Machines Can't Dance

(from an unfinished pre-"war" post)

I’ve been watching teasers and speculations about the coming Next Tech Thing. As best anyone can tell, it will be a kind of AI alter ego. Not quite a brain chip 😖, yet, but an eyes-free, hands-free, always-on THING in your pocket or on your person. To be designed by diabolical genius Jony Ive, who enslaved us to our iPhones, it will accompany you everywhere, inhale everything you do and say (self-surveillance, now!), and improve on it—from administering your calendar to feeding you insta-scripted witty remarks on dates. I’m guessing it will also drown out your Inner Critic with an endless stream of affirmation and real-time, instantly actionable self-improvement prompts. (As I write this I’m already thinking of ways to rebel against it.) Rod Dreher believes that among other things, it will be a portal for demonic possession, a minder-demon like a witch’s “familiar.” Not a bad name for it, actually. The Familiar. 😳

AI As Ouija Board & Familiar

The question this has raised for me is: What do we have against ourselves?

Why are we always turned outward, grasping for the next new toy, when we come equipped with wonders that put the most advanced technology to shame?

It’s like tossing your beer cans and candy wrappers out the car window while fantasizing about going to Mars. The brain is like the ocean: We still know so little about it, we dump all kinds of shit in it, it’s right here, keeping us alive, and collectively (with notable exceptions), we’re kinda bored by it. Or in a hurry to augment it. Or, if we wade in barefoot, uneasy or repelled.

Never even mind the uncontrollable depths of meditation, creativity, or psychedelics. Just look at staying balanced in Earth’s gravitational field.

It’s an exquisitely complex, moment-to-moment accomplishment, involving coordination among the eyes, sensors in the inner ear and in the ankle and hip joints, the brain’s cerebellum and motor cortex, the extensor, flexor, and transverse muscles of the torso, and more. A healthy human standing “still” wavers like a candle flame, making constant tiny adjustments to maintain alignment with the axis of gravitation.

I learned about this bit of evolved genius—as constant and mostly unconscious as breathing—by being trained in the Feldenkrais Method®. Gravity was one of Moshé Feldenkrais’s obsessions, and to his mind, our unique vertical orientation to it is what singles us out as a species, as much as (and inseparably from) our big brains and manipulative hands. Reading further into biology, it turns out that brains per se evolved as navigational centers when organisms first began to be autonomously and purposefully mobile—that is, not simply to slosh wherever ocean currents took them, but to work their own way toward food, away from danger, toward or away from light. Rock-anchored sea creatures that swim in search of a perch when they are larvae have rudimentary brains until they attach to some rock and settle down, at which point their brains, no longer needed, wither away (couch potatoes, take note). Movement, Feldenkrais asserted, is “the first language of the brain.”

Meet the “adaptive unconscious”: “an information-processing unconscious that does much of the work needed to navigate us through the world without taxing our limited consciousness,” writes a reader-reviewer of Timothy D. Wilson’s book on it, Strangers to Ourselves. This self-regulating intelligence, which does its thing largely beyond conscious awareness, was shaped by evolution, and its purpose is survival. For example, our distance senses (“teleceptors”), the eyes and ears, are located in our mobile heads and paired for a reason. When we detect a sudden movement or sound, our heads swivel to triangulate the precise direction of the threat, and the fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system instantly primes us for action with a squirt of adrenaline, triggering a cascade of physiological changes.

Robots are slow and dim by comparison. They may be able to leap onto loading platforms or do forward flips by sheer power, but the slickest of them are still clumsy, creaky caricatures. Almost any organism is light-years beyond them in complexity, refinement of function, and integration of systems. They are probably best at a single, preprogrammed mission, like finding and killing someone. If you see a robot dancing sinuously in a TikTok video, it’s either an AI fake or a human in a robot suit.

So why are we mostly so uninterested in working with our own fantastic wetware (balance, dexterity, the senses, imagination, all preinstalled and free) and so eager to swap it out for some tinny hardware? Does infinitely rich nature, including our own nature, bore us because it’s too slow and subtle, not optimized for thrills till the moment before it kills you? Or does it intimidate us? Are we competing to be The Greater Creator? (There’s just one parameter in which our creations do excel; it’s aptly named “Brute Force.”) Are we averse to nature because it’s harder to master than metal (sooner launch Starship than surmount procrastination)—or because its living creations, including us, are going to die? Is that our real beef?

I’m not in line for the next toy. I’m in my childhood backyard watching for hours as funnel weaver spiders pounce on flies. Not a Luddite, I love technology that lets me watch galaxies and mitochondria the same way. Clear and sharpen my sightline to the cosmos, don’t clog it full of artificial, commercial crap. Technology is meant to be prosthetic, not parasitic; to reveal nature, not compete with it.

But we are nature, and we can observe ourselves with the naked eye. Introspection needs no intermediation. Is that why we run away from it, into the toy store? What are we running from?