FROM THE PRINT MAGAZINE:
The following is an excerpt from the Overture to our upcoming magazine, New Polity Issue 7.3, “The Hype vs. the Real.” It is published here to tempt you into subscribing to the print magazine. This essay also inaugurates a new blog series: “The Great AI Debate.” The series will provide a space for our thinking on AI and for people thinking differently than us to publish and push back. Send submissions with an abstract to cs@newpolity.com.
It is a terrible time to be in the SSPX, because Pope Leo is obviously the man. Without his guidance you’ll get stuck AI-generating images of commemorative wine bottles and (somehow) feeling traditional. (Rats! To have missed the obvious Francis Moment, which surely would have scraped together more sympathy for the schismatic.) In Magnifica Humanitas, the said pope sayeth: “the artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking. Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections” (Magnifica Humanitas 100).
In this, the pope is sensitive to the actual reality of industrial and post-industrial capitalism, which is not the storybook version in which the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, ending in a class of subsistence farmers scratching at the dirt beneath skies occupied by billionaires who spit on them from private jets. What we have actually seen is a rise in relative wealth, accompanied by a massive disparity in its distribution and a weird appropriation of the goods normally associated with poverty by the wealthy.
No matter what possible consumerism might yet accomplish, actual consumerism has produced a world in which machines have made it difficult to live a less-than-expensive life. The transformation of the world into a car-world has not made driving expensive, it has made walking expensive—one must be rather well-off to live in a walkable city or neighborhood. The industrial food system makes it very cheap to eat and drink the products of great expense and energy-consumption, and very expensive to eat (what were once) low-expense products: food that’s organic, no-spray, grass-fed, harvested by hands, pasture-raised and so forth, which are now ways of marketing what is in fact an overall “doing less” to your vegetable. Small carrots with dirt on them are today more expensive than big carrots with no dirt, and the general expense of the farmer’s market compared to the cheapness of a Dollar General is the great punchline of capitalism: actually, the rich get poorer.
Rich kids get Montessori schools, which countenance neither screen nor any other expensive tech. Poor kids still (!) get one-to-one tablet and laptop programs and online everything. Marriage has not been abandoned, it has been similarly enclosed as the province of the college-educated. What anyone can observe by talking to an Ohio Valley man with his “wife”—by which he means “most recent girlfriend”—Professor Brad Wilcox put in these terms: “a majority of educated and affluent Americans (ages eighteen to fifty-five) are married, whereas only a minority of poor and working-class Americans are married.”[1] Church attendance is the same—increasingly, it’s an enclave of the college-educated middle-class.[2] Health, which was once a small boast of the poor against the gout of the rich, is now an expensive product: poverty basically tracks with obesity and other morbidities. Not having a smartphone, not being addicted to social media, and, in general, not being on the consuming end of expensive machines—this is expensive, sometimes requiring a $100,000 education at a Catholic school to even countenance the habit-kick.
To put it another way, if your life involves living, in crucial ways, like the poor of 1880; if you have the time and opportunity to raise vegetables and keep animals; if eating and drinking and working involve you with friends and family; if you can walk to get groceries or get a drink; if your family and friends are near and enjoy common spaces together; if you can read a book; if you have a degree of spiritual depth and the ability to pay attention to the world; if you have a wife or a husband and every now and then think that your relationships of love are the real treasure of life and that you wouldn’t trade them for all the money in the world; if you have an inheritance of faith and an education which allows you to judge which technologies you will adopt, and when, and how—well, you’re probably middle-class to wealthy. You can afford the joys of poverty.
The pope describes “human communication” as another commons, ripe for enclosure. Again, his concern is not primarily that we will take chatbots for human subjects, but that those who need human connection most will be “transhumanized” instead of touched—given simulacra which are “just as good” or “better” and so ”gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections” (Magnifica Humanitas, 100). Nothing’s inevitable, but with the amount of debt with which the simulation of human connection is being produced, actual human connection is set to become a scarce commodity, and the mark of power and wealth in our society to become the capacity (and desire) to receive human connection without renting it from the great tech monopoly, just as it is currently a mark of power and wealth to not have to drive a car.
“Conversation,” “being together with another,” “being listened to”—these will decidedly not take the storybook route, with the wealthy enjoying maximized chatbot use, AI companions, and instant, seamless virtual reality, while the poor grit their teeth and deal with the flesh-and-blood world of personal encounter. If the route that has always been followed is followed once more, the wealthy producers and financiers of chatbot technology will make the world of personal encounter an expensive commodity that they can afford, while the poorer and the poorest will be pressured into purchasing commodified versions of personal encounter in the form of fake persons—the operation of which accrues to the wealthy.
We already know this on a small scale: Do you think that the technocratic elite of our country deal with AI-powered call centers? Do you think their problems are resolved by the use of AI assistants “here to help?” Do you think their therapists are chatbots? Do you think our elites are dropping their kids off at Montessori school, sipping their acacia tea alone, and spending the rest of the day with ChatGPT on the topic of whether or not to shoot up a shopping mall? Do you think they have AI girlfriends because they are lonely? Alternatively, do you think that the American poor will buy Light Phones? Do you think that they will pick up the Silicon Valley trend of “friction-maxxing,” in which they add slow, analogue technologies to their lives in order to keep the creative powers awake within an increasingly seamless digital universe? That they have enough of the nobility of the American Working Class to disdain the distractions placed upon their attention spans? Do you think that the techies of the Bay Area will end their lives in nursing homes, without visitors, a prime market for “help” in and through the installation of humanoid companion robots?
No, obviously: tech is made for the 99% by the 1%. The 1% have family, friends, attention, skill, spiritual wealth, and plentiful human connection—that is to say, the goods of poverty. The 99% get to deal with the machines—the goods of immensely concentrated wealth. The incessant cry of Magnifica Humanitas is to remember “the most vulnerable.” Designers are to take “care for the poor” as the mark of the success of their products: “the quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer” (Magnifica Humanitas 113). Such a priority given to the poorest is the only way out of the commodity trap, in which a wealthy person takes his own spiritual wealth as the norm of his society, and then builds machines, the temptations and degradations of which he can avoid, only to be genuinely surprised (I do think the surprise is sometimes genuine) to find that for the poor, these things are dangers: addictive, anaesthetizing replacements—and not augmentations—of things missing in their lives.
Marc Barnes is the editor of New Polity and a professor at the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio.
Notes
Patrick T. Brown and Brad Wilcox, “Get Married: An Interview with Brad Wilcox,” Ethics and Public Policy Center, April 11, 2024, https://eppc.org/publication/get-married-an-interview-with-brad-wilcox.
W. Bradford Wilcox et al., “No Money, No Honey, No Church: The Deinstitutionalization of Religious Life Among the White Working Class,” in Lisa A. Keister, John Mccarthy, Roger Finke, eds., Religion, Work and Inequality, Research in the Sociology of Work, vol. 23 (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2012), 227–50.