SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
There has been a lot of AI news these days, and it makes sense to try to learn everything you can about what's happening with AI and what could happen. But for some of us, the more we learn, the more we're filled with a sense of anxiety, even borderline panic.
MICHAEL SACASAS: I think there's certainly a kind of pit in the stomach where you might think, oh, how big of a deal is this? What are the impacts? How worried should I be? What can I do? Oh, there's nothing I can do, and now what?
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PFEIFFER: Michael Sacasas is a Christian writer who explores the existential side of the technology we use. He's been thinking lately about an old essay by C.S. Lewis called "On Living In An Atomic Age."
SACASAS: So this is three years after the first atomic bombs are detonated. The specter of a Cold War is brewing. An arms race is taking shape. And it becomes evident that now humanity possesses these weapons of mass destruction. And he addresses this question right at the outset of this essay - how are we to live in an atomic age? - maybe in the same way that we might be asking now, how do we live in an age of artificial intelligence, if there's a threat of human extinction, at the most extreme?
So Lewis says if we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies, he goes on to say, but they need not dominate our minds.
These very sensible human things that Lewis urges us to do and to find refuge in, in some cases, they are the very things that maybe now we're tempted to outsource to AI. We surrender our existence. We surrender the tasks, the relationships, the labor, the work, the conversations. But I think maybe that's the most immediate existential threat - the threat that we give up on existence.
And maybe it's a gift that, on some occasions now, we have this threat that looms over us that heightens our sense of those moments, our experience of those moments, to remind us that this is actually, at the end of the day, what meaningful life is made up of, what our satisfaction as human beings consists in, in the day-to-day and the ordinary, in our fidelity - to borrow a line from Albert Borgmann - our fidelity to daily tasks through which our care and involvement in the world is expressed.
PFEIFFER: That was Michael Sacasas. His Substack is called "The Convivial Society."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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