AI and Responsibility
People were thinking about “AI” long before 1992, but I doubt they completely envisioned what the technological landscape would look like in 2026. Although, I think a few people had a good idea of what was coming. I wanted to share a couple startling paragraphs from Neil Postman's Book “Technopoly” from 1992.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 7, entitled “The Ideology of Machines: Computer Technology.” He is warning against thinking of “machine as human” and, by implication, “human as machine.”
Perhaps the most chilling case of how deeply our language is absorbing the “machine as human” metaphor began on November 4, 1988, when the computers around the ARPANET network became sluggish, filled with extraneous data, and then clogged completely. The problem spread fairly quickly to six thousand computers across the United States and overseas. The early hypothesis was that a software program had attached itself to other programs, a situation which is called (in another human-machine metaphor) a “virus.” As it happened, the intruder was a self-contained program explicitly designed to disable computers, which is called a “worm.” But the technically incorrect term “virus” stuck, no doubt because of its familiarity and its human connections. As Raymond Gozzi, Jr., discovered in his analysis of how the mass media described the event, newspapers noted that the computers were “infected,” that the virus was “virulent” and “contagious,” that attempts were made to “quarantine” the infected computers, that attempts were also being made to “sterilize” the network, and that programmers hoped to develop a “vaccine” so that computers could be “inoculated” against new attacks.
This kind of language is not merely picturesque anthropomorphism. It reflects a profound shift in perception about the relationship of computers to humans. If computers can become ill, then they can become healthy. Once healthy, they can think clearly and make decisions. The computer, it is implied, has a will, has intentions, has reasons – which means that humans are relieved of responsibility for the computer's decisions. Through a curious form of grammatical alchemy, the sentence “We use the computer to calculate” comes to mean “The computer calculates.” If a computer calculates, then it may decide to miscalculate or not calculate at all. That is what bank tellers mean when they tell you that they cannot say how much money is in your checking account because “the computers are down.” The implication, of course, is that no person at the bank is responsible. Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame people? We may call this line of thinking an “agentic shift,” a term I borrow from Stanley Milgram to name the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. When this happens, we have relinquished control, which in the case of the computer means that we may, without excessive remorse, pursue ill-advised or even inhuman goals because the computer can accomplish them or be imagined to accomplish them.
In October 2026, we live in a world where generative LLM AI is being used to write software, news articles, and social media posts. To create images and music and videos. It is being used by millions of average people to do much of their thinking and creating for them. It is being used by corporations to replace human workers. It is being used by governments to make decisions to presumably improve the lives of their citizens – and also to intentionally destroy human lives.
I can see the potential of generative AI to do tremendous good. But it must be developed and used intentionally and responsibly. I believe we should not be so careless as to abdicate our responsibility for human life – for ourselves and for one another – and for our planet to a combination of sophisticated programming and hardware housed in massive, environmentally destructive data centers that continue to be built at break-neck pace.
I have 77 pages left to read in “Technopoly,” but I can already recommend it to anyone interested in technology, its benefits, and its problems.
#100DaysToOffload (No. 185) #tech #AI #books