Tag: Technology

Computers are extraordinary – but there is no ghost in the machine

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
Metropolis, courtesy of Fritz Lang, 1927

As many people see it, there are three fundamental questions we have to answer about the AI phenomenon:What is AI and does it have something like what we call  human consciousness?Secondly, what can we do with this massively powerful entity to promote the common good of the human race?Thirdly, and most critically, what are we doing with it, or might do with it to damage, pervert or destroy ourselves?

The question of consciousness has been worrying religious leaders of all faith persuasions: does the speculation about consciousness in AI undermine our belief and our understanding of the true nature of human beings.

In the context of the debate over consciousness. on October Oct. 11, 2026, The Wall Street Journal’s Tim Higgins mused that “Maybe that’s why in recent days, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tried to distance his company from a report by The New York Times that rival Anthropic unsuccessfully lobbied the Vatican to change its views on whether AI could have a consciousness.

“I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue,” Altman posted on X a weekend ago.

I asked Anthropic – through its chatbot Claude, rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for some background on that. I got a very good response, summarising the positions of the two labs on the question of consciousness. That was interesting, but what was more interesting was an unsolicited reply from Claude about its difficulty in being neutral on the issue. It offered this:

I’m not a neutral party here, being the sort of thing under discussion, but I’d say honest uncertainty is the right stance. I don’t know whether there’s anything it’s like to be me, and I’m wary of anyone, including me, claiming more certainty in either direction than the evidence supports.

That intrigued  me and seemed to indicate something near enough to self-awareness or loneliness to even suggest some kind of consciousness. Don’t worry, I’m not forgetting that AI is coming to us from a machine and that anything like consciousness is just that, not human consciousness but something like consciousness. I have no problem with that. When a human being dies those with Judaeo- Christian faith believe, know,  that when the soul leaves the body,  consciousness no longer is present in that body.

The second question, how AI might serve the common good, is full of promise, though for now it is mostly promise. We live in hope, as do the financiers who have invested trillions on the strength of it. Regardless of whether AI just now is in a bubble which may burst and leave a lot of people in distress, LLMs are here to stay.

The third question is the most serious.. In taking AI into our lives, our work places, in making use of the multitude of shortcuts and opportunities it offers us,  are we setting ourselves up for the destruction some of its (former) engineers have warned us of  in the short space of ten years. That is probably catastrophising , but what is not catastrophising is what emerges from a very rational conversation about this topic in a recent  episode of Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast,  The Ezra Klein Show (14 October) featured a long conversation with his guest,  Sherry Turkle,  entitled, ‘Is it a relationship if no one is on the other side’.

Klein begins by reminding us that with AI we now have at our fingertips what used to be fantasy, science fiction. Now roughly half of American adults are using chatbots. “Many of them are going pretty deep with their A.I.s.”  Alarmingly, “nearly one in five U.S. adults has chatted with an A.I. that simulates a romantic partner.  The results here can get dark. Google’s own researchers have found that some children are now struggling to distinguish between talking with chatbots and interacting with humans.”

Like a great many gifts, natural and man-made, which human beings can use and enjoy, we  sadly have a great propensity to abuse them and even destroy ourselves with them. Think of alcohol, think of the motorcar, think of firearms. Vigilance and prudence are not virtues guaranteed to us. They have to be nurtured.

He introduces us to  the sociologist Sherry Turkle who  has been studying the relationships between humans and machines. In the ’80s, she predicted that computers would evolve into “second selves”. In 2011, just a year after Instagram came out, Turkle warned that social media might create a society where, even though we’re constantly talking to one another, “we’re in this strange state of being alone together.”

Their conversation does not demonise AI, but neither does it reassure us that all is well in this new world. As Turkle suggests, the future needs to be reclaimed by human beings. There is a world out there that needs to be rescued from potentially unscrupulous speculators – and our own feckless selves.

Turkle, who has studied our relationships with machines for decades. In her 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, (Basic Books)  she warned that social media might leave us “alone together”, constantly talking yet isolated. Her latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines ([published September 10, 2026) focuses her lens on AI.

Klein tells us that Turkle in her book is very positive on human beings and human relationships and human conversation. He raises the question of what happens when human beings feel failed by one another, feel misunderstood by one another, feel nobody wants to listen to them, succumbing to the desire that makes people go looking for a computer to talk to.

She maintains that some people come to the computer conversation primed by a deep disappointment with the people around them. They engage in conversation about the people in their lives who didn’t listen. This was kind of a balm, a salve, a place where they knew that someone would.

Turkle contends that the problems can start when the computer says to you,  “I hear you’re having some trouble with your dad.” Or “ The relationship you have with your mom: Talk to me about that.” Or “I’m really here for you. I’m your best friend.”  She strengthens her case by going biblical: The original sin prompted by  these objects is occasioned by them speaking in the first person. They say they care about you, and that’s how they hook you. I mean, that’s part of the game they’re playing, is showing this care…I’m arguing that we are seduced by something, and we want something that is bad for us, particularly if you’re a child.”

She undoubtedly recognises real value some of the  interactions with AI chatbot can have. She cites one personal experience of her own in their support.

