Form & Essence & AI
Everyone I know is struggling with the significance of AI in the wake of ChatGPT and a seemingly self-aware Bing/Sydney. It’s front and center in the Writers’ Guild strike, and even Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called ‘Godfather of AI,’ left Google to warn of its dangers. The potential is unfathomable, writing and coding projects are reduced from hours to seconds, the digital world seems to read our thoughts, fake prose by famous people is amusing. And yet we struggle.
We struggle with why we struggle, coming up with doomsday scenarios resembling the Terminator movies, or lamenting that no student will ever have to write or research an essay again. AI devotees defend the technology as progress, luddites bemoan the loss of the world they knew, and most everyone in the middle just continues with a combination of interest in coming conveniences and a simmering unease.
We’re having the wrong conversation.
As a nonprofit leader very much invested in societal development, I’d like to suggest that AI is just another step along an age-old challenge that all humans face balancing form with essence. Humans seek meaning and purpose. Every fulfilled person draws on inner strength built from confidence, flexibility, perseverance, and more. These things are essence, impossible to measure and see.
We operate, however, in a world of form. We obsessively measure personal wealth, profit and loss, clicks and views. We want more, and we want cheaper. These things don’t make us happy, because happiness belongs to essence, but we frequently think they will.
Form and essence aren’t good and bad. They just are. They’re two aspects of reality, like the nucleus and the electron that make up the atom. What’s bad, however, is when our perceptions, and our resulting policies and actions, are out of balance. And where form and essence are concerned, as a society, we are way out of balance.
When we tie school funding to standardized tests, education favors exams over curiosity and joy. When we spend over two hours a day (on average) on social media, provocation and performance outweighs trust and empathy. When success is measured only as profit and loss, work becomes transactional rather than inspirational.
Form is distracting and intoxicating because it’s obvious. It’s easy to point at a report, and count the money. Essence drives how we feel every moment, drives our will, our inner resources, our commitment to job, family, and cause, but essence is hard to see and measure, and is therefore undervalued.
So, what is the promise of AI? It is yet another step in a long and lustrous journey toward greater convenience. Now our technology will finish our sentences, drive our cars, and write our music. From the perspective of Form, it’s brilliant. Even more for even less.
From the perspective of essence, however, the word might be treacherous. This is not to say AI is bad. It’s not bad at all. AI is merely a type of progress. It is treacherous, however, because of the illusion it casts. What’s the illusion? The illusion is that it really matters. It’s the same illusion the material world of form has always cast over the spiritual world of essence.
AI will make writing the essay easier but it’s not the essay that matters, it never was, it’s the act of writing. AI will play and win games of chess but it’s not the winning that matters, it never was, it’s the act of playing. AI will write music that sounds like Beethoven but it’s not the music that matters, it never was, it’s the journey and the genius behind it. In Gabe Polsky’s 2018 documentary In Search of Greatness, creativity guru Sir Kenneth Robinson said, “We are not robots. We are people who are driven by feelings and inspiration and a sense of possibility. Creativity is the essence of humanity. It’s not an incidental part of being human, it is distinctively human.”
We’re having the wrong conversation because the conversation is rooted in form. We’re struggling with whether or not the technology should exist, whether or not we should use it, and what utopian conveniences or catastrophic disasters await.
I believe the better conversation is the timeless, depthless discussion of how and why. Why study, why work, why build friendships, why serve, why perform, why take a walk and smell the roses? How can we keep the why of essence balanced with the what of form, and how can our technologies, including AI, help our humanity?
Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash