You Still Have to Decide

By Carlin McKeahow

It is 11:47 at night. The kitchen is quiet except for the refrigerator and the occasional car passing outside.

A man sits at the table with a laptop open. There is a coffee cup beside him that should have been rinsed hours ago. His daughter asked him a question before going to bed. Something about whether people have a purpose. She is old enough that a joke won’t answer it anymore and young enough that whatever he says may stick.

He has been staring at the cursor. Then he opens an artificial intelligence program and types the question.

The answer appears almost immediately.

It’s clear. Thoughtful. It’s better organized than anything he was likely to produce at that hour. There’s nothing obviously wrong with it. He reads it twice, copies part of it into a document, changes a few words, and closes the computer.

Maybe he uses it the next morning. Maybe he doesn’t. The interesting part happened before either choice.

For a few minutes, he was confronted with something human beings have been confronting for as long as we have been able to bury our dead and look at the stars: the uncomfortable fact of our own existence.

Then somebody else did the thinking. That somebody happened to be a machine.

There is nothing sinister about this scene. I use these systems myself. They can summarize tedious material, find patterns, help organize a confused argument, explain difficult concepts and save people hours of pointless labor. A competent adult would be foolish to reject a useful tool because it makes certain tasks easier.

But there are tasks, and then there is participation in your own life. We’re getting worse at telling the difference.

The problem reaches farther than artificial intelligence. Governments do it for us. Corporations do it. Algorithms, bureaucracies, recommendation engines, professional experts and institutional procedures all offer versions of the same convenience: give us the difficult part and we will return something manageable.

Often this is exactly what civilized life requires. Nobody should have to personally inspect a bridge before driving across it or conduct a clinical trial before taking ordinary medicine. Civilization depends upon trust, specialization and systems larger than any individual mind.

Yet every useful system creates a temptation. The temptation is to confuse receiving help with being relieved of the obligation to think. That distinction is key because you’re not merely a passenger moving through a world somebody else built.

You’re part of whatever this world is. That can sound mystical until you examine it closely.

Every atom in your body was here before you were. The carbon, calcium, iron and oxygen presently organized into the person carrying your name came from elsewhere and will eventually go elsewhere again. Your language was handed to you. Your first ideas about right and wrong came from people whose names you probably learned before you understood what morality was. Your fears have histories. So do your ambitions.

Even your thoughts have a strange habit of showing up before you decide to think them. Try it sometime. Sit quietly and wait for your next thought. Don’t choose it.

Wait.

Something arrives. A memory. A song lyric. An irritation. A plan for dinner. An old embarrassment from twenty years ago that apparently decided this was an appropriate time to return.

Where did it come from?

You can explain parts of the process neurologically, psychologically or biologically. Those explanations are important. But they don’t remove the strangeness. There is experience happening here.

For a short period of time, matter has taken a form capable of noticing matter. That should bother us a little more than it does.

We usually walk around with a picture of ourselves that resembles a driver sitting behind the wheel of the body. There’s the world out there, the body here, and somewhere behind the eyes sits the real “me,” watching everything happen.

Look carefully and that little driver becomes difficult to find.

You’ll find memories, sensations, habits, preferences, emotions and a running internal commentary. You’ll also find a body constantly rebuilding itself. You’ll find a personality that is recognizably continuous with the person you were at sixteen while also being profoundly different from that person.

What you don’t find is some permanent object called the self-sitting untouched behind all of it.

A better comparison may be a whirlpool.

A whirlpool is real. You can point to it. It has shape, location and consequences. It can pull something beneath the surface. Yet there is no particular collection of water that constitutes the whirlpool. Water enters, water leaves, and the pattern persists for a while.

Then it doesn’t. That might be closer to what we are. A pattern moving through time. And this is where the subject stops being merely philosophical. Because if you are a living pattern rather than a fixed object, what you repeatedly do matters enormously.

A person who habitually allows other people or systems to make difficult judgments for him isn’t simply saving time. He’s changing the pattern.

The teacher who stops reading student work carefully because software can grade it is training herself not to notice certain things.

The officer who begins treating the recommendation on a screen as the decision itself slowly loses the habit of asking what the screen cannot know.

The citizen who receives every political question through summaries selected to confirm what he already believes eventually becomes unable to distinguish being informed from being reassured.

The parent who gives every difficult question to a search engine may discover one day that his children know where he gets his answers.

None of these people becomes stupid overnight. Something innocuous happens. A capacity that isn’t exercised begins to weaken. This is hardly unique to technology. Bureaucracies discovered the trick long ago.

