On techno-optimsim and techno-naivety
On techno-optimism and techno-naivety
This week I participated in a webinar on artificial intelligence and its effects on philanthropy. I was stunned by two things: techno-optimism is still alive and kicking and I would even say is evolving into some sort of techno-naivety.
Particularly when I listened to the diverse proposals on how AI can support philanthropy I had to hold back not to send cynical comments in the chat. Alas, I still did, once or twice. The first comment I made when the speaker was talking about the cumbersome business of reading all these reports that come in from grantees and making sense of them. So, she contended, because that is so cumbersome, they often end up unread and the lessons in them unused. Hence, AI could help us to read and summarise reports and distil from them results of the activity and the most important lessons. My comment went along the lines of: why don't we rather get rid of reporting? It's a lot of work for the grantees and apparently of not much use to the funder.
Another suggestion was for AI to be used to screen applications for funding or, on the other hand of the funding spectrum, to write expressions of interest or even whole proposals. This would eventually lead us into a world where AI would write the applications and AI would read and rate them. What could possibly go wrong?
I don't want to become a cynic, but it was not easy during that discussion. The two examples above show that most people think in terms of keeping the current ways of doing things but just do them more efficiently with technology. Technology in general, not just AI, will help us solve specific problems and help us do things better, but it will not help us decide if we are doing the right things.
This leads us to a deeper problem. While in the world of systems change we often talk about the need to go beyond symptoms and look for 'conditions that hold a problem in place,' the solutions we produce to the problem are still very often an immediate solution to the problems we can see and perceive. This solution might then lead to new problems, which are again tackled with new technologies to solve that very problem. In the 1971 metalogue 'Is there a conspiracy?' Gregory Bateson frames this cheekily as 'the machines telling us what to do' (see the Paper Museum at the bottom of this weekly email).
Gregory's daughter, Nora Bateson, calls the solutions we come up with 'direct correctives' and cautions us that tackling directly what is seen might not lead to any shifts in the systems – rather it might perpetuate the underlying patterns (Bateson 2021):
It is easier to name what is seen and strive to change it. But what if what is seen is already old news? Is the search for direct correctives a search in vain, looking in the wrong places? Like the story of the man who is looking for his keys only where he can already see — it is time to ask: how to stop looking for the car keys under the streetlamp when it is known the keys were lost in the forest? Just because it is possible to measure and describe emergent events after the submergent coalescence does not justify turning away from the difficulty of addressing their nascent becoming. These pre-emergent processes are more challenging to define, but at least equally necessary to consider.
Instead of engaging with the messy aliveness of life, as a society we are collectively stuck in a problem-solving mode that drives us into deeper and deeper dependencies on technology. With AI now being on the cusp of driving its own development, there is a real danger that this dynamic becomes finally irreversible. The presentation called 'the A.I. Dilemma' (well worth investing the hour to watch it) about where we stand in the development of AI by the makers of the film 'Social Dilemma' brings the point home quite well. And I don't think they are particularly alarmist or pessimistic given their track record of documenting what social media is doing to society.
While I used to be a techno-optimist, I now firmly believe that the solutions to our most pressing problems cannot be found in new technologies. Technologies might enable us to further push the inevitable, yet they also make things worse, driving us further away from a real solution, taking away the urgency. I believe that to overcome the polycrisis we are facing, we need to rediscover our connections to each other as humans and to the planetary ecosystem we are part of. Moving away from a story of individualism, fragmentation and competition to a story of interdependency, cooperation and what Iain McGilchrist calls 'distinction without separation.' I know this sounds very abstract and I don't have any nice recipes we could employ. But I am super enthusiastic about finding a way together. Many great minds are thinking in this direction, including Nora Bateson, Iain McGilchrist, Bonnita Roy, Philip Shepherd, Báyò Akómoláfé (see below) and so many more. Are you with me?
Reference: Bateson, Nora. 2021. “Aphanipoiesis.” Journal of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the ISSS, Virtual 1 (1).
The Paper Museum
From the Podcast Outside Conversations with Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé, a powerful argument against the use of the metaphor of leverage points:
So what this ontologically expansive invitation allows us to notice is that if our bodies are tentacular, if they're rhizomatic, if they're there and here, then there is no acting that is not an acting with, right, there is no thinking there is not a thinking with. We obviously like to start tracing agency from the point of intentionality, motivation, learning. It's a very humanist, liberal tradition, you know, to situate agency and action within political means or sociality of human actors. Right. Our mistake I daresay is that we leave out most of the world and how it comes to materialize in what we are doing. And this is what Africans know very well in their bones. I've just come off a conversation about the risk of victory. Like we won, through the 60s, we got our independence, we won. But that is worse than a Pyrrhic victory, right, because we chased away the colonizers, but we were left with all the tools, the paradigms, the systems with which we were colonized. So there is a sense in which we don't act outside of the world to change it. Or in the words of Chinua Achebe responded to Archimedes give me a place to stand and I shall move the world and he says, There is no place to stand, we have to stand with the world and move at its pace.
The quote that links this to leverage points is from Cinua Achebe from his 1960 novel No Longer at Ease and goes like this (thanks to Tim G. for finding this):
The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.
Why have I added this to my Paper Museum? I loved the whole podcast but this one quote resonated with my thinking about leverage points that I have shared in an earlier versions of my weekly email.