科技带走了什么——以及我们如何夺回它 | 人工智能 | 卫报 --- What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian
Composite: Artwork by Anais Mims and Guardian Design. Source Photographs by Getty Images
Gathering
Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I’d spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me.
The berries on a single spray might range from green through shades of red to the darkness that gives the fruit its name. Partly by sight and partly by touch, I determined which berries were too hard and which too soft, picking only the ones in between, while listening to birds and the hum of bees, to the music of water flowing, noticing small jewel-like insects among the berries, dragonflies in the open air, water striders in the creek’s calm stretches.
I went there for berries, but I also went there for the quiet, the calm, the feeling of cool water on my feet and sometimes up to my knees as I waded in where the picking was good. At home I made jars of jam. When I gave them away I was trying to give not just my jam – which was admittedly runny and seedy – but something of the peace of that creek, of summer itself.
I once read an essay in which a man tried to figure out how much per pound his garden tomatoes would cost if he factored in the price of all the materials and the hourly rate for his own labour. It was ridiculous and intentionally so, because growing tomatoes gives so much more than a certain number of pounds of fruit. There’s the exquisite smell of tomato leaves, and the sense of time that comes from watching a plant grow, observing pollinators visit, seeing a flower become a fruit, tracking its ripening. There is the pride of doing something yourself.
What the tomato-grower was pointing toward is what my friend, the environmental activist and author Chip Ward, long ago called “the tyranny of the quantifiable”. You grow tomatoes for the process, not just the product, to garden as well as to eat. To do as well as to have.
It doesn’t matter if you hate blackberries and tomatoes, gardening and wading; everyone has their own version of deep immersion in the moment, of engaging with the world in an embodied and sensual way, whether it’s dancing or dog-walking, cake-decorating or dirt-biking. What does matter is that we are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing. This has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now also technology’s. It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves. I want to defend these things we are urged to abandon. This isn’t an essay about AI per se; it’s about what gets lost when we unthinkingly accept what AI offers us. It’s an attempt to describe and value just what it is that gets overlooked or devalued.
Connecting (and disconnecting)
Silicon Valley is full of tyrants of the quantifiable. For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend.
This ends up meaning that we can minimise our presence in the world and maximise time spent working and online, which also means maximising alienation and isolation. This has involved a reordering of society right down to our retail landscapes. Many things have become harder to do in person. Of course, there are well-recognised upsides, but the downsides are no less real: public spaces and public life have withered, including some of the places in which we once acquired our goods. All those errands – buying milk or socks (in the past, I would have said the newspaper) – meant moments of human contact, moving among strangers and making acquaintances, maybe observing the weather and the natural world. These activities meant becoming more familiar with your surroundings, feeling at home beyond the confines of what you rent or own.
All this, I believe, underpins democracy: ease with difference, familiarity with the lay of the land, a sense of connection and belonging, knowing where you are and who’s out there, relationships – however casual – to people beyond your immediate circle. To embrace the tyranny of the quantifiable is to dismiss the subtle value of these daily acts out in the world and the ways they generate and maintain networks of relationships.
So we have withdrawn, while being constantly told this is good, and it has turned out to be bad in a thousand small ways, weakening public life and local institutions, isolating us. Chronic withdrawal can lead to a yearning for contact, or simply a sense of loss at its absence. But it can also lead to something else: a growing inability to cope with that contact. It can transform a sense of something missing into aversion, or numbness, or unreal expectations about what human contact should be. The resilience to survive difficulty and discord, to brave the vagaries of unmediated human contact, must be maintained through practice. Silicon Valley-bred isolation robs us of that resilience.
McDonald’s customers in New York order at a digital kiosk. Photograph: Robert K Chin/Alamy
While writing this, I dropped into a casual Indian restaurant I’ve been going to for years, only to find that, since my last visit, the system had changed so that you no longer say your order to a fellow human. Instead, you punch it in on a touchscreen even if someone is behind the counter. I helped the next customer, an old woman who just wanted a cup of chai, figure out the screens for her order. The process took us so much longer than saying “a cup of chai, please” and precluded any human contact with the servers, though at least she and I interacted with each other. The servers seemed miserable, their tasks more mechanised and less social than before. Here in San Francisco, which has been annexed by Silicon Valley, these screens for placing orders are now in more and more eating establishments that still offer face-to-face service. I wonder if people choose them over speaking to the cashier out of that aversion to contact that technology has inculcated in us.
A few days later, I wandered into a bookstore in a neighbourhood frequented mostly by young people, many in the tech industry, and asked the guy at the desk if they had Karen Hao’s Empire of AI. He pulled a used copy off the counter he had just priced, and then we bantered a bit. At the end he thanked me for interacting beyond the minimum. That was rare these days, he said. “People under 30 don’t make eye contact.”
Love letters minus the love
Having convinced a lot of us that we don’t want to go out and have unmediated contact with other people, Silicon Valley is now telling us we do not want to do our own thinking, creating or communicating with other humans. “You’ll never think alone again,” said one advertisement for an AI product called Cluely. The ad seemed confused about what thinking is and oblivious to why we might want to do it ourselves. These companies often suggest that things we have always done are too hard to do.
The price of giving up many activities is the atrophy of the ability to do them. The sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle, who has followed the evolution of computer technologies since the 1970s, writes that she wanted to raise an empathic child. “I knew that without the ability to spend quiet time alone, that would be impossible. But that was where screens began to get us into trouble. Our capacity for solitude is undermined as soon as we introduce a screen.”
Perhaps the ability to be alone and to think and act alone, though seldom thought of as an activity, is one that matters. (Among the dismal stories of AI adoption I came across was one in the Atlantic about a man who “consults AI for marriage and parenting advice, and when he goes grocery shopping, he takes photos of the fruits to ask if they are ripe”. Ripeness is something you can judge by smell and feel as well as by appearance, but if you outsource it long enough maybe you forget how to make decisions or what a ripe fruit should smell and taste like.)
In 2025, the startup Cluely marketed its AI assistant with an advert featuring a young man wearing smart glasses, similar to those that first appeared as Google Glass in 2014 (other companies now offer glasses that do this, including Meta). Glasses of this type, which have internet access and tiny screens, operate on the premise that as you move through your day you need constant help, outsourcing basic decisions, checking facts, being reminded of appointments, in essence being babysat by your headgear.
In the Cluely advert, the young man (who’s actually one of the product’s creators) gets a steady stream of prompts for talking to a young woman on their first date. So much of what tech offers is solutions to non-problems, or to problems that need to be solved though other means. Why is the young man incapable or afraid of talking without coaching? Is he really talking to his date or is he relaying instructions? How would she feel if she knew she were talking to an algorithm via her distracted date’s phone? With continued use, he may become even less capable of doing what we’ve all done for ever: converse, which is an act of collaborative improvisation.
The point of a date is presumably to connect, but in this interaction it’s reframed as something like a business opportunity. He wants to impress the girl, but if she is impressed, it won’t be with him. Ned Resnikoff writes in his newsletter, chiming in with Turkle: “Cluely’s explicit promise is to abolish solitude – and, in effect, to abolish thought. All dialogue with one’s self is to be replaced by queries put to a large language model.”
Composite: Artwork by Anais Mims and Guardian Design. Source Photographs by Getty Images
