I've been trying to read a little bit of the King James Bible every day. This morning, I read Exodus 9 and 10, about the plagues that visited the Pharaoh.
And the flax and the barley were smitten, for the barley was in the ear, and the flax was bald. But the wheat and the rice were not smitten, for they were not grown up. They were not grown up. And Moses went out from the city of the Pharaohs. And he brought his hands into the Lord, and the thunders and hails ceased, and the rain was not poured upon the earth.
I had this uncanny thought: the glowing devices that are in everybody's hands when you walk out into the street—they seem like a Biblical plague, don’t they? Phones. Because of their ubiquity and their hold over everyone. From the perspective of an ancient chronicler, it would seem like some kind of punishment meted out by God. Wouldn't people from another time or place look around, today, and think some divinity has wanted us to suffer? Wouldn't the human landscape look stripped by strange mechanical locusts?
I don't think of my negativism as nihilism, or my pessimism as giving up. I see it as humanism, defending and enforcing its borders. It's my way of saying: here are the places where our territory as people has been overrun, where we've let the barbarians in. In attitude—if not style and spiritual sensibility—I probably feel the same way about the industrialization of the mind as Blake felt about the industrialization of the landscape in 1790s England.
It didn't stop Blake from pursuing his visions, illustrating and writing his mythographic poems. But his sense of calamity pushed those visions further, made them more extreme, and raised the stakes for his counter-argument against modernitty.
Blake, like Ruskin two generations later, understood that you can't even begin to worry about art until people have clean air, clean water, and access to nature—nature that is unharassed and wild. In fact, they both understood that studying the art of the Renaissance was a way to stage a critique of the industrial, finance-driven world of Pax Britannia.
Automation destroys quality. Why is art worse? Why is film worse? Ironically, AI is only going to make things worse. AI shows us why—because automation allows us to skip too many steps. As designers and creators, we’re incentivized not to iterate our material but to produce, not to tinker, toy, and evolve, but to print content. Generate.
Now, this is not to say, of course, that any tool or speeding-up process is always bad. Pencil and paper were definitely an improvement on wax tablets. The typewriter, even if not an outright improvement on pen and paper, provided situational advantages. The word processor is where things start to get tricky. 1And certainly, once you get to Google Docs, you start seeing a real decline in the quality of prose. Pop music has far fewer chord changes, parts, modes, and key changes than 50 years ago. As autotune and logic have taken over, recording studios are not better than they were in 1975. Bookstores are not better stocked than they were in 1975. And publishing—well...
Here’s an intuition, a prediction: in 20 years, products that were formerly entirely designed by humans, like books and buildings, will almost be entirely designed by machines. But the best books, like the best rugs—say Persian or Turkish rugs—will still be made by hand. Automation will be the most efficient tool in the world. It will both illuminate and raise the value of the human, of the step-by-step, but will prove too much of a temptation for most people. Products of human cognition and human handicraft will become like gold—compared to paper money—a stable currency in an inflationary period.
In an ideal world, I could erase myself from the digital commons. My image, my writing, would exist only in print. I'd converse only in person. I'd still have an income from writing and still sell tickets to plays, etc. But that's not the world I live in, to say the least.
AI is probably making this problem exponentially worse, while also maybe providing the ability to detect and measure the scope of the problem.