Beatrice Institute Podcast- Unmachining: Reclaiming a Grounded Life
Beatrice Institute Podcast- Unmachining: Reclaiming a Grounded Life
An kitchen table conversation with Grant Martsolf
A few weeks ago
and I had the pleasure of speaking with as part of the podcast series by the Beatrice Institute, an eucumenical learning and research community which serves all who “pursue beauty, truth, and goodness”. Recent episodes include Progressing Toward Apocalypse with ; Can We Rebuild the American Trades with Jacob Imam; and The Fate of Post-Industrial Man with (author of Of Boys and Men). is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, writes on about “flourishing and social class in the Machine Age”, and also just launched here on Substack. If you enjoy the writings of , , and you’ll appreciate Grant’s work as well.It was quite fitting that as we tried to begin our recording session, the tech setup refused to cooperate: first the sound failed, then the mics would not work, then the recording software faltered. Meanwhile the skies outside our window turned almost black and a tornado warning was issued for our area. Fortunately it all did work out and what we share with you here today, is a lively conversation on questions such as:
How do we stay human in the midst of digital upheaval? What lessons can we glean from dystopian literature? Is there a heuristic we can adopt that helps us to discern which technology to use and which to reject? Can only a deistic story compete with the Machine story or are there secular alternatives?
This is not an academic discussion, more like the kind of conversation we might have around a kitchen table (and often indeed do), or while walking along together on a pilgrimage (you can come and join us and
on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage next June - See here for details).You can listen to our conversation with Grant below or on
here.You can also listen to the Episode in full here, with accompanying timestamps to orient you to the topics discussed. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Music.
You can view the complete transcript on the Beatrice Institute website here.
The transcript below is abridged for readability (the ellipses indicate some skipped content).
Grant:…There are two words that you use liberally in your writing: one is the "Machine," and the other is "digital technology." How do you relate these two concepts to each other?
Peco: Digital technology would be things like smartphones, the internet, laptops, those kinds of things, artificial intelligence, more recently. And when we normally think about these things, we think about them in terms of their utility as tools in our lives. And sometimes they're definitely helpful. There are various ways like our Zoom meeting today, where we use technology; it's great, it's good. But when we say the Machine, we're really talking about the dark side of technology, which doesn't get as much conversation, and in particular, the way in which technologies are increasingly dominating our social lives, dominating our personal lives. And then the other dimension to that is that, in addition to the increasing intrusion of technology in all aspects of life, there's almost this ideological component in which there's an assumption that we need to do this, that we need technology. Technology has to be the solution to most, if not all, of our major problems. So when we talk about the Machine, it's not just this dominant effect of technology, but more of a techno-ideological system that is imposed on society.
Grant: And is there a thinker who has been particularly influential on you in terms of how you think about what this Machine is?
Peco: Surprisingly, it didn't start with a thinker, but it started with a piece of furniture: my grandmother's couch.
Years ago, we had to move in with my mother, and she had this couch that she got from her mother. We were just starting a family, and we spent a lot of our time in the evenings sitting on the couch talking about the day, talking about our kids, talking about our marriage, talking about what we saw and what we experienced. This was back in the day when smartphones were just on the verge of being released, so it was still kind of a flip phone era, and as the years went on, we noticed increasingly our conversations were about how technology was altering the behavior of people that we saw all around us. So, this conversation kind of snowballed through the years, and became a real focus of our concern, and then it was a bit later that we began to notice actual thinkers and actual people who've written books that we started to pay a bit more attention to.
Ruth: I think actually the initial person that we started reading that resonated with things that we were observing was Sherry Turkle, who wrote when there was the onset of social media that was affecting young people. Then later on, as our thinking evolved, we started to read
and Wendell Berry and those typical Machine thinkers, but also went back in time to E. M. Forster, and older Machine thinkers. But it was through our conversations where we first really just looked at people around us and looked at what was happening, and made decisions in our lives based on our observations.Peco: Yeah. In summary, Grant, we were concerned parents.
Grant: I’m going to start with some discussion of dystopian literature. In fact, I don't know the timing; I actually think I might have been first introduced to the two of you through the novel [Exogenesis]. It's Ignatius Press, am I remembering this correctly?
Peco: That's correct.
