Broken Denial
You can't fix what you don't realize is broken.
Eliot Kirschner wrote an interesting story about his attempt to get his clothes dryer repaired and was told that now appliance parts are replaced, not fixed.
“The more I thought about all this, the more I wondered if our fraught political environment reflects a world where we expect to replace what grows old and broken rather than go in and try to repair what needs fixing….
As we face a world that can sometimes seem beset by uncontrollable chaos, where systems and institutions we have relied on are deeply damaged, we need to find new ways to repair and build resilience. We will never be able to fix what is broken if we see everything as replaceable.”
His story reminded me of my first shock of the concept of disposability. I was in the military in the late 60's and my mother sent me a Christmas package containing a disposable flashlight. When the battery died, I vainly searched for a way to replace it. I simply could not wrap my mind around the concept of throwing away a useful tool.
My engineer father taught me to be a 'handyman' - able to maintain the mechanical items that made modern life comfortable. Now all my gadgets come with stickers warning me away and the voiding of my warranty if I foolishly remove the panel exposing the intricate electronics disdainful of human interaction.
This shift from an active relationship of man to machine to a passive dependency on technology we don't understand. I have no idea how my cell phone works and certainly wouldn't be so foolish to crack it open and begin tinkering with it. I used to counsel young students not to become too enamored with the latest tech which will become obsolete, but to learn to speak and write well - skills that will endure. How naive I was!
Now Chat GPT can compose articles in seconds scraping data from a range far grander than my meager lifespan. We are sleepwalking into our own obsolescence.
Poet Mary Oliver posed the question:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?”
"Planning to do" is now such a quaint phrase. That would require contemplation and reflection - skills that have atrophied in our frantic efforts to keep up with the exponential changes in our technology. Our lives are no longer "precious" but perilous of becoming obsolete and insignificant to technology changes. Ennui and anxiety are epidemic and growing throughout the world today. Subconsciously we sense we are imperiled, but we reflexively double down on the hope that new technologies will be our salvation. I am reminded of the fate of the 'Sorcerer's apprentice' whose rudimentary magic skills create only havoc.
One cannot "repair" something until we realize it is "broken" and no longer serving humankind. We have passively created an omnipotent "Deus ex machina" - "god from the machine." The origin of the term comes from the crane that was used in ancient Greek drama to lower the actors playing gods onto the stage magically eliminating the anxiety of a seemingly unsolvable problem suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence.
We naively hope our tech will magically "fix" the dilemmas we created for ourselves. As the old saying goes: "The gods punish us by granting our prayers."
and how can we realize it is broken when we are living more and more in a world that doesn't require us to think, when everything is disposable, including people ...when the machine is thinking for us, we are at the mercy of soulless intelligence, and I use those words recklessly. There is no mercy in AI. Great article, John.
Your perspective reveals wisdom and forethought, John. I can only hope our “throw away” society will slowly realize our folly much as we have in rejecting the use and abuse of plastics and styrofoam. Thank you for this insightful article!