AI as self-erasure

Western man’s will to disappear is getting installed in the omni-operating system

Elevated “deaths of despair” and declining birth rates in the West must be due to an array of factors, hard to tease apart. My hunch is that one of them is what the sociologist Richard Sennett called “the specter of uselessness.” He meant feeling redundant at work. But there is a deeper, existential version of this that may arise when the world feels already-occupied, so there is no place for you to grow into and make your own.

In the normal course of human society, you are born into a culture that has prepared the way for you. It initiates you into its language and tells a story of where you came from. It is saturated with meaning due to a chain of begettings that reaches back in time, each generation of which started and grew through acts of love: at conception, and in the ongoing work of teaching, transmission and care. The world is welcoming, in other words. It was built by your ancestors, and they imagined you long before you arrived. [i] They wondered what sort of work you might do, before you knew there is such a thing as work. Your parents may have recognized the echo of sibling or a parent in your face as you sought the nipple. They smiled at you.

This sense of a world handed down in love is interrupted when the basic contours and possibilities of life appear to be ordered by impersonal forces.

Small language models

I was at a small dinner a few weeks ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Seated next to me was a man who related that his daughter had just gotten married. As the day approached, he had wanted to say some words at the reception, as is fitting for the father of the bride. It can be hard to come up with the right words for such an occasion, and he wanted to make a good showing. He said he gave a few prompts to ChatGPT, facts about her life, and sure enough it came back with a pretty good wedding toast. Maybe better than what he would have written. But in the end he didn’t use it, and composed his own. This strikes me as telling, and the intuition that stopped him from deferring to the AI is worth bringing to the surface.

To use the machine-generated speech would have been to absent himself from this significant moment in the life of his daughter, and in his own life. It would have been to not show up for her wedding, in some sense. I am reminded of a passage in Tocqueville where he noticed that America seemed to be on trajectory that would have it erecting “an immense tutelary power” what wants only what is best for us, and is keen to “save [us] the trouble of living.”