Category: Ideas

What might Neil Postman have said about AI?

What follows was produced by AI, specifically ChatGPT.

“Neil Postman, though he passed away in 2003—well before the rise of modern AI—left behind a body of work that provides a clear lens through which we might imagine his views on artificial intelligence. As a media theorist deeply skeptical of uncritical technological adoption, Postman would likely have offered a cautionary perspective. Here’s a synthesis of what he might have said, grounded in his core ideas:

  1. AI as a Faustian Bargain
    Postman frequently argued that every technology is a Faustian bargain—it gives something but also takes something away. With AI, he might have said:

“AI may offer speed, convenience, and predictive power, but it extracts a price: the erosion of human judgment, autonomy, and perhaps the very definition of what it means to think.”

He would have asked not just what can AI do, but what happens to us when we let it do those things for us.

  1. Technopoly and the Delegation of Meaning
    In Technopoly (1992), Postman warned of a culture in which technology is deified and entrusted with authority once held by human institutions. AI would, in his view, accelerate this shift:

“When we let algorithms determine our choices in health, justice, education, and love, we risk surrendering meaning-making to machines that cannot comprehend meaning.”

  1. The Problem of Context
    Postman stressed that technologies decontextualize information. AI, especially large language models, abstracts vast amounts of data from their original contexts:

“AI can produce prose that sounds human, but it does not understand the human condition from which meaning arises.”

  1. Amusing Ourselves with Artificial Intelligence
    Postman’s critique of television in Amusing Ourselves to Death could easily extend to AI-generated content:

“If television turned all discourse into entertainment, AI may turn all creation into pastiche—replication without depth, novelty without risk.”

He’d likely warn that as we consume more AI-generated content, we may lose the cultural stamina for original thought and emotional complexity.

  1. Education and the Erosion of Inquiry
    Postman believed education should cultivate critical thinking and meaningful dialogue. AI, used uncritically in classrooms, might horrify him:

“When students outsource their thinking to machines, they are not learning. They are acquiring answers without questions.”

He’d probably be especially wary of using AI to write essays, fearing it undermines the struggle that real learning requires.

My truth, your truth

Hank and Martin, Wyoming, 2015.

Hang with me here. I’m going to point out some things that will seem very elementary. And I’ll point out some things that might seem on their face to be problematic.

Let’s start by level-setting a couple of things about language, regarding both its proper uses as well as where it can go wrong:

First, words are used to point to reality, to what is. While we sometimes miss the mark in our pointing, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do when we use a word: point to what’s really there.

Second, words are not these static things. They have different uses and meanings — varying situational definitions, if you will. For instance, I can know a fact. And I can know a woman.

A good part of our disagreements are simply matters of definition.

Ok, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about truth. Whether we have every really taken very long to think about it, we all know that objective reality exists. A particular rock is either there or it isn’t. We can say that a thing’s being is independent of our knowledge of or about that thing. A child can tell you – and he’d be right in doing so – that a tree that falls in the forest is really there, falling, whether we are on site to observe it.

Final point for now: Everyone knows that while our senses are imperfect and can fool us, it’s not a very common problem if we are reasonably well in body and mind. So I can rightly say that I know this particular rock is hard, white, slightly abrasive, cool to the touch (though I know that that will change when the morning sun hits it), and about four feet from that small tree (now three and a half after I’ve picked it up and put it back down).

Why on God’s green earth am I taking the time to point out such obvious things?

I bring up these obvious things because in our current culture, we often get confused about the word “truth,” seeming to speak sometimes as if we can make a rock or a tree appear or disappear based on whether we want it to exist.

In the next post, we’ll continue our exploration, starting with the idea of preferences.

An Introduction to the Book of Proverbs

Brink of the Lower Falls, Yellowstone National Park. August 2023.

Knowledge is good, for many reasons. But it is not wisdom. Insight is similar to wisdom. Insight comes from inspiration.

Wisdom is knowing what to do when the right rules aren’t apparent, or perhaps don’t directly or obviously apply.

This book is practical in its instruction. But since the wise know that all men are fools — never forgetting the possibility that they themselves may be the chiefest among them — it is wisest perhaps to remember that we fools by our very nature despise wisdom and instruction.

We’re all in our “terrible twos”: We don’t like being confronted, contradicted, being made to feel powerless, small, like a fool.

However, we must ask God’s power to set these things aside, grow up enough so that we can receive the words of this book, treasure up its commands, make our ears attentive to wisdom, and incline our hearts to understanding.

And thus we begin.