By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
The high-tech backlash seems to be building — if not already upon us — and I’m here to report for duty. No less that Pope Leo XIV devoted his first encyclical to “upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power,” specifically targeting artificial intelligence and the “technocratic paradigm” that concentrates “dominance” in the hands of a few and must be “disarmed.”
Of course there’s a lot more to the message, but I still never thought I’d see the day when I would nod along so enthusiastically to the words of any pope. That said, I’ve always been more than a little atavistic. I used a rotary dial phone all through college, refusing to buy a cellphone until I was approaching 30 (it was a Nokia flip phone that I promptly dropped in the lake and didn’t replace). I had to be forced into buying my first smartphone at age 33 because of work.
I’ve always preferred a typewriter for what I consider “serious” writing and I’ve only read three “ebooks” in my life — all in graduate school, because I didn’t want to pay $100 for a text that I’d probably only read once.
All that said, I’m on a computer or some other device for the vast majority of my day, and use social media, doomscroll on my phone, watch YouTube videos, and stream hours upon hours of movies and TV shows, just like other people.
That doesn’t mean I’m particularly happy about it, and as AI and other “smart” technologies are being forced into every aspect of modern existence, I’m getting more and more strident in my already established Luddism.
It’s coming out in little ways, too, like when my wife and I got our first-ever brand new car last year. It’s a great car and we’re grateful to have it, but it took us at least a few weeks to fully turn off as many of the “driver assist features” as we could. My favorite was when the car would judder, reduce speed and otherwise freak out whenever I had to cross the center line to avoid hitting a cyclist, then yell at me for being a “distracted driver”… because it had distracted me.
This is not uncommon. The Wall Street Journal published a piece on July 30 profiling a handful of drivers who have been “taking extreme measures to avoid new car technology,” and asking if they are “curmudgeonly roadblocks or the last beacons of sanity?”
I’d say the latter.
When I got my newest phone last summer, I similarly spent about a week disabling as many AI elements as possible, and only just managed to shut off almost all the AI-assisted writing B.S. that now comes intrusively standard with Google Docs (it turns that there are some elements that just “can’t” be done away with). If anyone can tell me how to nuke the “AI Overview” that tops the Google search page, I’ll buy them a beer.
No wonder that futurism.com reported in mid-July that “terrified tech execs are traveling with armed bodyguards as AI backlash grows.”
I’m not naive, though. I know that people throughout history have complained about “the way things are these days.” I can’t even imagine what kind of “curmudgeonly roadblock” my great-great-great grandfather Justus Hagadorn must have been. That guy was born in upstate New York in 1806 and died there in 1907, meaning he came into this world during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency and left it during Theodore Roosevelt’s. Talk about some change.
Regardless, this is different. I don’t give an ounce of credence to the AI boosters’ claims that our current techno state of affairs is analogous to the era of the printing press, radio and TV. Those were methods of transmitting information created by humans; none of them were “generative.” No one ever asked a printing press to write an “adult dystopian romance novel,” then sat back and watched it spit out reams of perfectly set pages based on all the other books it had already chewed up and absorbed (looking at you, Daggermouth).
This is different from nostalgia, and I concur with the pope that it presents an existential threat to creative authenticity and overall human dignity. But I’d be lying if there wasn’t a little nostalgia buried in this unease. I was reminded of that when I caught one of comedian Kareem Rahma’s “Subway Takes” on Facebook (yes, I realize the irony).
His guest on the train that episode bemoaned the “loss” of the TV remote, meaning she missed the process of flipping through channels of programming that hadn’t been formatted to her specific tastes (an experience that those of us over a certain age can well remember).
“I had to fight for my sense of taste,” she said, adding that, these days, “we are spoon fed. The algorithm makes us lazy and it feeds us ‘taste.’ … I think we need autonomy when it comes to curation and creating taste.”
To borrow a phrase from the pope, “Amen.”
