Pope Leo XIV was reported the other day as saying on AI: “We currently interact with machines as if they were interlocutors and thus become almost an extension of them. In this sense, we not only run the risk of losing sight of the faces of the people around us, but of forgetting how to recognize and cherish all that is truly human.”
It sounds like typical priestly pablum, the kind that anyone who has ever spent any time in a Catholic school might roll their eyes at out of force of habit; I can almost hear Father Madi crooning “all we can do is pray for you” when urging our senior year to demonstrate how seriously we’re taking our baccalaureate finals. But there’s much more to these words than that.
The Pope’s words struck me as reminiscent of the much more incisive insights of Gunther Anders who wrote on technology: “There is no situation that is morally more evil than the situation in which evil has been so fully integrated into the situation that the individual itself is spared from being evil.”
That’s been the trend in society since the very first rise of intelligent war machines, which took a giant leap forward in the age of the atom. But as Manuel Delanda wrote in the 90s, the gradual stripping away of human guidance in war has been going on for centuries.
And now, as with most things, what was tested in the battlefield is being deployed against us. As Christoher Muller put it, reflecting on Anders: “The more technology allows us to do…the more it necessarily also does “without us”—that is, without our active comprehension, involvement and thus, ultimately, also without requiring our explicit consent or generating concern. Increasingly, our things don’t seem to need us anymore.”
That’s exactly what served the interests of the war generals, and precisely what will serve captains of industry. Weapons that don’t need soldiers anymore. Labor minus the laborers.
Gunther Anders wrote about ‘the obsolesce of humanity’ in the wake of what he called “the bomb”—so singular an event that it did not need any qualification. As threats to resume “testing” (read: use) of this bomb are being made again, it’s important to return to his insights.
This is how his argument broke down:
1. Moral philosophy has always believed that there would always be human beings.
2. To be able to make the bomb, it was necessary that there be no moral conscience.
3. The bomb is not a means since it exceeds all ends.
4. We have become bigger than ourselves. We have become smaller than ourselves.
That last point needs explaining; we have created technologies that allows us to destroy our world several times over. The threat is so much larger than us that, he argues, we are now incapable of true fear. As Frédérick Lemarchand puts it: “At the very moment when we should apprehend—in the double meaning of grasping and being afraid—what we are doing, the maker of end of the world instruments seems devoid of any moral conscience and therefore of any sense of concern for the world.”
We grow in our capacities, and we are greatly diminished.
We took this photo among the monuments to a now fleeting sense of hope, that dream of the 90s when nuclear war seemed to be truly a thing of the past. We can revive that dream today, if we want. I don’t think enough of us want to.
This is what Albert Camus wrote on August 7, 1945, the day after the bomb was dropped into public consciousness:
“The world is what it is, that does not say much. We all know this as of yesterday, thanks to the formidable chorus that radio, newspapers and news agencies broadcast on the subject of the atomic bomb. They told us, effectively, in the midst of a host of enthusiastic commentaries, that any average sized town can be completely levelled by a bomb the size of a football … We can sum it up in one sentence: mechanical civilization is about to set upon its ultimate phase of barbarism. A choice must be made, in the near or not too distant future, between collective suicide or the intelligent utilization of scientific conquests.”
80 years later, and we’re still making that choice.
I first learned of this artwork from @mk.photomedia after a frigid New Year’s Day photo walk a couple of months before the @uraniumfilm festival I was helping to bring to Seattle. I hadn’t even heard of this park before then.
There are 22 of these nuclear submarines’ “fins.” The visual metaphor is meant to evokes of a pod of whales. It’s a very hopeful image, explicitly evoking Isaiah’s vision of the day when nations beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.
It’s the same prophesy that tells us that “a wolf shall dwell with a lamb, and a leopard shall rest with a kid; a calf, and a lion, and a sheep shall dwell together, and a little child shall drive them.”
It’s the same vison that inspired MLK to declare in 1963 that “every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low.”
And here we are, still dreaming.
As a Seattle Times article put it last year: “The artist’s intention was to create a number of these all over the world, though to date, the piece has only one sister, in Miami, where the fins might more readily bring to mind a school of sharks, which are more likely seen off the coast of Florida than orcas.”
Maybe that’s why this piece is called “The Fins Project.” It’s not done. In fact, it’s only just begun.
The history of America’s nuclear deterrence policy is as fascinating as it is depressing. The basic premise during the Cold War was that if both sides could completely destroy each other, then neither would dare start a nuclear war.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, this doctrine of mutually assured destruction took a sharp turn. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara argued that the U.S. didn’t need to target only military bases. Instead, it could threaten cities and factories, because even a few hundred powerful nuclear weapons could destroy most of the Soviet Union. He thought this clear threat of total destruction would stop either side from attacking first.
The very term for the doctrine (“MAD”), however, wasn’t coined by McNamara. It was coined by the analyst David Brennan who argued that trying to keep a never-ending nuclear standoff didn’t really protect the U.S. in the long run. Put plainly, the policy was mad.
“The “thingification” of man, as one of the essential forms of man’s alienation in bourgeois society, also dehumanizes a number of his other relationships. If the politico-technocratic mechanism relates to man as to a thing, man’s active role will then be confined to the pursuit of well-being or political voting, and man will eventually relate to another man as toward a thing. The extreme and drastic forms of inhumanity that have come to light in the past thirty years are no more than the consequences of a more fundamental constellation.
The “polyvalence” of the human being in the midst of this extremely “thingified” and compartmentalized relationship becomes so distorted that the very process of work itself proves unbearable. All the efforts on the part of psychologists and sociologists to solve this impersonal situation for modern man, whatever improvements may have taken place, have ended in failure. Any such efforts are nothing more than serviceable palliatives, for the problem is not primarily psychological or technological, but rather a matter of the philosophy of history.
Man may be more or less aware of his alienated condition, but the end result is the division of his personality against itself and the formation of the homo duplex. As a man, he does not feel himself to be part of the broader community. As an official being, he does not feel himself to be a man. And this characteristic feature of the alienated man, so long familiar, has consequences of the most tragic kind in the field of human relationships.”
(Predrag Vranicki)