The Cost Of Super-Humanity… – The Hugh Hewitt Show

…may just be our humanity.  The Boys is a comic book come Amazon Prime series in the superhero genre.  It is at once an exercise in licentiousness, seeing how much one can gross out an audience, and a deep and disturbing look at our natural tendencies.  Its essential question is, “What would happen if people gained superpowers without an Uncle Ben to teach them that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ or  Pa Kent to imbue their adopted son with truth, justice and the American way.”  The answer is not at all pretty, and yet disturbingly realistic.

And so I come to a piece from regular show guest John Ellis, dated July 8, on “Your Exoself.” (behind paywall)  Ellis examines the latest in “wearable” tech and quotes the founder of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly at length.  I reproduce the quote here:

Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, remind us of what we once knew before, offer advice and recommendations, do simple errands, and remember everything we say and do. Before long, it will know us better than we know ourselves. It will be our exoself.

While we will use more than one agent, we’ll primarily favor just one that knows us best. Always-on means this agent is listening, watching, tracking, present during all our waking hours, and maybe even while we sleep. We will allow this intimate access to our inner life because it gives us superpowers: knowledge, judgment, decisiveness, confidence, and most important, speed. We will feel productive, creative, smart, capable, and on top of it when it is on. When it is off, we will feel amputated.

This entity is clearly not our self. But at the same time, this always-on AI will be so close to us, understanding us so well and so deeply — better than almost any human could — that it will not be an other, or an outsider either. It can model us too well to be an other. It will be an exoself: something in between our self and an other self. Neither us, but also not outside of us. A new category.

It won’t feel strange, because we don’t feel strange wearing eyeglasses all day, or hearing aids, or carrying a computer in our pockets. Machines like this have been moving closer to us since they were invented. Smart machines started out as room-sized apparatus, then moved nearer as appliances alongside a desk, then onto the desktop in front of us, then onto our laps, then into our pockets — and soon, they will sit on our skin, perhaps on our heads. We already see prototypes of smart glasses, where the exoself can perch, whispering into our ears and illuminating our eyes. (Source: kk.org)

The host discussed this with Ellis on his usual Friday appearance this past Friday. (Again, paywall)  In that interview the host expressed his concern that such will be the end of reading.  He is right but that only beginning of the problems.

Such devices will serve to reinforce the worst in us.  One of the things I hate about streaming TV is the lack of variety presented to me.  When cable TV came to be it was such a wonderful thing.  I could surf the channel guide and find everything from 1940’s musicals to news to sports to documentaries and so on and so on.  Now I log on and since I watched a 1940’s musical yesterday it suggests another three dozen such films, making a variety of viewing experiences very difficult to access.  Imagine your whole life that way.  In a moment of weakness, after a massive argument, you ask your personal AI how to murder your sibling.  So noted, that second self will seek to reinforce your desire with suggestions, hints and information – perhaps until you actually do the deed.

Two abilities I have enjoyed in my life are eroding due to devices.  I have been blessed by God with an exceptional sense of direction and mathematical capabilities.  It used to be that I could go to a place once and return there forever never again without needing directions or maps.  The GPS on my phone has deeply eroded that capability.  There was a time in my life when I could conduct basic mathematical calculations in my head faster than it would take me to grab the calculator.  But no more, reaching for the calculator has become instinctive.  What will happen to people when human knowledge is simply in their pocket and not in their head?  It will be the end of learning.  There will be no more knowing, only asking.

Indeed the superpowers Kelly projects for us have a far higher probability of turning us into the kind of lackadaisical, self-absorbed, power mad people seen in The Boys than they have of making us better.  In point of fact, the central character in that series, a Superman analog, comes to think of himself as God.  He can enjoy this delusion because few come to his power level and so it is quite easy to dispose of those that might oppose him.  But imagine the same delusion in multiple, equally equipped people.  It is a recipe for war.

We will interpret the advent of such tech as an end to the need for education since all of knowledge will be at our fingertips for the asking.  But it will make the demand for character formation greater than ever.  we best be thinking now about how to do that formation lest the horrifically fictious become our reality.