baleful influence of violent and pornographic images, and so on. But do we have as clear a focus on the pernicious effects created by the form of these technologies and media, which allows us to outsource some of the most fundamental aspects of our being?
A recent New York Times essay noted that some folks are using ChatGPT “to figure out what to say in situations that feel high-stakes. They are using the tool to talk or read to their children, to approach bosses, to provide difficult feedback, to write wedding vows or to pen love letters.” Where are we culturally when we normalize an algorithm as a surrogate for our own thoughts and feelings on childrearing, workplace connection, or expressions of love? What do we lose in terms of social attachments, self-understanding, and personal development if we will not face these challenging and formative moments with our own mind and our own voice?
This strikes me as part of a larger motif which suggests that electronic technology and media can (and perhaps should) deliver us from the social and emotional challenges inherent in our world. The tech industry has triumphed in marketing their services as extensions of our “real” selves. Once such technologies are made to seem “natural” and “normal,” their activities become natural and normal, too. Thus it seems reasonable that if social media and artificial intelligence can help us to avoid the normal challenge of interpersonal encounters, it’s only healthy and wise to have it do so.
“Where are we culturally when we normalize an algorithm as a surrogate for our own thoughts and feelings on childrearing, workplace connection, or expressions of love?”
Very quickly, overuse of technology can lead us into some truly unhelpful and ultimately dehumanizing places. Suddenly, we believe that it’s worthier to collect dozens of online “friends” than to work on sustaining an in-person relationship. We dismiss real-life activities and encounters as too emotionally risky, and seek comparative safety of anonymous online life. We downplay the formless benefits of simply “hanging out” with people in favor of the dopamine-delivery system provided by scrolling Tik Tok. We view navigating the harder edges of social life not as learning opportunities, but as pains to be deadened or simply eliminated through living a virtual life. So many new forms of media promote engagement when they are just as likely to be used as mechanisms for avoidance.
Most of us can discern when a desire for mild escapism or temporary distraction from the virtual world metastasizes into a retreat from anything challenging and uncomfortable in the real one. These efforts are not simply doomed to fail—the outside has a way of crashing in, no matter our attempts to hold it at bay—but also truly injurious to our wellbeing. If we avoid engaging with negative emotions, we will never embrace the challenges, develop the perseverance, and find the deep, sustaining relationships that will propel us toward fulfillment.
As the media scholar Neil Postman noted more than 30 years ago, “There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.” Our world is sometimes hard, sometimes broken, sometimes threatening; it is only as full, resilient, connected selves that we are able to find meaning within it. This is the point of a Browning education, with its emphases on relational learning, knowing and loving boys, courage, compassion, honesty, curiosity, purpose, and "grytte." The reward of is not only academic accomplishment, but also an abiding awareness of how connection, resolve, and engagement create an authentic, purposeful human journey. Indeed, it is an understanding that tech will not save us, but that we ourselves can.