I recently listened to an interview on YouTube, “Making Sense of a World in Crisis,” featuring Yuval Noah Harari, a prominent public intellectual. He drew a crucial distinction between humans and AI: humans are living, organic beings, whereas artificial intelligence is based on machine algorithms. Humans have feelings, deep attachments to others and thrive in communities. They are biological beings who respond to the celestial cycles of day and night and require downtime to recharge. AI is a relentless machine, running at top speed 24/7.
Constant technological advances, a hallmark of our modern age, are forcing us to speed up like rats on an ever-faster spinning treadmill. We must start pouring sand into the gears of this out-of-control machine. Otherwise, Harari warns, we are doomed to reach our breaking point soon, resulting in “madness, collapse and eventual death.”
Harari argues that the damage extends deep down to the language we use, which is the very foundation of human culture and power. The danger is that AI will take over “anything made of words,” including political and legal systems and the interpretation of religious texts, thereby replacing our human monopoly on language and culture.
L. M. Sacasas, my favorite ethicist, is on the same page as Harari, emphasizing that words are fundamental to who we are and that they are at high risk of being appropriated by AI. He has written a wonderful essay on Substack titled “Owning our Words.”
While words have increasingly lost any semblance of meaning in the political arena and on Madison Avenue, he says they are still important in private conversations between two individuals: in order for such a conversation to be fruitful, it’s necessary to trust that the other person is telling the truth.
When you lose the trust of the people, you lose everything. Sacasas argues that this is true not only for individuals but also for countries. He suggests that the root cause of the fall of the Roman Empire was that words lost their meaning.
He buttresses his argument by quoting Marilyn Chandler McIntyre’s “Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies,” who stresses the need to steward the gift of language: “If language is to retain its power to nourish and sustain our common life, we have to care for it in something like the way good farmers care for the life of the soil.”
As Sacasas notes, this quote brings us under the spell of Wendell Berry and one of my favorite essays of his, “Standing by Words.” Berry begins: “My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.”
Berry writes that in our ordinary dealings with one another, we can only understand what is said by assuming the speaker’s accountability, the accuracy of his speech and the meanings of her words. We assume, in short, that language is communal and that its purpose is to tell the truth.
By way of the following example, he offers a clear definition of what made this country strong: words rooted in real-world objects valued by real people in real communities.
We are seeing a disconnect unfold today in the revolt among regular folks against the highfalutin theories of the educated elite that don’t jibe with their everyday experience. MAGA has taken advantage of this to burnish its fake-populist appeal while, in fact, doing the opposite: catering to the rich and powerful. But we haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until AI becomes the arbiter of our lives, in cahoots with the titans of Silicon Valley and Trump Republicans.
In the near term, Democrats can become relevant again by using plain language to describe what people care about. As Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear recently wrote in the Washington Post: “That’s part of what Democrats can do to win in the areas that have been slipping away. Another is to start talking like normal human beings again. We’re not going to win the messaging battle if we say that Trump’s policies make people ‘food insecure.’ No, they make people hungry.”
Remember to act locally, along with supporting Bernie Sanders’ proposed nationwide moratorium on data center construction.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.