Troubled Present, Future Uncertain

We are creating a world where people with short attention spans struggle to distinguish between fact and fiction. Ceding that ability to chatbots and other AI tools is a recipe for catastrophe.

With my spouse traveling abroad as part of a delegation over the past ten days, I’ve had a lot of time to read. The seventh book (yes, seventh!) that I’ve read during that period is the 1991 horror novel Summer of Night by the American author Dan Simmons. I’d first read it when it first came out, aged 17 or 18 at the time, when I was still living in Quebec City. While I didn’t remember much about the story itself, I distinctly remembered enjoying it a lot at the time. Halfway into my reread of the book, I know why I did, though this may be for different reasons now that I am 50.

Simmons’ depiction of childhood (most of the main characters are eleven years old or so) — particularly the spatial aspects of children growing up in a small town in the 1960s — is fantastic, and reading it now, it takes me back to my own childhood in small town Canada in the 1980s. Then, just as the protagonists in Summer of Night, our lives were knees deep in reality. Outside school, on weekends and during the long summer breaks (the period during which the novel takes place), the outside world was a fun place, a universe that constantly tickled our curious minds and awaited discovery. My fondest memories from my childhood include: playing little league baseball in the evening (I played for eleven years up to Junior AA, most of them as a pitcher); practicing baseball with my mother at lunchtime; playing tennis; biking for hours; spending entire afternoons reading novels; writing my own stuff on an old Olivetti typewriter; making small electronic devices with my father; learning to program (Basic and C) from my father on an old TRS-80 computer, the army-green printer, which must have weighed a ton and was as big as a small fridge, slumbering next to me, reams of orange paper with the dots on the side pouring out…the list goes on. All of it was tactile, grounded in reality, and often involved getting out of the house.

One reason why Summer is resonating with me so much is that I miss that time, and I miss that world. I look at our world today, with the eyes of someone who spends thousands of dollars every year buying physical books, and I struggle to be hopeful. Everywhere I go, people walk around and slouch into their chairs hypnotized by their smartphones and tablets. For many (if not most) people, their universe has been reduced to that small screen, the world around them irrelevant. What particularly troubles me is what this is doing to our children and future generations. What this fixation with the tiny screens, with the immediacy of information and the ever shortening attention spans attendant to such a world, will do to their ability to concentrate, to dedicate sufficient time to resolving a task, or to resolving a complex issue. We now live in a world where, “thanks” to the advent of artificial intelligence, thinking itself is done for us by machines and software in “the cloud.” This problem (and yes, it is a problem) is now prevalent in academia: one of my jobs involves editing articles for a Taiwanese think tank that employs me. All of a sudden, authors whose articles in the past would require heavy editing are now submitting articles with impeccable grammar and the sentence structures of the very best of writers. The problem is that every paragraph reads like the answer to a question. There is no content, no original thought, no logical continuity between paragraphs. Article after article is stylistically uniform and reads as if it was written by the same individual. I wonder how such academics (many of them university professors or think tank “experts”) would perform if, one day, they became government officials and had to resolve a complex emergency.

Meanwhile on the radioactive wasteland that has become X (formerly known as Twitter), the new thing is to ask Grok (an AI “chatbot” which to me sounds like the name of a slimy seven-foot monster under the bridge that snatches and devours little children on their way home from school) to “check” facts (@Grok, is the moon really made of cheese? or @Grok, are the laws of gravity a matter of opinion?). Most people already have an attention span of about 45 seconds, meaning that they are unable to concentrate long enough to read an article, let alone a book. Those people cannot even do their own searches on the Internet (never mind cracking open a dictionary or encyclopedia) to check whether a claim is factually correct or not. They need something in “the cloud” to do it for them — and there it is, nearly instantaneously, an irrefutable statement of fact to elucidate their worldview. Never mind that whoever controls the companies that operate the AI chatbots, whether they be corporations or governments, also have the ability to control, or to censor, the results.

We already inhabit a world where polarization has reached such extremes that one could be hit in the face with the facts, but should those facts not dovetail with one’s opinion on politics or, say, vaccination, the bump on the forehead will stand no chance of changing one’s opinion. Factuality has become malleable, irrelevant even. And politicians are now harnessing the powers that disbelief in factuality is giving them. Some high schools in the United States are now teaching “alternate takes” on the January 6 insurrection — in other words, teaching young minds the counterfactual that there was no insurrection, that Biden “stole” the election, and so on, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Anyone who’s read Orwell’s 1984 will immediately recognize what this is all about (on this subject I highly recommend the just-published Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century by the historian Laura Beers). And us idiots who, for decades, have been criticizing the Chinese Communist Party for distorting (or erasing) the Tiananmen Square Massacre!

Factuality is out, people have the shortest of attention spans, and they’re ceding whatever ability they have to fact check to machines that often are controlled by the very people and corporations who benefit from our inability to tell true from false. Which brings me back to books, which require one to dedicate time, to concentrate, and to think about the information that is being given. I really wonder what young readers today would do should they come upon an unreliable narrator in a novel. What would they make (should they ever bother to read them, that is) of, say, Nabokov’s Lolita or Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, to give but two examples? If you can’t spot an unreliable narrator, if you have lost all critical faculties, how can you deal with politicians and media that weaponize information? The answer: You can’t, and you will become part of that weaponization.

If future generations cannot distinguish between a fact and an opinion, and if they cede the ability to recognize faculty to some software, I really doubt that they will be able to find solutions to, ways to avoid, or mitigate the consequences of man-made or natural catastrophes (they may in fact make them likelier or exacerbate their effects). All this takes me back to another novel I’ve read during my spouse’s absence, The Second Sleep by the British author Robert Harris, in which a group of people must contend with a Church-run form of authoritarianism-cum-anti-science in their attempts to discover the cause of an Armageddon that occurred centuries prior. While the actual cause of that cataclysm is never made clear, it is evident that, man-made or natural, our over reliance on electronic devices and AI was either the cause of that catastrophe, or made it impossible for us to deal with it adequately.

So yes, I miss the more innocent, more real, world depicted in Summer of Night. Don’t get me wrong, that world had an equal share of imperfections and held many dangers. But people who cared had to proactively seek the solutions, and there was a general understanding that the people who were given the power to make the decisions, who ran governments and research institutions, were people who believed in the facts, and who had spent years in school learning and developing the skills that such responsibilities required. I very much doubt that future generations will even have the patience to dedicate years of their lives to obtain a PhD (and why would they if we continue to elect leaders who constantly devalue and demonize intellectuals and universities?). Consequently, as with everything else our willingness to spend time acquiring knowledge will shorten, expertise will lose all meaning, and we will hand over important responsibilities to people who are simply unfit for the positions involved (my use of the future tense here is admittedly overoptimistic, as we already have such individuals in positions of authority with the potential to cause great damage). Or we’ll cede all that to machines and cross our fingers that they have our best interest programmed in their little electronic hears, wherever those may be.

I know what my memories will be when I’m on my death bed. Some will be from that childhood I described above. I do wonder what memories the current and future generations will have when the time has arrived for them to depart this world. Surely not the countless hours they wasted flipping through enormous amounts of garbage on their mobile devices…or will that be it?

Good luck to us, and, more so, to those who will come after us.