A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. "Meghan O’Gieblyn is a brilliant and humble philosopher, and her book is an explosively thought-provoking, candidly personal ride I wished never to end ... This book is such an original synthesis of ideas and disclosures. It introduces what will soon be called the O’Gieblyn genre of essay writing.” —Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.
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A friend gifted this book to me for my birthday last month. I'm glad they did, because I'd have missed it otherwise! I did not quite know what to expect going in, but it proved to be a lovely mix of memoir, history, and question-asking. Very me.
I'm going to keep this constrained to just my experience reading the book. This has been one of my most notated books in recent memory and a lot of my notes are questions. I'm going to resurrect my dusty substack to meander through some of those. I'll edit this review later with links to those posts.
I picked up the book about two months after my friend explained it to me and had for some reason an understanding that it was about AI. It is about a lot more than that. I was initially thrown off by the philosophy discussion opening the book, but found the writing so approachable and so personable that it didn't feel so divorced from the practicals of the human experience. I'm not sure what I mean by that. I tend towards a low tolerance for highly philosophic books because ultimately it ends up being a lot of stroking that doesn't lead anywhere. The deep philosophical questions of the world, like, are we in a simulation? don't mean that much to me as I'm working on homelessness or how technology is impacting people experiencing it. They would mean more if someone told me how to open the console and the codes to make the world a better place and fast.
Perhaps that's an imagination failing on my part. Anyway, the discussions often feel more about the speaker than about the mysteries of the world when they're in writing. I quite adored the weaving of self into O'Gieblyn's writing. It is refreshing to read someone struggling with these big questions and choosing not to try and separate themselves from their thinking. Context matters! Context always matters. She discusses this on pages 152-153 in passages that I've drawn giant exclamation marks adjacent to.
I think a lot about equity when it comes to AI tools and how they are deployed. Really not even deployed. Developed, trained, deployed, utilized, evaluated. I tend to be suspicious of people who claim these models will be able to balance out or be prompted in such a way as to solve for the bias within their models. I get a bit freaked out about these models making decisions in the human/social services that could impact things like people being referred for housing or who gets a voucher.
There are a couple of places in the book where O'Gieblyn describes AI of significant sophistication as to render it indistinguishable from revelation. Or, that because we cannot understand the decisions made and cannot possibly probe these models for understanding, that we must accept their say in a way analogous to the believer accepting the word of their god. It reminds me of that old thing that technology of significant sophistication is indistinguishable from magic. Magic, Majesty, Mysticism, Machines. This is the stuff of nightmares when you're trying to ensure equity and accountability. The first three of these things have been co-opted by systems to dominate populations – and it's probable that we are witnessing or have witnessed the co-opting of the fourth. Not that I am resigned to this cynicism.
Which is to say, I think these tools can be used for good. But I think it is hard to square these extremely sophisticated machines as tools when their complexity is nearer a galaxy than a hammer.
I have a ton of little notes throughout the book and even more simple tabs marking passages. But almost all of those are going to show up in some form of writing in the next few weeks, and they're all about questions in my head instead of the book itself.
So I'll try to cut this short. I really enjoyed this! The blend of memoir, science, theology, literature, and philosophy is right up my alley. I love thinking about these questions, and they are presented in such human terms that they are not clinical or obtuse. I need to chew on this for a while, and write out what I'm thinking and chew on it some more. I mean, the author talks about the story of Job several times and that is one of the stories that really sprung a leak in my faith, so it's always a real treat to accompany someone else's thoughts on it.
Probably one of the more compelling realizations I had while reading involved a quote or story from Niels Bohr around page 174. Basically, the realization or remembrance that mathematics and physics are not, in fact, the language of the universe. There is no connective tissue between those squiggly lines in textbooks and LaTeX editors on your computer to the underpinnings of the Universe. If there are underpinnings at all, we have no mechanism by which to observe or interact with them. The best we can do is create symbols and bestow upon them meaning. The best we can do are shallow metaphors. That is, for whatever reason, quite freeing and compelling to me.
