The False Tech Gods Will Not Offer Us Transcendence
In the final scene of El Camino, the new Breaking Bad movie (spoiler upcoming), Jesse drives off on a long, curving highway towards the snowy peaks of Alaska. Via this scene we know his fate: he has succeeded, won, and now will now live a happy life.
Stories often end with this notion. In the closing scenes of a movie, characters quite literally drive or walk into an imagined Utopian state. They transcend their story and now live in a permanent stasis, an enshrined bliss. Their problems are fully resolved so off they go into their final, perfect state.
In books, movies, comics, plays, operas, and everything in between, the story almost invariably ends with an unambiguous finality. “….Happily ever after”, the cliche goes.
This narrative of ‘transcendence’ is written into our lives. If only we could solve the problems in our life, like in those stories we read, we will transcend into a blissful state. Transcendence in terms of a narrative indicates a final state that both surpasses human foibles and demands that no new problems shall arise.
We view technology as offering transcendence as well
This desire for a narrative finality embeds itself in all aspects of life. We read religion, politics and the media as narratives that involve a sense of transcendent finality. Religion speaks of a transcendence to the afterlife, political parties speaks of creating utopias just so long as you vote for them, and the media sculpts stories with endings that offer a cathartic transcendence. The criminal is caught, the hero rewarded, and that is the end of the story: the Just is praised perpetually, the Offender is punished eternally. If there’s more, we don’t hear of it — it isn’t interesting! The nuance of the post-narrative dulls the catharsis.
Our attitude toward technology is much the same.
People like Ray Kurzweil speak of a literal transcendence by moving our squishy brains into silicon chips. He speaks for much of Silicon Valley, who collectively seem agree in the singularity, wherein all human problems will vanish with an exponential technological cascade — true, theological transcendence.
Though these techno-utopians may not always explicitly refer to some form of transcendence, they implicitly suggest it by pointing to the unequivocal bliss that their product or service will engender:
“I would much prefer having my first screening with an algorithm that treats me fairly rather than one that depends on how tired the recruiter is that day” .
This is a quote from Loren Larsen, Chief Technology Officer of a company called Hirevue. The company’s offering is a technology that uses facial recognition to weed out candidates that are deemed not suitable based on their facial cues. The quote points to a common idea of believers in technological transcendence — that the human is the problem that tech will fix.
Most technological entrepreneurs, especially those with massive platforms or new technological mediums tout the transcendent. Mark Zuckerberg claims that Facebook could have prevented the Iraq War:
I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, then maybe it coulda gone differently.
In other words, war is something that a technological artifact can overcome without consequence. Our violent nature is something we can transcend (through Facebook). Despite the fact that Facebook was originally used as a means to rate women’s attractiveness.
Even economists felt the same. Keynes felt that we would largely transcend ‘work’ through technology and science, and boredom would be our greatest enemy.
These statements are substantively different from the transcendence proffered by religion. Yet in so many ways these carry similar weighty implications: humans are a problem that can be solved in perpetuity by something. Our violent nature, our bias, even our death of old age — these aren’t problems to be worked out through humans, but by an “other”: technology.
But there is no transcendence, least of all through technology
It’s romantic and often poetic to think like this. It is also, of course, false. There is no perfect state. We solve some problems, but new ones emerge (or we intentionally create them). The story doesn’t end. We don’t transcend the idea of problems or ourselves.
Ours is an existence of perpetual striving whether we are aware of it or not. Philosophers like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Sartre understood this, as did many other philosophers.
And technology, of course, has never allowed us any type of transcendence, it just reshapes our relationship to the world. There is no end point; there is no point where a piece of technology solves all our problems.
Certainly qualities of life change through technology — often for the better — but technology brings with it new problems. A spear made it easier to kill our prey, but also one another. The printing press allowed for the dissemination of knowledge, but also falsehoods. Social media allowed people to keep in touch with one another to a wide and instantaneous degree but…surely I don’t need to list the litany of problems with social media.
The key isn’t just “with good comes bad”, it’s that we don’t transcend, we cannot transcend our humanity through technology. Visions often paint humans not having problems but that humans are the problem and that technology will fix us. Humans, as a species, are riven with problems and chaotic impulse, but these won’t be solved through technology (nor anything else for that matter). We, as finite beings moulded by evolution and our world, will always suffer in one way or another.
The Philosopher John Gray summed this up well in his book Straw Dogs:
Technological progress only leaves one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately, that problem is insoluble.
So if we do not transcend ourselves through technology, what happens?
What appears with new technologies is new states of being-in-the-world: the key word is new, not better. In these new states of being, new capacities, concepts, and relationships occur. Philosopher of technology, Peter-Paul Verbeek presents us with the example of an ultrasound. Yes, it allows parents to ‘see’ their unborn baby, but it also presents new responsibilities and ways of thinking. It forms a wedge in between ideas of the body of the mother and baby. It detects for symptoms of Down Syndrome. This, then, forces a difficult choice that parents otherwise wouldn’t have: should they continue with pregnancy or not?