Grant: I think I was buying one of Michael O'Brien's newer novels, and I saw yours, and then I read it, and then I found you through Substack. So, I actually got it probably in a different or opposite direction than some people do. Let me take a step back, it seems in nearly every dystopian novel, artificial baby production takes a key role in the narrative. Why do you think novelists see artificial wombs as such a central feature of the dystopian future?
Peco: So, I'll just kind of begin with myself, it really started not so much with literature, but with actual science. I was just looking at what's really happening in science today and the research today, and artificial wombs are being developed, not to the extent that you see in dystopian fiction, but they're being developed. And also, there are increasing advances in the field of genetics, in terms of understanding things like polygenic risk scores for certain heritable traits; this is advancing quickly. And so, when I was looking at that stuff, I thought, oh, this would be interesting to put in a novel. When I was writing my novel Exogenesis, I hadn't read Brave New World at that point. I mean, I think I'd probably heard about the bottle babies at some point, that might've sunk into my consciousness, or my unconsciousness, but at the explicit level, I was thinking about the actual science. So that's what fascinated me, like, where is our science going? Where might it get to eventually? In terms of other writers, I don't know what their motivation is, but certainly, when you think of childbirth and pregnancy, it's such a defining aspect of people, right? In mythology, we have this idea of Mother Earth, and things grow out of Mother Earth, trees and bushes and whatnot. And it's almost like women themselves are like Mother Earths. They grow stuff, literally out of their bodies, and they're human beings, and the first experience of human life is this weird, bio-social connection that we have to another human where eventually we become individuated as we’re born. So, it's really a defining element, and that's why I think it's all the more morally disturbing to imagine severing that connection, severing that bond and growing babies in bio-pouches as they do in Exogenesis and then looking at their genetic profiles, walking through a warehouse, and looking at them hanging in pouches and saying, “which baby do I want to be my baby?”, “which is the best baby?”. That's just morally disturbing, but also fascinating for a novelist.
Ruth: And I think, from a spiritual perspective, the way that the dystopian futures use this, when a woman has a child within her, that's a spiritual connection, that's a creation process. And it's one of those processes that can't be replicated outside a person – it breaks you open, it's your first contact with a true, kind of helpless love, and also with suffering that produces life. So we come into deep connection with creation and God in the process of being pregnant and giving birth, and to then extract that into a dystopian future where that separation has happened, I think it's kind of like this rupture with God. I think maybe that's why it's also fascinating to write about.
Peco: Can I just say something? I think you said “helpless love,” when you were describing pregnancy. I love that phrase because you really are helpless, and in the dystopian world, everything is under control. There is no helplessness, which sounds better, and in some ways, maybe it's more convenient and safer, of course, but something is lost when we lose that element of helplessness, even though it sounds paradoxical; why would somebody want to feel helpless? So it's a bit of a paradox as well, right? How do we struggle with the desire for security and safety, but also the loss of humanity that might come with having too much convenience?
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Grant:…So, what do you think goes through the mind of real world Machine architects like Zuckerberg, Altman, and Musk, when they read these dystopian novels?
Peco: That's a really good question. I mean, I really don't know what goes through their minds, but these people are elites. They're financial elites, and in some respects they're social elites, and verging on political elites, right? They've got this great power over society. And, there's the old saying, you cannot worship God and money. You have to pick one. And when you have that much power, I can imagine how seductive it is and how much you have to struggle with trying not to rationalize your own ambitions, and you're trying to extract your own ego from that process. I don't know how they do it, I think it's very difficult. So, for them, I think that the temptation is to fall into the feeling of I can be a Mustapha Mond, and it's going to be good; I'm going to make it better, my intentions are really good.
Grant: That's a really good point. I saw an interview with that she did with Sam Altman, who developed Open AI. It was really fascinating, he was a very smart guy, very thoughtful. I mean, his whole idea is that he would have AI for people, right? That it would serve the common good. And then, she basically asked him a variation of this question: “why are you so virtuous that you won't turn into a monster?” And she didn't ask it this way, she asked a little bit more tactfully, but it was really fascinating; he didn't understand the question, right? He really returned to the fact that we have these systems, and we have committees. And she said, “no, you, why can you wield this power responsibly?” And it was sobering to hear him have, again, not even so much a bad answer, he just didn't even understand the question.