A person signs the form because legal approved it. The supervisor follows the policy because headquarters wrote it. Headquarters points toward regulation. The regulator points toward statute. Everyone has an explanation and nobody seems to have made the decision.

The signature is still there. The consequences are still real. But responsibility has been dissolved into procedure.

This is one reason large institutions so often produce outcomes that nearly everyone inside them privately recognizes as foolish. Each individual performs one defensible action. The machine formed by those actions does something absurd.

Ask who decided and eventually you meet a blank wall.

Modern technology can intensify this because machines are very good at producing answers with no visible hesitation. Human beings hesitate. We say, “I don’t know.” We argue with ourselves.

We notice something bothers us even when we can’t immediately explain why. We remember a detail that doesn’t fit neatly into the spreadsheet. Systems tend to dislike these pauses. They’re inefficient, difficult to measure, and hard to standardize.

The danger isn’t that machines will suddenly become evil and steal human freedom while dramatic music plays in the background. Most relinquishment will feel pleasant, disguised as relief.

One fewer decision. One fewer uncomfortable conversation. One fewer hour spent reading the whole document. One fewer moment saying, “I’m responsible for this and I need to understand it.”

The person at the kitchen table isn’t facing a technological problem. He’s facing an ancient one.

What does it mean to be here?

There’s no software capable of answering that question for him. It can give him Plato, Buddhism, Christianity, existentialism, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and ten thousand quotations about meaning. It can compare them more quickly than he ever could.

Useful.

But eventually the screen goes dark and he remains.

So does his daughter.

And when she asks what he thinks, the answer cannot honestly be, “Here is what the system generated.”

She’s asking for something more costly. She’s asking what another human being has concluded after living some life. That conclusion may be incomplete. It may change. It might even be wrong.

But it belongs to someone who accepted the burden of having a mind.

There’s an old tendency in philosophy to search for the final explanation, the sentence underneath all the other sentences. Religion does it in one way. Science, at its worst, can be tempted toward its own version. Political ideologies certainly do it. Give people one concept that explains everything and many will defend it long after it has stopped explaining anything.

Existence appears to be less cooperative. Every model we make of reality exists inside the reality it attempts to describe. The brain studying the universe is made from the universe.

The scientist holding the instrument, the philosopher writing the argument and the child asking why anything exists are all participants in the same event they are trying to understand. There’s no balcony outside existence where we can stand and inspect the whole thing.

That doesn’t mean truth is unknowable. It means humility is part of serious thinking. We should pursue truth aggressively while remembering that our explanations are still explanations.

Maps are necessary. Nobody should confuse the map with the ground under his feet. Once you understand that, another consequence follows.

You will die.

Your name will eventually stop being spoken. The objects you worked hard to acquire will belong to other people or end up in a landfill. Your body will return its materials to the same world from which they came.

People have spent thousands of years arguing about what, if anything, follows.

I don’t know. But death doesn’t make life meaningless any more than the final note makes a piece of music meaningless.

The ending is part of the form.

A dinner matters because the people around the table won’t always be there. A child’s question matters because the child asking it will soon become someone else. An apology matters because there may not be another chance. A decision matters because consequences travel farther than the moment in which it was made.

Impermanence isn’t a defect in existence. It seems to be one of its operating conditions.

Which brings us back to the tools we are building.

Use them.

Use the good ones aggressively. Make tedious work smaller. Find information faster. Catch mistakes. Translate languages. Explore ideas. Let machines perform work that machines perform better.

Just pay attention to the moment when assistance begins replacing participation. Read the document before you sign it. Ask how the recommendation was produced. Occasionally navigate without the algorithm.

Write something difficult before asking a machine to improve it.

If you’re responsible for another human being, don’t hide behind a system when the system produces an answer you know is wrong. And when somebody you love asks what you believe about something that matters, resist the urge to outsource the discomfort.

Sit with the blinking cursor for a while. You may discover that the struggle to answer is part of the answer.

We spend much of life trying to become more efficient at getting through it. But getting through life isn’t the same thing as being present for it.

For this brief interval, the universe has arranged some of its matter into you. You can notice things. You can decide. You can refuse. You can change your mind. You can help another person. You can make a terrible mistake and sometimes repair it. You can look at something powerful, convenient and authoritative and still say, “No. I need to think about this myself.”

Whatever else human beings are, that capacity is worth protecting. Because one day the pattern ends.

Until then, you are here.

You might as well be the one living your life.

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Carlin McKeahow is a contributor to The Havok Journal. His work examines artificial intelligence, emerging technology, institutions, and the human consequences of systems that move faster than public understanding.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.