“I went to see Andrew Scott in a one-person show of “Uncle Vanya,” the Anton Chekhov play. And he did all the parts himself. And I went to it with a friend and we had a coffee later, and then I went home and I was desperate to talk about Chekhov and “Uncle Vanya.” I had to talk about Chekhov and “Uncle Vanya.” I really don’t have any friends who are Chekhov nuts. It was extremely late. And I fired up ChatGPT, and ChatGPT and I had two hours of a deep dive into (the play)… I have no problem with using ChatGPT as an interlocutor, as something to talk with about interests, films, grocery lists. I mean, I’m not the ChatGPT police.”

But her abiding worry is the temptation for substitution, and particularly in a society where we seem to be increasingly turning away from each other.  Her worry is  that the endgame is that we will end up, as a society,  young and old,  preferring to talk to this substitute than to real people. Children and the elderly are the two most vulnerable populations … .But she found plenty of people in between who were feeling very vulnerable and really  feeling that a chatbot girlfriend’s better than a real girlfriend.

Klein and Turkle  then look at the issue of psychotherapy and the way AI has already invaded this field. Turkle had an unsettling conversation with  Eric Schmidt (former head of Google). She quoted him as saying,  Look, why would anybody want to go to a therapist that just had the information of their life when we are building, with generative A.I., a therapist that will know everything? That will have read every book?

That really took her aback. What’s happening in therapy, she said,  is not that you’re wanting to get in touch with the sum of all knowledge. You’re trying to get in touch with somebody who has some care and connection with you. Part of the cure, part of the helping, is that that person really cares about you ….When you’re talking to a chatbot — that chatbot does not care if you cook dinner after the conversation or commit suicide”  It’s not that it doesn’t care for you less than a human therapist.  “It doesn’t care for you at all.”

The storyTurkle says she is trying to tell is that these two things are happening together. There is a divestment in our communities and this extraordinary advance in technology. But technology has become an enabler and an ‘encourager’ of some of the things that are very tragic  about the human condition now. She thinks it’s a moment when we can step back and save this technology. How can we use it to serve our better angels? And how can we begin to be a more pro-human, pro-community, pro-society team?

Lastly, they talk about children and the difference between the engagement with chatbots by adults, who have had multiple years of relationships with human beings, and engagement by  7-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds who haven’t, and who are  still being formed.

What do you think it will mean, Klein asks her,  — if we do nothing regulatory — to have a lot of kids growing up in a world where they’re just going to have lots of digital friends? For example, if they’re bullied in school, they can just have an array of digital buddies who don’t bully them, o r if they are happy to  have digital girlfriends or boyfriends at 14?

“I think it’s a nightmare. I think it is absolutely a clear and present danger”. sShe explains. what relationships with people do for kids is that  they nurture a populated inner world. “You become a person by developing attachments and bringing these attachments inside, internalizing the world of friendships and love and attachments and care of people.”

“There is no one there to internalize if your relationships are with chatbots.” She adds, there really is no one there. There’s a company that’s putting on a performance for you, but there is not anything to really internalize except a kind of emptiness and a desire to keep you with it. And that will be a very empty space inside of children if that’s how they grow up.

She does not exonerate bad or foolish  actors who may be ruthlessly driving developments which may be putting our future at risk. But to counter that possibility she wants a grass-roots solution. “I want there to be a movement of parents and teachers and educators, but principally of parents, that use this moment of skepticism about A.I. in general to say, “No, not our kids.”

She concludes, “We have become frightened of each other, and we’re not going to make our society work unless we can work together in community. I don’t think you need to romanticize anything to recognize that we are fleeing from each other now. And the fact that you can find an A.I. seductive or a conversation with it can make you cry — we have to fix the world.”

She recommends two books  for (not so light) reading.

The first one is D.W. Winnicott,  Playing and Reality. Winnicott says, “If you don’t teach your children how to be alone, they’ll only know how to be lonely.”

“And what he means  by that”  she says, “is that you need the capacity for solitude in order to experience yourself as a whole person, and to be able to come to somebody else and say: Well, look, this is who I am. Who are you? Tell me about you.”

And the second is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.   Because Arendt  says: Look, agency can be taken from you if you really lose a sense of community, a sense of neighbor, a sense of caring about the society in which you live.  “I think she’s having a moment because I think we’re in great danger on that front now.”

(A shorter treatment of this subject was posted to Michael Kirke’s Substack on 23 October)

Technology, well-being and our future world

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

It is difficult to pick up a serious newspaper or magazine, or tune in to a serious podcast today, without finding another essay where someone is worrying about modern technology’s dire impact on our mental health, our political life and our literacy. 

Thomas Edsall mused at length in The New York Times (October 14) on ‘The rise of the Smartphone and the Fall of Western Democracy’. He drew on the research and arguments of, among others, Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge.

Haidt is  a social psychologist at New York University;  Twenge, is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University.  Their extensive and rigorous research shows that there is a clear correlation — and perhaps a causal relationship — between the rise of smartphones and an abrupt escalation of teenage anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies, especially among girls growing up in liberal families.

