I take it to be obvious that we are living at a moment when all kinds of capacities that had once been shorthand for what’s human are being disconcerted and called into question. And while all digital boosters advertise this as a way for humanity to unlock its true potential—eliminating annoying frictions like working, feeling, and thinking—in order to devote ourselves to a delicious obsolescence sometimes labelled “creativity,” it is characteristic of this line of thought that it invariably defines what’s creative or authentic or human as that which digital agents cannot yet do. This is a winning strategy so long as we have no care to formulate human measure, place, or purpose in other terms. And it is a strategy that leads directly to dehumanization.
We are prone to imagining the threat of dehumanization as one in which murderbots enslave us. Our paradigm for “dehumanizing” speech is one that is coercive or humiliating. These are real threats about the end of human beings, but the gravest threat now is to the human end itself: I mean a situation in which we are so completely successful in mediating and optimizing our tasks into outside-in digital processes that we lose our grip on the question of what we are for from the inside out. The clearest picture of this dehumanization is not being caged or brutalized but spending one’s life in an airport lounge: a non-place in which we are completely safe and comfortable even as we are almost completely desocialized, decontextualized, deskilled, and living in a sort of highly controlled dead zone of meaning; a place in which opaque technologies have come to replace the work of culture itself, and in which each person is absorbed in a parenthesis of screened experience even as all are practically neutralized.
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[W]e need the virtue of living language. According to the Turing test, a computer can be said to be intelligent if it can produce outputs that are indistinguishable from those of a human being. It is a bad test of actual intelligence for many reasons, but it is an excellent test of human beings’ eagerness to ascribe intelligence to machine outputs. The time is coming when the world may be divided into people who are willing to feel that LLMs speak to them and people who are not. Because this will be a matter of practical conviction rather than logical proof, it is only by acquiring the virtue of living language that one might resist.
… Language is realized only by being enacted, whereas the most pernicious feature of digital technology is that it unravels the contexts in which words carry weight. Just as you can know that other human beings are real only through practical conviction, you can know that words are alive only if you have lived them and if they have animated you. Human beings are worded creatures, creatures possessed of speech. But to live by words takes practice.