Peco: So, kind of a snapshot of the unexamined life.
Grant: Exactly, yeah. Okay, so obviously these dystopian novels feature a Machine manager, and often this tends to be an important plot point, where their eyes are open to what the system is doing to society, and then the novel revolves around their escaping or putting sand in the gears or whatever it is. We think of Bernard Marx and Paul Proteus from Player Piano; what do you think primarily leads to the awakening of a Machine manager?
Peco: I'm not sure in reality, how many of them will actually awaken. You look at World War II, and Nazis who just obeyed orders. You look at the Milgram experiments where people were shocking innocent people, giving them electric shocks during a cognitive task. And they take those shocks to quite a high level, to fatal levels. I think, sad to say in reality, most people, their eyes aren't opened. I think that's the danger we face when their eyes do become open, because that does happen sometimes, outside of literature in the real world. It reminds me of
; he wrote a book called The Psychology of Totalitarianism. In it, he talks about how when you're trying to deal with a population that's been heavily propagandized, and they're really closed off to any counter narrative, the solution is not to just try to argue strongly against them because that will just put up their defenses, right? They'll just reject that. What you need to do is very gently present information to them, and just quietly seed things around them, and hope that some of that will take.Ruth: I think maybe one example of a real life manager that kind of broke with the Machine was Tristan Harris, who you might be familiar with, who produced The Social Dilemma. And, I think one of the things that made him step out of the Google Machine, is recognizing what was going on. Because, I think as humans, we have this innate desire for freedom and autonomy, so we want to feel that our lives and our actions are in our control. He recognized that there was deliberate manipulation of attention, there was deliberate algorithmic enslavement. I think part of what made him step out is that there was a disconnection between the things he was observing, and his inner conscience. I think when there's this gap between what we observe truthfully in our real life observations and our inner conscience, that's when a change in a manager can happen, where they need to kind of bridge that gap.
Grant: …Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about your work in Substack. Again, it's been a real joy and pleasure to read your work; it's been fun to see you build a little community around your writing. That's been a real lesson for me to watch as you develop your Substack. So I'm going to read a quote from, it seems to me that Ruth is primarily the writer of School of the Unconformed, and Peco's primarily the writer of Pilgrims in the Machine, but you seem to cross right together, is that correct? It seems like the vast majority of pieces are co-written.
Peco: Yeah, so whenever there's sort of what we call a “think piece”, something a bit deeper and more abstract, usually I'm leading on that, and then if there are more applied insights, often we write together or Ruth will write on that. So there is overlap, and then there's a bit of separation as well.
Ruth: I think it kind of reflects a bit of our personalities and our kind of strengths; you're the thinker/analyzer a bit more, and I'm a bit more of the community person and kind of the social connector; so I do more of the social connection.
Peco: So, this is a really good way of saying we're each half a person.
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Grant: …So, I'm going to quote from a piece, called “The Three R's of Unmachining”, and this is from the School of the Unconformed. You're discussing a conversation with a Mennonite woman named Esther, so here's what you say: “Even though Esther and I were over a century removed from each other in modern conveniences we chose to use, we shared the same conviction that technology is making us less human." So what is the most basic sense in which, in this case, digital technology, I don't think this is all technology necessarily, but particularly digital technology, is making us less human.
Ruth: I think, at two most basic levels: one is it corrupts our relationships, and two, it corrupts our attention, and both of those go together. I'll start with attention. I think the average college student now switches tasks every 19 seconds; you can't even brush your teeth within 19 seconds. Which means we are so helplessly distracted and enslaved by these devices that we can't attend.
If we lose all train of thought, we can't attend to each other; we can't attend to what we are reading; we can't learn; we can't produce quality work; we can't attend to democracy, because we can't attend to what is true, what is not true. We can't attend to scripture or our prayer. So, I think it's making us less human because it corrupts our attention, which is necessary for everything that we do. I think most importantly, it translates into our relationships. It always kind of pains me when, for example, I see young mothers, and this is not to blame anyone, it's just an observation, when you see young mothers, who are nursing their child, but they're not looking at the child at their breast, they're looking at their phone because it feels like downtime, and maybe I can spend some time on the phone. This is the most basic relationship, and we see it in lots of small ways where things kind of just get interrupted and we don't look at each other or we don't take the time to speak with each other. I think that's the most fundamental part in which it is making us less human.
