What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | AI (artificial intelligence)

Gathering

Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I’d spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me.

The berries on a single spray might range from green through shades of red to the darkness that gives the fruit its name. Partly by sight and partly by touch, I determined which berries were too hard and which too soft, picking only the ones in between, while listening to birds and the hum of bees, to the music of water flowing, noticing small jewel-like insects among the berries, dragonflies in the open air, water striders in the creek’s calm stretches.

I went there for berries, but I also went there for the quiet, the calm, the feeling of cool water on my feet and sometimes up to my knees as I waded in where the picking was good. At home I made jars of jam. When I gave them away I was trying to give not just my jam – which was admittedly runny and seedy – but something of the peace of that creek, of summer itself.

I once read an essay in which a man tried to figure out how much per pound his garden tomatoes would cost if he factored in the price of all the materials and the hourly rate for his own labour. It was ridiculous and intentionally so, because growing tomatoes gives so much more than a certain number of pounds of fruit. There’s the exquisite smell of tomato leaves, and the sense of time that comes from watching a plant grow, observing pollinators visit, seeing a flower become a fruit, tracking its ripening. There is the pride of doing something yourself.

What the tomato-grower was pointing toward is what my friend, the environmental activist and author Chip Ward, long ago called “the tyranny of the quantifiable”. You grow tomatoes for the process, not just the product, to garden as well as to eat. To do as well as to have.

It doesn’t matter if you hate blackberries and tomatoes, gardening and wading; everyone has their own version of deep immersion in the moment, of engaging with the world in an embodied and sensual way, whether it’s dancing or dog-walking, cake-decorating or dirt-biking. What does matter is that we are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing. This has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now also technology’s. It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves. I want to defend these things we are urged to abandon. This isn’t an essay about AI per se; it’s about what gets lost when we unthinkingly accept what AI offers us. It’s an attempt to describe and value just what it is that gets overlooked or devalued.

Connecting (and…