M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village was released near the peak of techno-optimism. It was 2004; tech evangelists spread the good news of the open internet and the apps being built there. This new tech would usher humanity into a new utopia. The village released the same year that Facebook launched, blogging was booming, everybody had a friend named Tom and Web 2.0 officially became a phrase. They/we thought that this tech would provide a wealth of knowledge and understanding – bringing humanity closer together. Perhaps we believed ourselves Prometheus reborn. Perhaps we all just wanted to be part of something bigger and more meaningful. Perhaps we genuinely believed these digital tools would change the world for good.
But that’s not what happened. Entirely new digital spaces came to life and at first we marveled and then, over time, we found that the evil in the world followed us to these new Edens. This is a common literary theme, almost cliche. It turns out the evil we see was in us the whole time.
I was out on a jog this morning, thoughts ruminating, ChatGPT's 5 release fresh on my mind. OpenAI’s keynote speakers often mentioned “the promise” of AI and how it’s going to make us all better humans. Yet the messaging feels so dissonant when the next day you read an article about a guy giving himself bromism with the aid of artificial intelligence.
It’s difficult to fault the idealistic builders and entrepreneurs who hoped that their creations would meaningfully improve people’s lives. Nevertheless, one of history’s most common and depressing themes is that we use good inventions for bad purposes: Fentanyl was created to be a safer drug for anesthesia. Drones that originally documented nature’s beauty are now used in war. Social media promised connect us with friends and yet left us more lonely than ever.
Again, none of this is new, authors and artists speak of this theme often. It’s found in subtle and not-so-subtle narratives, many well read and known. We could pick a from a broad number of stories: Heart of Darkness (and its equivalent Ad Astra), Lord of the Flies, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide, even Animal Farm.
And yet this morning it was The Village that came to my mind — a film with middling reviews that exceptionally highlights just how earnestly we seek to escape the terrors of the world and just how futile our efforts are.
In it, we see a quaint rural community with an odd social habit of removing/destroying anything that’s red. The village and its inhabitants are isolated, surrounded by a dark imposing forest. As the movie progresses we learn that the town is a haven, protected by some ritualistic means from monsters that live in this forest.
This haven all upends when a villager (Joaquin Phoenix) gets stabbed by an unstable friend. Thus, triggering a blind protagonist (Bryce Dallas Howard) to journey through the forest in search of antibiotics from ‘the towns’—all of which culminates in the revelation that the monsters are actually town elders in disguise.
These elders each have their own personal backstory, each have experienced suffering caused by violence and thus each has a deeply personal reason to create a world where violence will never happen, ever again.
Yet they fail… The elders themselves rule with the threat of violence. Violence, in the form of a stabbing, springs up from within their own town as a natural part of society. (Just like the red flower at the start of the film which was some clever foreshadowing imo)
I find the story and its timing, almost prophetic. A reminder of that which appears to be an unfortunate part of the human condition. We earnestly seek places where pain is gone and humans are actually kind to each other. We can so often envision that world and chart a path to it. We long for that new Eden. And we put an honest, good-willed effort into creating it. But we carry our monsters with us — we find violence, prejudice, greed all just… emerging.
The promise of AI, I think, is just as hollow as our previous attempts at creating Eden. Just as we experienced with Web 2.0, I suspect we’ll experience again with AI. The dawn of a better humanity will not arise with the dawn of a new technology. Our tools will change but we will be the same.
This isn’t intended to be an anti-AI post. It is just an attempt to recognize what LLMs can’t do for us. They can recognize patterns, write code, provide answers to questions, serve up meal recommendations, rewrite your blog post and generate new imagery, maybe even diagnose cancer. And I think we’ll see it do even more than this! But it’s powerless to make us, as people, better. Our inventions are just things. And things (for the most part) have no inherent morality. They perform the action we tell it to.
I appreciate the efforts many companies are putting into creating guardrails and safeties around this technology. It shows an awareness that the tool can be used for nefarious purposes and provides a nominal attempt at owning those possible outcomes. To me these gaurdrails are also an admission. We need to create guardrails, we know the evil we see in the world will follow us into this new era of AI. I believe we must look to something other than technology to save us from ourselves.