Peco: In psychology, there are these concepts of agency and communion. Communion refers to social connection, and this is what Ruth is talking about, the separation within the realm of social connection. Then there's also this separation in the realm of agency. Agency is this capacity that we need to experience struggles in life and triumphs in life, right, to go on adventures. So yesterday, our little boy, our 12 year old, spent half the day in a barn with a bunch of other boys, and they were doing these adventure games there and jumping off of lofts. And, by the time we picked him up, he showed us his hand, he had some blood there, he had cut himself. So, these were physical games, there were minor injuries , there were scrapes. You don't get that in a video game, you don't get that when you watch an adventure in a movie, you don't get that in a representational world that's presented to you digitally, so you don't get full agency. You don't get a real sense of triumph and accomplishment. So that in addition to the loss of social connection, these two themes, agency and social connection are really foundational for humans. What it means is we're becoming more and more isolated from the real world and separated.
Grant: So, one of the key stories that we tell ourselves, and you talk a lot about stories in your writing and narrative, to justify unending technological adoption and progress and actually democratic capitalism more generally, are these origin stories, one of primordial scarcity, and one of primordial violence. They're really fundamental in our psyches of the West, in this way, we're sort of all Hobbesian. I often ask my students in a policy course I teach, what would happen if there was no democratic state and immediately we'd all kill each other, and it's just so deep in our psyche. So, convince the listeners that these two origin stories of progress are false.
Peco: I don't think they're necessarily false, because of course there are times of scarcity and violence; you don't need to scratch deep under the surface of a human being to find hostility. But I think the real primordial story is our relationship with the transcendent, I think that's the real primordial story. And the problem is, when you don't have that story, you start to operate from the story that you described, which is one of scarcity and violence. So, you go back to Sam Altman, who didn't understand that question that was posed to him, and that's because, I'm inferring here, but it could be because he hasn't really focused on that primordial story. Like, what's my connection to the existential reality that I live in? What does that mean for me and my struggles? Instead, it gets projected onto the system, right? So you think, how do we resolve scarcity through technology or through some political system? How do we resolve violence through technology or through some political system?
Now, of course, you can develop technologies and political systems that can help with those things. But if that's all you do, then you're really just tinkering with external structures, and you're failing to develop that internal awareness and consciousness and moral sense, and sense of responsibility. I think that can only really strongly arise, well, I won't say only, but I think the way that it normatively historically has arisen is when people really believe that there's something bigger than them or external to them, like a God or something just bigger that they need to be committed to, and that primarily defines their story.
Grant: Yeah, so this actually is a great lead into my next question, again, I really appreciate this about your writing, you talk about “Unmachining” from a positive perspective. What I mean by that is, it's not so much let's scare our kids that the Machine is horrible and it's going to hurt them severely, which is true, I think, but let's give them another story and another vision that's positive. So they'll want this positive vision and reject what the Machine has to offer. So it's an orientation of love, rather than fear. And as you said, we need another story that's more compelling than the story of the Machine. Is Christianity the only real Western story that can compete with the Machine story? Or at least some deistic, theistic story? Are there secular alternatives? Or do we need to return to God?
Peco: The Machine story is very powerful, and the reason why Christianity and perhaps some other spiritualities might serve as a counterweight is because they're anchored in a transcendent, right, and a transcendent could be powerful enough to serve as a counterweight, against the pull and draw of the Machine story. So, I think that's why those stories are powerful.
The difficulty is, and I should say, you're right, our goal is not to cast technology in a totally negative light. We don't want to demonize technology; we want to demote it from its primary status. But if we fail to demote it, if instead we elevate it and we say, no, technology is the answer is the solution. If we take this kind of ultimate approach and we just focus on that, we end up with a Machine story and the Machine story is, “you can do anything with technology, you can achieve anything.” And the story really is, you are a god, and that's a really problematic story.
So if you're a secular person now, and let's say you don't believe in God, the challenge that you're going to face, and it's going to be a difficult challenge, is what is the story that you're going to have that's going to be big enough to pull you out of yourself and serve as a counterweight to that story? Because what tends to happen with a lot of progressive stories, is as much as there can be a lot of good in those stories, I don't want to minimize that, they also tend to implode on the self and really emphasize self validation and self stimulation, how can I be stimulated? How can I be validated? and don't question that. That's ultimately the thing that needs to be protected, but what is that? That's a Machine story. So, the challenge that secular people are going to face trying to develop a secular story is that it doesn't slide into a Machine story, not saying it's not possible, but I think it's extremely difficult.
