Ever Not Quite

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.

This one is about the tech-entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s much-publicized designs on biological immortality and the Don’t Die movement of which he is the founder and leader. With the help of the American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose 1973 book The Denial of Death has influenced a generation of readers from diverse disciplines, I interpret this new form of death-denial as a manifestation of modern mainstream cultural assumptions.

If you are interested in learning more about Becker’s ideas, I highly recommend a recent documentary called All Illusions Must Be Broken, which is a contemporization of Becker’s work for our technologically-mediated world of today.

As always, thank you for reading. If you’d like to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber and/or sharing this essay around within your circles.

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.

This essay attempts to name something for which—or so it seems to me—we have lacked a satisfactory term. I have argued before against the reasoning which attempts to defend human preeminence by insisting that “no technology could ever do ‘X’”, however sophisticated or impressive the ‘X’ in question might be. This, it seems to me, is a weak position from which to secure humanistic values, for reasons which I’ll explain below. Here, I offer an alternative basis on which to think about what distinguishes us from even the most powerful simulations of human competencies. I am calling this the “anthropological aura”.

These reflections, of course, don’t exhaust all we might wish to say about what is at stake in the present unfolding of artificial intelligence, but I hope they provide a helpful category which may perhaps be of some use in your own thinking about these issues.

How industry is talking about the AI rollout

Building in the Ruins

On what comes after techno-optimism

Crisis and Revelation

“Things Aren’t Getting Worse. The Truth is Just Being Revealed.”

Strange Shadows [Part II]

Two centuries of photography have prepared the way for algorithmically-generated images. Now the image-world is becoming a Museum of Babel.

Strange Shadows [Part I]

Two centuries of photography have prepared the way for algorithmically-generated images. Now the image-world is becoming a Museum of Babel.

This Is Not an Automated Message

On what we lose when machines do the writing

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Reflections on the “humanity of the gaps” and techno-humanism

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.

I began the line of thought that grew into this essay modestly, by wondering about our expressions of enthusiasm for technological innovation—for new things and gadgets generally. Why do such feats of engineering elicit, for instance, the reflexive use of the word “cool” so readily and so reliably? But that isn’t what this essay is about; from there, I began to speculate about the implications of taking seriously the idea that technological capabilities have no inherent limitations—that perhaps just about everything is, at least in theory, technologically possible. It surely matters whether we believe this to be true or not—and if we do, what does that suggest about what we think we’re doing with technology, and what its history and future represent? 

I had intended for this post to be a short reflection on these themes and observations, but soon it became clear that I had wandered into some serious issues, and I decided to accept the opportunity to linger and explore them in greater depth. I began to consider the idea of what has been called the “humanity of the gaps”, that is, as machines become capable of more and more, we begin to define ourselves by contrast with them, locating our humanity in our ability to do what no machine can yet do. We frequently encounter attempts to quell fears about human obsolescence which urge that a more automated world, in which machines have taken over much or all of what is currently human labor, presents unprecedented opportunities for us to discover something new and profound about our own humanity. According to some versions of this view, whatever machines become capable of doing, this can only present us with opportunities to embrace our humanity all the more completely, and to develop more fully into our true nature: no machine can ever do everything we can do, so each advance only serves to elevate our unique abilities. I worry that these expressions of optimism suffer from two major shortcomings: first, the deeply unimaginative assumption that machines will never be capable of matching or surpassing human skills, and second, the implicitly utilitarian understanding of human purpose which reduces us to our functions and presses us into competition with machines in the first place. 

I conclude with a few thoughts about techno-humanism, a perspective which manages to avoid some of these difficulties, but which tends, in the process, to deliver us over to the contingencies of technological change and implicitly encourages a posture of acquiescence to its pressures. As always, what follows is a consideration of these issues as I have come to understand them—characterizations are incomplete, proposals are exploratory, and conclusions are tentative.

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. This post is my attempt to take stock of the effective altruism movement (EA), which has made major inroads into the popular mind over the past several years, and with which most readers are likely already familiar. The twentieth century Buddhist philosopher Keiji Nishitani once wrote that a consequence of the modern scientific interpretation of nature solely as matter and extension was that “[t]o the self-centered ego of man, the world came to look like so much raw material.” Within the domain of ethics, we could imagine that this perspective might express itself in the form of a totally amoral—or perhaps even openly immoral—form: when all former horizons of moral evaluation cease to make a claim upon our reasoning, we might conclude, no good remains but that of the selfish individual. But something less straightforward—and, to me, much more interesting—has occurred in the case of effective altruism (and this is closer to what Nishitani was getting at): Rather than defending a kind of moral egoism, the movement draws deeply from what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called a “rich moral background” which lies behind many modern deployments of instrumental reason, and, far from rejecting ethics as a mere hangover from a more naïve epoch, EA understands itself as a supremely selfless and humane initiative that is possible precisely because human-centered values have finally been able to claim their rightful centrality within the field of ethics.

What first drew my interest in effective altruism was what seemed to be its unique influence on the modern tech industry, particularly in Silicon Valley. I wondered about how ethical questions came to be understood so comfortably in the technical and scientific terms in which both EA and Silicon Valley see the world, and to what extent the movement’s close relationship with modern technology was a consequence of their shared intellectual sources. In this essay, I try to provide readers with a sense of the landscape of the effective altruism movement: these specifics are important because a major part of my argument is that the actual words and actions of modern-day effective altruists are remarkably clear expressions of the theoretical sources which the movement shares with the general orientation of modern technology: In both cases, the common theme is the conviction that the world can and must be set right by means of human control.