Setting down my phone

...and picking up my sketchbook

sketching at Halibut Point State Park - granite quarries here on Cape Ann…

Lots of good thinkers are trying to assess what the impact of digital tech is (or is going to be) on the human race. Jonathan Haidt is looking carefully at its impact on youth and youth culture; others like Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic AI, are trying to come to grips with its impact on economic, political, and social realms; and some are attempting to scope out its impact on our spiritual lives. Lots of good thinking. Little if any action to limit or pause the widespread development and use of this new technology.

At every important juncture in the history of technology (from the discovery and control of fire to the latest nanotech and space travel) there have been those who wring their hands and decry its dangers, as well as those whose champion the new tool as a kind of salvation or further evolution. But the question that the rest of us are wrestling with is how we can simply learn to use the technology without harm and with maximum benefit. This seems like common sense—a balanced approach—neither Luddite nor nerdy obsession with the digital realm. We look at exemplars of this new age of AI and rocket science (Musk, Amodei, Altman, Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al) and sometimes resent their power and obscene wealth. But most of the time I think we’re just awestruck by the juggernaut of the technology itself wondering what we’re supposed to do with it before it does us in.

That juggernaut seems to have a life of its own and we were stunned a couple years ago when thirty of the progenitors of AI signed a cautionary document warning of the coming eclipse of humanity at the “hands” of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Contrastingly, the oligarch Peter Thiel is predicting and celebrating it as part of human evolution--the next phase of our liberation from the dark ages of pestilence, fear, pain, and physical suffering. But Thiel is also the billionaire who is openly backing the end of democracy--and is forthright in saying that he and his fellow tech-bros are the ones who ought to dominate the rest of us for our own good. His approach is a self-conscious return to aristocracy--to a new kind of noblesse oblige in which the progenitors of AI decide how the rabble shall live. It’s an interesting sidelight that Thiel’s company is called Palantir — named after the infamous seeing stone in Tolkien’s trilogy, Lord of the Rings, by which the evil wizard Sauron seeks to control Middle Earth.

It’s been two years since that warning document from the AI progenitors and we still have no regulation of this technology. A tool that has infiltrated every single aspect of our lives. AI is not going away, and no one institution can control its use. Modern day pirates use it routinely now to fleece the elderly and the uninformed. The newly re-named and aggressive “Department of War” in our own country has waved off all warnings about it, putting one of its main inventors (Amodei) on a blacklist for refusing to allow his AI model “Claude” to be used for nefarious purposes. All warnings are being ignored, and we’re entering a phase with this new tech that hauntingly echoes a Greek tragedy about the consequences of playing god.

How is it that human beings can create tools that endanger and eclipse our very being?

The Greek tragedies, the biblical story of the builders of the Tower of Babel, and other morality tales warn of the catastrophic outcomes of unbridled hubris. And it honestly begins to feel like we’re living one of those tragic myths. I’ll confess that almost every time I pick up my iPhone to check social feeds or the stock market or my email account--every time I hold my phone, I feel a little tremor of anxiety mixed with something like pleasure. A little dopamine hit with a pinprick of fear. Am I addicted like millions of others?

Don’t you feel this too?

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About eighteen months ago I made a deliberate decision to start every day in silence and prayer without touching my phone or checking any of the digital feeds that pertain to my professional life or personal life for at least the first part of the day. Since then, I spend a minimum of an hour each morning in quiet--almost always in the early morning light without turning on the lamp nearby. No one in the house is awake for another hour, and I will briefly read from sacred texts and sit in silence, attempting to clear my mind and cultivate receptivity to God. I realize that some of my readers of this Substack are believers like me and others are not. I respect the need to acknowledge different understandings of the practice of intentional silence—and actually learned my own discipline of silence from my fifteen year sojourn in Eastern practices like Zen and Tibetan Buddhist prayer. I try here to avoid religious jargon at all costs--but sometimes there is no other language for what I need to communicate. Prayer, silence, receptivity to God—there is no other language I know to talk about these things, and I am growingly convinced that the only thing that will prevent the eclipse of our humanity by our own tech is this discipline of silence and self-restraint of our participation in digital media—even if it is only for a small portion of any given day.

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I know that AI will bring (is already bringing) benefits to the human race in the form of release from the drudgery of coding, economic calculation, and many unwanted drone-like tasks. It will lead to much faster gains in the search for a cure of cancer and other chronic diseases. It has already streamlined other kinds of technology that aid our daily lives—and will undoubtedly provide an infinitely faster means of realizing other aspirations—everything from internet access for the poor to space travel. But the 40,000-acre AI server “farm” (Stratos) being proposed in Box Elder County in Utah will sap resources (water, electricity) that may outweigh any potential gains it could bring. The fact that it is backed by the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) is concerning enough. And Stratos is only one of dozens of such plans. We are in a new arms race—this time with China—surrounding this technology, and some are saying that the last arms race (atomic energy and its bomb) is dwarfed by comparison in terms of its long-term significance for the fate of the human race.

After more than a half-century we are still finding it difficult to regulate the dangers of atomic energy development. And if the prognosticators are correct, AI’s impact will be an order of magnitude greater than nuclear energy and its benefits and dangers.

Finally, I’d like to offer a little advice if you can receive it: Try to abstain for some small portion of your life from participation in the digital realm. Call a friend and go for a walk. Listen to the ocean or the wind in the trees. Hand-write a card or letter to your mother or to a lonely widow or widower. Take time to have a cup of coffee with a neighbor or draw a wildflower in your sketchbook.

Make it a daily conscious practice of resistance. Put down your phone. Turn off all screens. Sit in silence. Make something. You will not regret this lost time in your digital “life”. No one practicing this small abstention is going to look back and think, “If only I’d spent more time online.”