Ruth: I was going to just add, we have a lot of secular readers. We actually have readers from across the political spectrum and religious spectrum and non-religious spectrum. So we do try and kind of offer common ground for anybody who's trying to find an alternate story. But I think at the base, a secular alternative would need to reject what we call faux-reality. It would need to reject the type of reality that's presented to us virtually, because the digital dimension, in it, we're by default a commodity. We need to kind of recognize that, and so the relationships we have online, they're not real, they're pseudo relationships. And again, that being groomed into a narcissistic self focus, being groomed into these enslaved hostages to the virtual world, any kind of secular story has to sort of reject that in favor of actual reality.
Grant: Yeah. So I want to move a little bit more into the practical. Actually this reminds me again, everything kind of comes back to Wendell Berry at some point, I suspect, but his story “Why I’ll Never Buy a Computer,” and he actually has this sort of heuristic that he goes through. I think they're 12 questions that you should ask when you're about to adopt a new technology. ”Is it actually better than the thing it’s replacing?”; “Can a normal person of normal intelligence fix this thing?”, those sorts of things. Do you have a heuristic that you use when thinking about adopting new technology? So you adopted Substack, is there a heuristic that you go through, before you adopt something new?
Peco: No, there isn't. And the reason is, I mean, I think that could be a good idea. I don't mean to dismiss the idea, but for us, it's really about how do we live well, right? And a lot of that, I should say, we're people of faith, so a lot of it is grounded in a spiritual worldview. And then out of that, there are these kinds of principles and ways of living that get extracted, and then those become behaviors and routines in our lives. I would say for me, the most protective thing has been, um, I call it routine hygiene. You have a routine for how to live, right? You wake up, you eat, and then you work, and you take breaks. I try to stay faithful to those routines to be productive, to keep a sense of balance to make sure I connect properly with my people in my family and people in my community. I try to prioritize that, and then technology fits in around that, and it can be any kind of technology for the most part. I mean, I use mostly a laptop and basic kinds of apps. But, if an app came along that disrupted that routine, and sometimes it happens. Just think of how you could be involved in the most special moment in your life, and get a notification on your phone that literally drags you to your phone. Like, you're just about to tell her that you love her more than anything, and the notification pops up, like, hold on a second. This defines our lives. Our routines are kind of riddled with these gunshots of technological intrusion. So I would say, really focus on your life, and that means stepping back from technology and asking yourself what's really valuable in life. What's worth living for? What's worth striving for?
Ruth: And maybe what I'll add is the one heuristic we do use is, “does it separate us from each other?” I think this is something we learned around 20 years ago when we first became Christians, where separation is kind of at the root and technology has this way of separating us. So, if I'm spending too much time on the computer, it's separating me from my children and the work that I need to do in my home, so, that can't happen. I think that's kind of a very basic heuristic of asking, does it bring us closer to each other, or does it separate us?
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Grant: Yeah, and so what we're doing at the University of Pittsburgh is we developed something called the
, which is a group of faculty at Pitt, very committed to orienting the applied sciences to human flourishing. So, similar to what you're talking about, how do you live well, and we talk about six basic goods, right. One of them is to love and to be loved, the other is agency, actually, you mentioned these, there's some dovetailing. And so, we're trying to encourage engineering students, medical students, and education students to really think: whenever I'm doing this intervention or developing this technology, how does it serve these six basic goods? I think that's helpful for some students anyway. So my understanding is you do not have cell phones, at least now, is that smartphones or cell phones generally?Peco: Well, I mean, I have a smartphone because I have a business, I have work, so I need a smartphone. I just generally use it for phone calls, pictures, and checking the weather. I don't really use it, but I use it for audio books as well, which I love. I mean, that's the one technology if I were to say I'm so grateful for, because I have eye strain, so I can't look at screens for very long without feeling kind of annoyed – maybe this is why I don't like technology, right? Like, it's just eye strain, this is a bad case of eye strain, all these theories – no, no, he just had eye strain. But yeah, we don't use many devices.
