A HUMANE USER MANUAL FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

In a time of the Artificial and Virtual, Consider the Four P’s

~Thomas Mahon~

I spent the first 30 years of my life in a faith-based world. And I have spent the past 50 years of my life in the world of intelligent machines designed eventually to have God-like powers.

Both worlds intend the same effect: that is to interpose themselves between us and nature, the better to control us for the power and profit of the interposer, clergy or technocrat.

So for example the Religion of my childhood defined Nature as a place of God-abandonment: broken, corrupt and sinful. And if we manage to avoid the world, the flesh and the devil in this life, we will spend eternity in the supernatural realm in the company of God.

It’s ironic that as faith in organized religion is fading away, the new faith in machine intelligence (AI, VR, etc.), is luring us into a world created by a small clique whose members aspire to become multi-trillionaires with us living our entire lives in their “platforms,” whether Meta, the Internet of Things (IoT), or the Singularity.

The problem with the new model is the same as the old model. We are creature of nature — we have been for a long time and will continue to be for generations to come. We belch and fart, have dandruff, toe jam and belly lint; are born and die.

Whenever an enterprise — a religion or a business — tells us to be unhappy in nature, to be unhappy in our own skin, and find contentment only on its platform, it does us a great disservice.

I’m not suggesting we go around loincloths and live in caves. Science and Technology, and Faith, have their place in appropriate doses, and have done wonderful things in providing what we need, and inspiring us to heroic acts.

But when Religions demand that we deny our natural humanity, and High-Tech demands that we morph into machines in a single generation, they fail us, terribly.

Don’t be quick to forget that we are creatures of nature, and don’t fall for the falsehood of overstated Faith and over-hyped Intelligent Machines.

Conversions, forced and enforced, serve only the demands of the powerful few, not the needs of the hurting many.

Nature never lies; it can break our hearts, but it never lies.

And nature always bats last

***

We are being subsumed, quite willingly, into a new, all-digital, global society created and controlled by a small clique of very wealthy and very powerful people.

With all the questions surrounding this sudden, massive reshifting of the world order — including employment, surveillance, and mind- and mood-shaping, etc. — it is good for us to step back from time to time to catch our breath and re-visit our relationship to our common mother — Nature — which unlike our tools, allows us to live and move and have our being, from womb to tomb.

And this involves engaging in what I call the 4 P’s. Taking time, from time to time, to back out of the digital universe to Pause. Perceive. Pray/Meditate. And Practice.

Pause

One of the greatest threats to our well-being now is the incessant barrage of marketing “noise” we receive from our electronic devices. It’s estimated that the average person sees 5,000+ ads a day — that’s over 80 percent of the messages we get each day — and most of that registers sub-consciously.

Much of the digital content we get is designed to frighten us, titillate us, and make us greedy and envious. And for the most part we are not even conscious this is happening. Might that have something to do with the increasing coarsening of society that we experience?

We are constantly at the receiving end of a tsunami of destabilizing content. But we are under no obligation to accept it or take in any more of it than what serves our needs. We can control how much we choose to expose ourselves. Pause and think about that and develop composure within yourself.

Electronic engineers work with something called a signal-to-noise ratio. They want their products to put out a strong signal of meaning, with minimal noise or distraction. We need to focus more on the signal of meaning in our lives, and minimize the noise and blather that comes at us constantly — so much of it delivered by our always-on devices.

Perceive

Throughout history, science and technology were largely concerned with things in themselves: stars, atoms, levers, microprocessors. And philosophers and poets were more interested in connections between things: love, mercy, justice. But in the last century the physical and life sciences in fact have focused more on relationships.

The theory of relativity measures everything in relation to the speed of light. Big Bang and evolution theories show how the present state of the universe and the biosphere are the result of measurable processes over time. The life sciences reveal that the mind (psyche) and body (soma) are extremely interdependent. Chaos is in fact highly evolved order. And mass is energy slowed down.

Perceiving and appreciating the interconnectedness of all things is no longer for mystics or poets alone, but also for hard-core physicists and microbiologists as well. Involvement in the web of existence is not an optional activity.

Whatever holds existence together — whether we call it God, Tao, super symmetry, consciousness, entanglement — it deserves our awe, attention and respect. So when we pause, we need to also perceive. And that means to look as well as to see; to listen as well as hear. Perceive the interconnections that are all around us and within us and without us.

Pray/Meditate

St. Benedict who established the monastic order in the 6th Century that kept law, medicine, scholarship and faith alive during the Dark Ages, observed that the Latin word for prayer (ora) is contained the word for work (labora). Doing appropriate work with appropriate tools is prayer. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the Silicon Valley area, said, “Pray always, and if necessary, use words.”

If we hope to reintroduce notions of virtue and humane values back into the scientific and engineering enterprises, mindfulness is the stepping off point. All spiritual traditions practice this: the cultivating of a keen awareness of what a given situation is, how to respond to it, and what will result from that response.

That’s also the definition of engineering, rightly understood. As we practice mindfulness we develop an understanding of our interconnection. We absorb the reality of our connectedness into the core of our being using the ancient spiritual technologies of stillness and silence. And so there is need for an Inner Net, millennia in development and evolving even now to compliment the Internet. The double helix of a sane mind in a sound body. Whether we call it prayer or meditation or something else entirely, it is a priceless tool in every age and place.

Practice

We can make an effort to be mindful and composed when using our tools — at work, home, school — and intend the outcomes to leverage kindness. It can’t be done all the time, but we can start and build on the practice: be calm; be kind.

Be conscious of your actions and thoughts so that from among all the options before you, when you use a tool, choose the one most likely to produce kind outcomes. In the past that was called virtuous behavior. And it’s called a practice because it takes work over time, but with more practice the process gets easier.

To the extent possible, every time you use a tool — whether pencil or supercomputer — practice doing so in a composed frame of mind and intend that the outcome of the effort is an act of kindness. This isn’t possible much of the time, of course, but it’s a start to rethinking technology as if people matter.

And as we start Rethinking Technology, we should also begin to rethink Knowledge itself. So much of our effort is to build the human world based on the model of the wedge, to divide some from others. Better we start to use our tools to structure our societies on the model of the web — of interconnectedness, of being — that the natural sciences are at last revealing to us. And thus engage in what the poet Rilke called ‘the great work of the world.’ The digital in harmony with the natural.

Pause. Perceive. Pray or Meditate. Practice. These four approaches have the potential to transform our relationship to technology that now seem to be overwhelming our humanity.

This short verse speaks to our current situation:

Science looks at how Nature touches us.

Technology is how we touch Nature.

When these are aligned, there is success-in-living.

When they are misaligned, there is catastrophe.

Mindfulness in our tool-use is essential now,

For our success, our sanity, our survival.

CHARGED BODIES, my recently re-published story of the people, power and paradoxes that launched Silicon Valley, is now available. See tommahon.com

© 2024, Thomas Mahon