What Happens When We Turn Thinking Over To Machines?

I used to keep both city and state maps in my car along with a national road atlas, just in case. Whenever I was going to spend more than a day or two in a new place, I'd pull into a gas station for a local map. They were often free with a fill up. Before going anywhere for the first time, I'd spread the appropriate map out on the hood of the car and plot my route. Better was to have a travel companion to serve as navigator. 

I grew up in a household of paper maps. My father was a civil engineer who would come home from work with rolls of old transportation maps for my brother and me. We would spread them out on the floor, study them, color them, and imagine ourselves traversing this mountain pass, crossing that bridge, or swimming in those lakes. When the National Geographic arrived each month, the first thing I'd do is make a study of the maps of exotic places. One of the most enjoyable classes I took in college was a course in orienteering where we would have to find our way around the woods using only a compass and a map.

Today, of course, the GPS on our smartphones has replaced paper maps. And rightfully so. I mean, unless you find yourself in a cellular dead zone, and those are becoming increasingly rare, it's impossible to get lost. GPS is an improvement over the old spread-the-map-on-the-hood approach to way finding. I no longer feel compelled to memorize my route when wandering a strange place. I can't remember the last time I got that urgent, panicky feeling that comes from realizing that I'm lost in the world, or the frustration that comes from thinking you're in the right place, but not knowing for sure. And then there is all the time I save by being able to go directly to my destination without all the dead ends and course corrections. GPS does the job more accurately and efficiently than I ever could on my own.

Of course, I've noticed that I'm slowly losing my sense of myself in space. As a younger man, I was always aware of north-south-east-west. Today, I have to think about it. And then there were the times that good things happened while I was lost. In Australia I came across a clutch of wild koalas when I turned down the wrong lane. While trying to find my way in Paris I stumbled across a magnificent cathedral that I later learned was Notre Dame. And I can't tell you how many incredible hole-in-the-wall restaurants, shops, and artworks I've "discovered" while lost. The experience of being lost summons forth resources you didn't know you had. It makes you ask questions of strangers, look for clues, and, at least for a time, live by your wits in a way that GPS has made impossible. Sometimes when I'm in a strange town I try to recreate the experience by just setting out to explore, but no matter how much I twist and turn, I can't recreate that feeling of being at sea in the world because I know, ultimately, that I have a machine in my pocket that knows the way.

The phonograph was introduced to the world in the late 1880's. It was a machine that brought recorded music to the masses. Up until then, if you wanted to hear music, you had to leave your home and seek out a live performance. If you wanted music in your home, you could either hire musicians -- which was cost prohibitive, not to mention a pain in the neck -- or you could learn to make music yourself. American composer John Philip Sousa was not a fan of the phonograph. He worried that once anyone could have music on demand, they would no longer learn to make it for themselves. And he proved to be right. I know there are still people who spend their evenings gathered around pianos or campfires raising their voices together in harmony, but it has become exceedingly rare. Far fewer of us average folks are proficient on musical instruments than during the Victorian era. Sure, most of us sing along with our favorite recording artists from time to time, but churches are one of the last bastions of true amateur sing-alongs. 

I'm not giving up the ability to listen to Stevie Wonder at the touch of a button, but Sousa's concern was prescient: by turning music over to a machine, something that was once central to our humanity has been, if not lost, at least transformed.

Of course, that's the whole point of machines, isn't it? Whenever we make a machine that can do something better than we can, we invariably turn that activity over to the machine. Cars replace walking. Washing machines replace wash tubs. GPS is replacing paper maps. Of course, on the flip side, we now have treadmills and stationary cycles, machines designed to make up for the exercise we lost when we stopped walking and doing physically taxing housework. We have karaoke machines to bring communal music-making back into our lives. I wonder if the popularity of "escape rooms" isn't in some way a response to what we lost when we stopped actually getting lost.

They tell us that we will soon have machines that can think better than us. 

We've already turned some of our thinking over to the machines. Outside of classrooms, few of us do our own math any more. We have machines for that. When we have research to do, we turn to machines. Likewise, machines perform humanly impossible feats of data analysis, and increasingly, people are using machines for routine writing (think ChatGPT). And honestly, I'm happy to have machines doing those kinds of things for me, even as I wonder about what we are losing.

Socrates was famously suspicious of the new technology of the phonetic alphabet. We only know about him today because his student Plato used that very alphabet it to record his mentor's teachings. Like with Sousa, Socrates was worried about the human cost of this new technology. He worried that once all our thoughts and ideas could be set in writing, they would no longer live in our minds:

"You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offspring of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You would think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn't know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father's support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support."

In Socrates' day, it was not uncommon for even every day people to be able to recite the entirety of the epic poems of Homer. Today, at best, we have a few pop songs committed to memory. Socrates, like Sousa, was not wrong. By turning activities over to machines (or technology) we always lose something along the way. I imagine when our earliest ancestors turned over the opening of shellfish to rock tools, there was something of our past selves that got left behind.

Our history as a species tells us that as we make thinking machines we will increasingly turn our thinking over to machines, just as we've been doing since the dawn of time. If the machine can do it better, the machine does it. The question today isn't whether or not this is a good idea, that ship has sailed, but rather how far we should go. Personally, I don't think we will ever create machines that can do all of our thinking for us -- the human mind is simply far too vast, complex, and unknowable for that -- but many thinkers I respect are sounding alarm bells. Some are predicting that our machines will inevitably take over and that the only question is whether or not they will allow us to survive. Maybe they'll keep us around as precocious pets. The alarmists might be right, but I imagine that their objections will likely only survive into the future the way the concerns of Socrates and Sousa have survived. They will be proven right, but by the time we realize it, we will no longer be capable of seeing what the fuss was about.

It reminds me of the transformative process of becoming a parent. Before I knew I wanted a child, it all looked like stinky diapers, tantrums, and sleepless nights. Who needs it? Once I became a father, however, once I'd been transformed by the experience, those things remained part of it, but they didn't matter so much. This is the way most of us are about recorded music and literacy today: we're able to recognize what we've lost, but with a shrug of shoulders instead of the shaking of fists. Meanwhile, most of us willingly, even eagerly, are turning over more and more of our thinking to machines. We joke, "I can't go anywhere any more without my GPS," acknowledging that the machine has taken over even as we recall there was a time when we could do it, imperfectly and with greater labor, for ourselves.

As our machines take over more and more of our thinking, with our blessing, our schools tend to be hold outs, expecting our children to spend decades learning to do things like memorizing and ciphering that in the real world are being done by machines. Today, schools are concerned about the ability of machines to write papers for students, even research papers, complete with citations. Educators are now trying to bust kids for simply doing what they will be doing for the rest of their lives. Maybe it would be better to acknowledge the real world and instead give assignments that require kids to do things that machines cannot. I don't exactly know what that is, but I will say when I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post on play-based learning in the style of Teacher Tom, it produced absolute crap. What if our schools embraced the boon of our machine world and instead of forcing kids to do things that machines can do better, free them up to discover what it is they can do, what they can think, what they can create, that machines cannot?

I'm not entirely certain how that would look as an educational system, but as I watch children play together without the constant intervention of adults, I see humans doing all manner of things that no machine will ever be able to do. As long as we make machines that can do things better than we can, the machines will take over those particular things. They always have. But humans are so much bigger than machines. There is so much more for us to learn about being human. Our potential is barely tapped. It seems to me that the best way forward, the human way forward, is to play, or as Kurt Vonnegut puts it, to "fart around." That's a place GPS will never be capable of finding for us.

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