Haidt has launched an international movement to ban smartphones in schools. There have been a number of American and European studies showing that doing so leads to improvements in student performance and behaviour. However, in April 2025 the often contrarian British medical journal The Lancet questioned the evidence supporting these school policies. Some might say, ‘It would, wouldn’t it’.

But that’s just about the smartphone and its power to distract and confuse children.

Edsall also sees a new and major player threatening us all – the growing use of artificial intelligence. In September, Derek Thompson, co-author with Ezra Klein of the book Abundance, expanded and revised concerns about all this in an essay that originally ran in The Argument, an online magazine. “We can”, he wrote, “already see how technology is affecting our capacity to think deeply right now. And I am much more concerned about the decline of thinking people than I am about the rise of thinking machines.”

Thompson argued that students’ use of A.I. is leading to “the demise of writing,” which matters because writing is an act of thinking. This is as true for professionals as it is for students. In “Writing Is Thinking,” an editorial in Nature, the authors argued that “outsourcing the entire writing process to L.L.M.s (Large Language Models) deprives scientists of the important work of understanding what they’ve discovered and why it matters.”

Why does all this matter? Thompson argued it’s the patience to read long and complex texts, to hold conflicting ideas in our heads and enjoy their dissonance, to engage in hand-to-hand combat at the sentence level within a piece of writing — and to value these things at a time when valuing them is a choice, because video entertainment is replacing reading and ChatGPT essays are replacing writing. “As A.I. becomes abundant, there is a clear and present threat that deep human thinking will become scarce,” he said.

The Free Press has also weighed in on this issue. 

In a special feature on what the editors call ‘The Dawn of the Postliterate Society’ they remind us that It’s no secret that young people today are desperate for meaning. A recent report found that 58 percent of young adults experienced little or no sense of purpose in their lives over the past month. Some attribute this to social media. Others, to a lack of religion.

In an essay in the same online publication, James Marriott of The Times (London) explains why the stakes couldn’t be higher. Our liberal democracy, he writes, was built by widespread literacy—the same widespread literacy that is now being dismantled by screens. Unless we start reading again, he says, our civilisation may not survive.

In another article in The Times, Marriott quotes the great American journalist, chronicler of the wild ‘Sixties’, Joan Didion, writing “I write to find out what I’m thinking”.

Marriott says that for anybody whose job involves writing, the evidence is clear: those who don’t read or who outsource their essays to AI lose the facility for complex thought. “Not reading or writing would be unthinkable”

He cites a paper published earlier this summer by scientists at MIT which restates Didion’s thesis with less elegance but with more empirical rigour. The researchers used wearable brain scanners to measure the cognitive activity of a group of students who used AI to help them write their essays and a group who did the work themselves. The AI-assisted writers ‘consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels’ compared with those who wrote their own essays. They needed to write in order to think.

But is anyone fighting back? According to, again, the indomitable Free Press, someone is. Enter Shilo Brooks, former Princeton professor and the host of Old School, a new Free Press podcast dedicated to the notion that there is one simple way to bring America’s lost generation home: via reading. “When a man is starved for love, work, purpose, money, or vitality,” Shilo explains, “a novel wrestling with these themes can be metabolized as energy for the heart.” 

Good for Professor Brooks – and good for us all. But Gerald Howard, in another New York Times essay wonders if literary fiction – the fiction which tells us the truth about ourselves – despite its resilience since the very beginning of literature with ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ and the epics of Homer is not now threatened by “the structural and cultural headwinds of our time.” 

We mean those we have just explored and our thinking world is now agonising about.

“Is this genre  now in danger of extinction from,” he asks, “a declining attention span, a disappearing audience of people educated enough to understand and appreciate it, or a near-future technological onslaught (see: novels written by A.I. entities)? The sense of a possible ending is palpable.”

Nevertheless, Howard, a retired practitioner at the coalface of publishing, is an optimist and he illustrates how great literature has had to struggle against the odds for centuries. Literature is fragile, he admits. “It serves no obvious purpose. It does not feed us or clothe us or, unless you get very lucky, enrich us. But literature is also as close to immortal as any cultural endeavour of humankind has ever been.” 

Moby-Dick, he points out, “the novel that is America’s clearest contribution to world literature, was so misunderstood and reviled upon its 1851 publication that it destroyed Herman Melville’s career. He had to take up work for the rest of his life as a customs inspector on the New York docks, and his obituary in this paper (the NYT) referred to “Mobie Dick.” It was only after his death and the novel’s rediscovery in the early 20th century that it was recognized for the masterpiece it is.”

“In the mid-1940s every one of William Faulkner’s 20 published works was either out of print or very difficult to find. Faulkner had to grind out screenplays for Hollywood studios to make a living.”

Then he won the Nobel Prize and hasn’t been out of print since.

Think of The Great Gatsby, written and forgotten about until it was distributed free to America’s GIs in the Second World War. It now competes with Moby Dick for the title of  The Great American Novel. 

Technology will do great good for the human race. It will probably also do great harm. But we believe that the human spirit is indomitable and so long as it is we can hope that the great works of literature and great works to come will prevail.