Ruth: I don't have a cell phone and I've never had one; I've just never wanted one because I recognize that, because I think I'm a connector by nature, I like communicating with people. I think it's just too much all the time to have a temptation on me. So one of the things is: just don't have technology on your body; that's kind of one separation. And frankly, when I go for walks or anything like that, I always just like being free. I don't need to be reached, I'll be back home at some point.
Peco: Ruth is a natural pilgrim. She won't not only not take a phone, she won't take her keys, her wallet, like nothing. She'll just have, if she could go barefoot, she would go barefoot. And I think she's always been a light traveler in life. And, you're a bit of a pilgrim, you're a natural pilgrim in that way. I think if you could be, you would walk all the time.
Ruth: Yes!
Grant: So, one thing I've been thinking about, can you give me an example of someone that you've interacted with through your writing, or just even your personal lives, who radically changed their perspective on digital technology and what was it that turned them? And I mean like a normie, you know, we were talking about Sam Altman and Tristan Harris. I mean, a normal human being that was like, Oh my goodness. You're right. I need to change my life. What was it to change them?
Ruth: I think what we have most often encountered, is people who have had these inner inklings of, something’s off and I would like to change, or people who have kind of realized, you know, I'd like a better relationship with my kids, or, I feel separated from my spouse. So they had these kinds of inner inklings, but through reading these articles, it gave them an additional impetus, and they felt like, okay, now I'll do it because I see others are doing it and you're saying it clearly, and this is giving me the extra motivation to do it. So, this year and last year, we had these sort of community digital fasting phases, and there, a lot of people have written back saying, wow, that was the experience that kind of helped me to recognize what's really important, what I want my life to be about. And it helped me to kind of do a reset, or like a restart…There's been hundreds of people that have written saying that these kinds of writings have encouraged them to kind of take it to the next level and to really give this a serious go and to feel encouraged by others who are also doing it.
Peco: Yeah, and I think a lot of people who maybe don't see a lot of examples around them feel isolated, and they feel like they're the only ones, or maybe their family is the only family, that's thinking about these things. And so, we sometimes get letters or emails from people saying, you know, thanks for reminding us that we're not alone in this.
Ruth: It actually kind of reminds me of this C. S. Lewis quote that I just came across where, if everybody's running toward a cliff and you're the one running away from it, you're the one who looks insane. This is kind of paraphrased, but it's kind of helping people realize that, you know, it's okay to be weird and it's okay to be different because after all, maybe we do need to turn at this cliff and go in the other direction.
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Grant: One thing I suspect and maybe don't, but I hear this in my own experience is that, you know, you're just a Luddite or an Alarmist. How do you respond when people say to you, “well, in the 1980s, we were scared about television and it's turned out okay.” I think you can actually really contest that claim, but you know what I mean? It was either Aristotle or Socrates was very concerned about the written word, how that would destroy discourse. So, how do you respond to someone who says, “you’re fear mongering, people will adapt, people are very adaptive. This is a new reality that we just need to adapt to.” How do you respond to that?
Peco: People who think we're fear mongering probably don't really closely read our writing. There might be other Machine writers who are a bit more on that emphasis, but I think we really try to emphasize a different tack on that. One thing I'll just kind of point out again is, you know, the goal is not to demonize technology, but to demote it from its place of priority. And, what's different today is, first the acceleration of technology. Things are moving faster than ever before. So you look at, when was the written word invented? When was the first wheeled vehicle invented? Something like 3000-ish BC. And then, when was gunpowder invented? Like 4000 years later, right?
So in the really old days, technological innovation happened really slowly, and now it's accelerating really quickly. So, that's one real difference that makes it hard to adapt. Then, the other is the really intrusive nature of technology in terms of co-opting our attention, as Ruth was pointing out earlier, co-opting our relationships, and co-opting our sense of agency. And so, the corrosive effects on the deeper fabric of the person are accelerating and deeper. I think those are the differences and those are the points of concern for us.
Ruth: And I think, what you were also pointing out is, of course we can adapt, but because I think you call it like we're contortionists, right, we can adapt to almost any situation. That does not mean that the situation or that reality is a good one to adapt to. So, maybe we should be asking, is this a reality we want to adapt to? Do we want to have that much technology in our life? Do we want to be that separate from each other? Do we want to feel comfortable with that?
