I catch a whiff of Jevon’s Paradox in all of this. We have more computing power so we find more and more ways to use it, from making grocery lists in an app that used to live on the back of disused envelope to far too many things to name. Some of it’s useful, like instant access to recipes that scratch an itch or use up some odds and ends you didn’t know could be combined. But we seem to be expected to reach for some device to answer our questions, even before the rising tide of machine learning applications (my preferred term). At least in Jevons’ day we got heat and light from coal, but what do we get from this mad dash to be king of the ash heap? I just booked a one night stay in the old city of Kyoto and my stated purpose to the proprietor was to step back into a different kind of sophistication, not simpler/better/worse, just more intentional and organic, if that word still has any meaning.
Have I used machine intelligence myself? I have and the results have been decidedly mixed. I needed to extract a category of posts from Wordpress and clean them up for a book project…no way I could have done that myself as quickly and painlessly, but I had to watch the process and manage it like an eager puppy, all enthusiasm and no awareness. Similarly with a VBA project to extract data from an excel workbook, with all the vagaries of excel for the web vs desktop excel. These tools know all of this stuff, things I don’t want to know, don’t want to spend time learning. So I see some value there. But I have other examples where I know it just can’t do what I need. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Possibly related…I hear an echo in this passage from Jung.
“We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.
“Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.” Jung — Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Okay, but actually, how useful is it to scratch a momentary itch? Most of our consumption is opportunistic, not planned. Such consumption bypasses any careful judgement or social discussion. Which is great news for the corporations that profit from the consumption.
“Everything was precious, now everything is cheap". – Peter Mulvey
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods
I think of this phrase often: “improved means to an unimproved end”