As people often do when crossing the street, I generally wave to the drivers who have stopped their cars to let me cross. Recently, I was informed that on occasion, I had been waving to driverless cars.
This is my first time back in Texas since self-driving vehicles were introduced here. When I first read about the impending advent of driverless cars over a decade ago, I expected their presence to carry with it some perpetual wow factor—to provide us with a sense that the world was becoming more technologically utopian. The idea was novel, and while it would rely on automated sensor technology that was somewhat familiar at the time, it would be employed in a way that was innovative and fascinating.
But after a few days of continued accidental waves here and there, their presence has become for me less and less impressive, and instead, drab—a sorry signpost toward a bleak reality ahead.
In the past few weeks, I have spoken to AI to place orders for food, read articles which have been partly generated using AI, and seen people consult AI for medical assistance (including a doctor), research help, and (frighteningly) social advice. These pseudo-interactions with AI come on top of our already frequent mediated-interactions or would-be interactions with real persons—texts, comments, emails, mobile orders, contactless package deliveries, and the like. These virtual substitutes for authentic and unmediated human interactions have become commonplace. But unlike our use of older technologies such as washing machines, toasters, and refrigerators—which perform small tasks which would ordinarily take much time or money—and even unlike those technologies which have allowed us to interact with other people in a mediated way, our engagement with LLMs, generative AI, and neural networks spare us the necessity of relating to other humans at all. In this sense, AI is a technology that is categorically different from anything that has come before it. While technology before AI often served to increase efficiency in daily life, often to the detriment of relationality, AI presents itself as offering to replace relationality entirely.
And now, the unfortunate introduction of pseudo-relational AIs on platforms such as Meta and X will only hasten this strange dissociation with reality as we further outsource those aspects of our lives which are ordinarily relational.
While Marx went philosophically astray in countless ways, his diagnosis of the problems that arose in the fallout from the Industrial Revolution are nonetheless worth considering. He was right in observing that, since man had been consigned to acting as a cog in a machine, he had come to stop seeing his work as something which flowed from his rationality, the product of his effort as something tangible, or his wage as a direct fruit of his work. In the cognitive dissonance caused by doing manual labor for hours on-end in the factory, man became alienated from himself, from society, and from his work.
The advent of self-driving cars, though an interesting use of AI, is ultimately just another way we have outsourced ourselves and our rational capacities to machines.
As we replace more and more people who provided services which would formerly require relationality—teachers, food handlers, and taxi drivers, for example—we will only further alienate ourselves from our humanity, since we are essentially relational beings. In outsourcing our relationality, our culture has begun to believe that human relationality is, at best, not unique. At worst, our culture has begun to accept the idea that it is unnecessary. As the new revolution comes to a head, we will come to realize that our acceptance of AI was hasty, and our integration of it was flippant.
In the meantime, we all ought to delete some apps, touch some grass, and remember that any counter revolution must begin with leading simple lives.
Monk by the Sea, by Caspar David Friedrich
Ryan P. Both 