Do we want to be this separate from our children? Do we want to have most of our time spent online? I think, one statistic I looked at, it's like an average of 44 years spent connected to technology in our lives. Do we want that? Do we want to adapt to this? Maybe we don't.
Grant: So, last question, and it's similar, what's the productive utility of nostalgia? A lot of writing within this Machine literature says, well, remember back to this time, how great it was. Is nostalgia useful or not?
Peco: I think we all have a bit of a halo effect when we look at the past because the past is static and known. And so, some of the anxiety that gets connected to the future doesn't linger over our memories of the past, and so it can feel a bit safer. I'm not sure nostalgia is all that useful or productive, except where it points us back to something true or good or beautiful. So yesterday I was driving to a little village just outside of our town, where our son works at a butcher shop and it's in Mennonite country. So I was driving along and I saw a couple of horses pulling a buggy, and I slowed down as we were approaching it because, it actually was odd because it had lights, electric lights on the front, which I normally don't see on Mennonite carriages and I peered over as I passed and there were three or four boys and a girl sitting in there, all of them wore this dark blue, and the person who was riding, steering the carriage was a little boy. And, the glow on his face was, you know, it was really palpable, and I think he was learning to drive. So it's kind of like for us, you know, when you're 16 or 18 or whatever the age is there in the U.S. and your dad is sitting beside you going, okay, go slowly, remember, push down on the clutch before you change the gear, this kind of thing. I guess this was his equivalent, and when I saw them, I felt that nostalgia. And the nostalgia wasn't that I wanted to be a Mennonite. It wasn't that I wanted to go back in time and live on a farm. It was nostalgia for the simplicity of life, for the simple good things in life, the embodied experiences with other people in the real world that don't leave us sullied in the end, that don't diminish us in the end, that don't make us feel like, what did I just do? As we sometimes feel when we spend too much time with our VR headset or in front of a screen, but that instead leaves us feeling like this was a good nourishing experience, and it left me feeling more human. I think nostalgia there, if it points you back to that, can be healthy.
Ruth: And I think, maybe opposed to a productive kind of nostalgia, an opposite would be more like, a productive alternate reality, right? Because we see sort of an alternate time beside us here sometimes when we see the Mennonites, the school children kind of playing out in the field, you know, all kind of dressed simply, so we kind of have it as visuals in front of us. But I think many of us encounter this when we get back in touch with just the simple things, you know, tending a garden, or baking a bread. Maybe that's why we bring up these simple things. It's not a nostalgia, it's more like just turning toward simple reality and recognizing there's something there that we can tap into that grounds us.
Grant: Well, that's a great way to end. Ruth and Peco, thank you so much for joining me, particularly taking time out of your Saturday. It's been a great conversation. I like to think that if we lived in the same town, I think we'd have a really fun evening with our kids all sitting around a table, so thank you.
Books and articles mentioned in this episode:
- ’s writings on the Machine
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
The Iron Heel by Jack London
Exogenesis by
GaskovskiBrave New World by Aldous Huxley
“Acceleration and Resonance: An Interview with Hartmut Rosa”
- ’s conversation with Sam Altman: “Is AI the End of the World? Or the Dawn of a New One?”
The Psychology of Totalitarianism by
The Social Dilemma, a documentary by Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google and founder of the Center for Human Technology.
“Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer” by Wendell Berry
“Machine Capture in Three Acts Lessons from Henry and the Great Society”
by Grant Martsolf published on
The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
Please share your responses or reflections in the comments.
We’d also love to hear what questions you would ask us!
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Great and insightful interview.
Funnily enough, that segment on Sam Altman is as germane as ever with the release of o1 today. OpenAI reports it as performing as well as PhD students and at least from initial impressions, it appears to be a big step up from GPT-4. As the gaps between significant release dates seems to be decreasing with the rate of progress seemingly accelerating, it feels as if the opportunity cost of unmachining is only rising. Altman's recent comments about strapping rockets to dumpsters don't engender much faith in anyone who wants to believe he is taking the risks seriously.
I just can't help but feel that immediate future of technology will only leave more people behind as opposed to taking them forwards.
OK, I bow out ... salute to our hosts for the conversation ... POV matters. I will continue reading the rest of the transcript!👍