Technology and the Examined Life

The Watercooler
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Alec Watson (aka “Technology Connections” on YouTube) has recently taken a break from teaching us how to use our dishwashers and singing the praises of heat pumps to rant a bit about Algorithms™️ and The Kids These Days™️:

It’s well worth a watch. He approaches the topic with some nuance…? …on the internet‽

He points out that people tend to trust what computers spit out. He calls this phenomenon “algorithmic complacency.” And with AI becoming ever more powerful and pervasive, it’s becoming easier and easier to offload our critical thinking to “an algorithm.”

Techo-optimists usually reply to these critiques of AI by reminding us that in ancient times people also bemoaned new technologies… like writing, as Plato did quoting Socrates quoting Thamus:

this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
~ Phaedrus by Plato

If writing didn’t lead to the end of learning and wisdom as Thamus thought, so the argument goes, neither will new technologies.

Well, for the full rebuttal of that, please read Technopoly by Neil Postman. He starts with just that quote and goes on to point out that writing, indeed, has robbed us of our memories and wisdom.

Memorizing Texts

As a monk, I’m expected to memorize Pāli texts.

After learning the basic (morning, evening, anumodana, etc) chanting and dragging my heels for a while, I’ve finally gotten around to the Pāṭimokkha.

It is hard. It is not a muscle my education developed.

But there are benefits. Spending so much time with the text, I now have a facility with the rules that I didn’t before. I don’t need to wonder what category of offense it is to, say, request specific foods; Immediately, the text of Pc 39 jumps to mind … as does Sk 37. I know right away, it’s a Pacittiya for fine foods and a Sekhiya for other foods, but not an offense when you’re ill.

The rules even leap to mind when I’m not trying to think about them. As soon as I put my hands on my hips: Na khambhakato antaghare gamissāmī’ti the Pāṭimokkha reminds me.

And I do put the agency there in the text. It comes alive inside me.

The same is true of the suttas, of course. “Na paro paraṁ nikubbetha; Nātimaññetha katthaci na kañci” often comes to my mind when I see a being in a pitiable state. As soon as the disgust and that desire to “turn away from” arises, the Metta Sutta is right there, encouraging me look… and smile.

Wisdom with regards to technology

Writing is a great way to get your thoughts out, to keep records, to organize knowledge. But having that knowledge written down somewhere makes it easy to offload, to leave the texts sitting on the shelf. In short, it creates a kind of “textual complacency.”

This is what I like about Watson’s concept of “algorithmic complacency.” It alerts us to the danger of reliance on AI in a way that resonates with the history of technology as a whole[1] and empowers us (if we dare!) to step outside our “complacency.”

For every technology, we should ask, “What is this technology good for? And what do we lose by adopting it?”

I have my own (tentative) answers to those questions with regards to AI (which I’m happy to share!) but this note is already a bit long. In this post, I simply wished to share that video and to encourage you to ask yourself: are the technologies in my life serving me? At what cost? And Kathaṁbhūtassa me rattindivā vītivattanti?

As the days and nights flit by, what sort of person am I becoming?
~ AN 10.48

  1. This should come as no surprise as “technology connections” is kinda his whole thing. ↩︎

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Coincidentally, I had just watched this video earlier today and it was so good that I was thinking of making a post about it. Glad you did so already, Bhante!

One thing he said while describing his experience on Bluesky struck me as a perfect description of all too many social media and forum posts.

What was previously a post with a nice discussion going on underneath between myself and various people who know who I am and what I mean when I say words becomes littered with strange, out-of-context, often antagonistic replies as if the only possible response to seeing a post of any kind online is to loudly perform a challenge against it.

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I am so perplexed about how people use the internet these days, and I don’t think it’s just kids. I have watched people my age and older just using aggregated content to get their news and information.Mant times, I have told people a web address to put into their browser and instead of typing that into the address bar the will use a search engine to get to that very same site.

Watching this video above I am amazed that people don’t use bookmarks any more?! I guess I basically use the internet like it I’s 2009, except no one writes blogs anymore, so I can’t find their content so easily via rss.

Some kids these day™️ want to bring back the old internet. I found this young purple haired dreamer to be a beacon of hope, with her creativity first approach to the internet. Maybe we are ready for the internet renaissance?

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Oh for sure. I was using “Kids These Days” in a tongue-in-cheek way.

In fact it seems that older people are much more likely to fall for online scams and bot accounts and fake news sites and so on…

One hopes!

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Greetings @Khemarato.bhikkhu.
You said:

For every technology, we should ask, “What is this technology good for? And what do we lose by adopting it?”

Perhaps. But we are rarely given a choice. I don’t recall being asked if the technologies of the printing press or even symbolic communication violated my sense of good and whether or not I thought I would lose something by learning to read and write. I was only expected to do so. And, ironically, you and I could not even be discussing it without having mastered some competence in use of those technologies. To achieve the kind of ethical decisiveness your test demands we need not only clear and distinct definitions narrowed down much more than “every technology”, but also a moral rigor that influences us at our very first learning opportunities.

Is this even possible?

Any optimism we get from technology is that it works, not that it’s technical, and if the benefits outweigh the harms, that’s one thing, but before that?–what do we consider harmful, beneficial, etc…? There’s no consensus among us. The closest we’ve come is that that for the Buddha non-harm and benefit = the precepts. And we still quibble about that!

(I still remember the cognitive dissonance I felt the first time I realized monks could use computers. Yes, I was pretty ignorant of the Vinaya, but I also thought of it as part of the reason they were worthy of being a refuge–they were untarnished by the evils of the internet. Since then, I’ve often wondered whether or not the Buddha would make using the internet a Pāṭimokkha violation if he’d been born in our times. Would he have approved of some sites and not others? Etc…)

Your criteria also implicitly asks of each novel technology what bad might it serve, and what we might gain by adopting them? The Buddha provided us guiding ethical principles based upon a conception of the good that makes non-harm and beneficence universal, notwithstanding debates about whether or not its deontological, utilitarian, consequentailist etc… But it is pragmatically decisive on some points. Lying is always evil, as is stealing, killing, etc… But what about new technologies? I’ve no doubt he was smart enough to understand that all the requisites were at some point novel technologies, but I don’t recall reading about him concerning himself over the harms versus the benefits of alms bowls, robes and dry, warm places to sleep and mediate. Those parameters serve as training in learning to be content with what one has, regardless of their technological statuses. They’re just instruments. I doubt he would’ve banned them if one of his monks used an alms bowl to whack someone upside the head.

Perhaps my speculations are miles away from informing us whether or not mendicants or lay followers should use computers, AI, etc… But, like the requisites, they’re just instruments. Unlike them, though, they don’t teach us how to be content with what we have. Nor can they tell us anything about what they’re good or bad for, or what we’ll gain or lose by using them, or help us anticipate a harm/benefit calculus that give us a definitive course of action of the ethical dilemmas they might pose outside of what we can glean from the guidance offered, for instance, from the ten regular reflections for the renunciate, or the Pāṭimokkha.

Living with the ethical dilemmas of the technologies we had no say in learning to use is a toothpaste-out-of-the-tube type hardship we all endure. But it’s in the facts of such ethical dilemmas, and not their artifacts, that we can find the guidance where the Buddha’s teachings on virtue can’t. So perhaps we ought not to question whether or not new technologies serve a notion of the good, or what we have to gain or lose by adopting them, but rather what has our neo-phobia about new technologies amounted to for us in the past? The End of the World has been happening long enough that we ought to have at least figured out by now that the harm is not inherent in new technologies, but elsewhere. I’ve convictions about where they do inhere, but I’ll save that for later.

best,
~l