In this way tech involves the creation of new capacities, that involve new challenges and problems, all while solving old ones
In addition to generating to capacities, relationships and concepts, technology also extends them. Many argue that technology has helped us think and consider new concepts through immediate access to a variety of information. We can compare and contrast information in the physical world in ways that appear closer to thinking — but outside of the boundaries in our brain. Our mind, extended into the world. Is this transcendence?
No, our minds have always been linked to the material world. New capacities slowly emerge by using tools to help us count, create language and form societies. But even as we change — even as we developed language, tools, and society we still deal with stress, pain and anxiety.
Of course, it’s not as though we live in an unending hellscape — new capacities bring both the good and bad. For instance, some argue that the extending of our minds into technology is replacing our ability to remember, which I’ve argued may be happening, but in the course of this change new capacities for making and understanding relationships emerge.
But what about technologies that ‘think for us’ — won’t they help us transcend to new heights?
Some argue that displacing our will to algorithms and AI is good (see our CTO friend above), as they form purer, more effective and objective arbiter of ‘what things are’ (e.g., image recognition), justice (e.g., by matching faces in surveillance videos to database), and user behaviour (e.g. Youtube algorithms). While the displacing of our will is troubling for a variety of reasons, it’s also an illusion that human will is fully displaced, it’s actually just pushed further down the line. It’s the will of the designers of AI and algorithms, and any ignorance or bias they embody, that is conveyed digitally. We see how this repeatedly causes problems.
New issues are created by our humanity, however difficult this is to perceive. This is why it’s vital to carefully evaluate even AI and algorithmic technologies in ways that reveal the human interaction in their creation and usage.
But it’s good to have a vision, isn’t it?
Of course we need visions. We need idealism. They hold us to a goal, stop our efforts from becoming an anodyne, ‘design-by-committee’ mish-mash.
But we have to be honest about if that vision is something that is any more than a fairy tale. Is it, like WeWork’s vision, which crashed down in a comical IPO of empty promises and subsequent job layoffs?
Technology often offers more than just a simple vision because it is very difficult to perceive the impacts it will have, so the more idealistic among us will cling to the positive vision, the utopian, the transcendent.
But there’s a particular line of pessimism that I think is important to consider as we design, build and create. And in all honesty, this pessimism can be beautiful. Much art is devoted to the fallibility and difficulty in our being, in our finiteness.
Pessimism can help us be pragmatic. In his book Future Ethics Cennydd Bowles emphasizes spelling them how we will achieve our corporate visions. How will we achieve the lovely glowing words? He also mentions sci fi and other forms of complex narrative building as actual research. What’s important is that we don’t look at the bright shiny utopia, or the gloomy dystopia, but rather something that has bits of the bad and good.
Visions give us something to look forward to. But it’s important to parse the difference between a vision and an idea of transcendence. A vision defines a new way of being and transcendence implies a new way of not being. In other words: a way that will solve the problem that is ourselves, perpetually. It is certainly good to think about how we can solve very human problems, but the idea that a single piece of technology will do that is, to put it mildly, delusional.
What else can we do?
Focus on the human, the nuance, the complex.
It’s understandable why we don’t do this, though. The advantage of clear , uncomplicated visions is that they can be sold. Investors, employers, purchasers, clients, governments — they all need to be sold on something positive, not something nuanced with potential problems. But as more and more corporations are be directed toward triple bottom lines, and values other than capital generation, the picturesque sales visions may be a thing of the past.
Having an opposition to an idea of transcendence isn’t cynicism, it’s intelligence. It allows you to project your ideas realistically into the future through toolkits like the consequence scanning toolkit from Doteveryone. I wrote about a number of other ways to think about the future in this article.
Challenging unambiguous, transcendent final states isn’t cynical, it’s beautiful
I mentioned earlier that most movies end with an unambiguous finality. Of course, the better (in my opinion) movies end with ambiguity and thematic nuance. In Blade Runner, Deckard’s fate is left unknown (at least until the sequel) — is he safe? Is he human?
Is the classical Japanese Ozu movie Tokyo Story, 4 adult siblings are mostly uninterested in their parents, and seem rather devoid of emotion when their mother dies. One character notices this and asks “Isn’t life disappointing?” “Yes, it is”, wistfully responds one of the only characters who cares about the parents, a widow of one of their children. Despite her altruism, she leaves to an uncertain future, pondering a watch that ticks away her life.
There’s no transcendence in this movie, or, importantly, implied after the end of the movie. People change, and adjust in their new circumstances. Life is disappointing, yes, but also beautiful in its nuance and change — ‘mono no aware’. This is what makes Tokyo Story such a beautiful movie.
So why can’t we think the same way about technology?
