The meaning of ‘knowing’

Whether we like it or not, we are going to be hearing from and talking about generative AI a lot next year. Out of the many things we could have discussed in this, the year’s final issue of this newsletter, I want to leave you with a few thoughts on grappling with the cultural and literary impact of technology. This is not something people talk about often but it can help put into words something a lot of us may have felt at some point.

Sarah O’Connor writting in the Financial Times a few days back argued that we are becoming a “post-literate society” where we are “only a few short steps from being supported by the machine, to finding yourself dependent on it, or subject to it”. (If you hit the FT paywall, try reading the article as republished in The Irish Times instead.)

This is neither the only time someone has reminded us of this, nor the first. Nicholas Carr famously did so in his book The glass cage—which was unjustifiably overshadowed by his older book Shallows. He spoke of how people using technology quickly let the technology define their work. Architects drawing designs by hand were more imaginative, more daring in their explorations, and generally came up with more distinct ideas than architects in more recent times who have been, almost exclusively, using computer softwares and seeing their output homogenised.

The computers we use, Carr points out, influence “the way a person works and thinks” and before long we come to “value what the software can do and dismiss as unimportant or irrelevant or simply unimaginable what it cannot.”

Our imaginations are being limited by the possibilities of our machines. Our understanding is taken for granted simply because we have solutions to provide us answers at out beck and call. In The knowledge illusion Steven Sloman pointed out that “we fail to draw an accurate line between what is inside and outside our heads” leading to an illusion of knowledge: we think we know something simply because we know where to find or look for that piece of information.

That brings us to the crux of society’s problems today. As Sloman points out, a result of the knowledge illusion is that when faced with complex ethical, moral and social questions, “instead of appreciating complexity, people tend to affiliate with one or another social dogma.” In other words we are quicker to get polarised.

Seven years ago, writing for The New Yorker about our dying habit of reading, Caleb Crain discussed the fundamental difference between a society that reads (‘literates’) and one that indulges in more stimulatory, audiovisual forms of consumption (‘orals’)—think shorts, reels, AI summaries and such—resulting in this remarkable passage:

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories ... In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk ... Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all ... it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth. (emphasis added)

So there you have it: as we surrender ourselves to technology, we fail to realise that we are not only selectively empowered by it but also greatly limited by it too. It shapes not only what individuals can do but how we as a society behave, with increased polarisation, reduced appreciation for nuance and complexity, and mindless submission to whatever industry has us believe is the next exciting piece of tech.

The solution? A more literate society. We need to start reading more. The researcher Maryanne Wolf reminds us that “the secret at the heart of reading [is]the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before.” This helps expand our imagination, better digest our consumption and more adroitly express our thoughts. The internet used to be more like a book in the early days but is increasingly becoming more like television. It is taking away what Proust called “the intellectual power that one has in solitude” whenever we hold a conversation with a book.

As wanton exploitation of technology continues all around us, perhaps the best resolution we can all make for the new year—and for the tech we work on—is to read more. A lot more.