The Relentless Road to Progress Part I
Collective Dissonance in the AI Debates and How It Will Save Our Creative Efforts
This is painful for me to admit, but…The anti-AI writing/art crowd has been making a profound point this entire time. We just didn’t notice because it’s hidden beneath the common complaints you hear all the time, which snowballs into one giant middle finger aimed at The Singularity. You know the ones I’m talking about. “AI is going to take our jobs!” “AI is stealing!” “AI will destroy our ability to write good stories.” “Big studios will never adopt it for copyright issues so nothing will change, haha!”
These statements, silly or not, are just subtextual expressions of an underlying fear that most of us carry in our hearts. See, it isn’t really about taking over jobs or copyright issues. It’s about losing our sense of what it means to be human as we further divorce ourselves from reality, eroding what we know as society via the exponential growth of technology. I mean, we’re already seeing it. That’s why…
Society Sucks
I think we can all agree, but just in case, consider the common problems we see every day. More people are lonelier, angrier, depressed, anxious, and self-centered than ever before. We regularly pass homeless people, more concerned about who will win the big game than the well-being of those around us.
We refuse to help strangers on the side of the road when they need help because we fear everyone we don’t know. We create movies that idolize anti-heroes like Tony Montana or Walter White instead of actual heroes we can look up to. And even when we do, we seem to give them qualities that emphasize vanity and materialism over meaning and values.
Hell, even our leaders are sore sights as too many are involved in disgraceful scandal after scandal. The rituals of common decency and human connection like holding doors, greeting people you pass, or just striking up a casual conversation have been shot to death. And just about every ounce of wisdom from our ancestors that we relied on for thousands of years has been questioned and criticized into total oblivion, replaced by nothing more than money and safety. We quantify everything, and anything that can’t is simply ignored like human dignity, self-actualization, and happiness.
Too many of us no longer know how to date, how to grow up, how to build things, dream, or act on reason over rationality. We are, in every conceivable way, a complex society but one that is too narrow-focused, seeing the World as black and white rather than a spectrum of gray. That’s why we all specialize and compartmentalize our operations and why businesses are slaves to their key performance indicators, instead of slaves to any meaningful effort to make the World a better place.
So what happened? How did we get to this awful state in our society, and what will this mean for us concerning advances in AI and storytelling? It’s a very complicated question that I’m not sure anyone can answer. But perhaps we can find some clues by examining a seemingly unrelated topic: how our brains operate when new ideas are introduced.
The Ruler/Manager Dilemma
Our brains work under a heuristic model, in that there is a left and right hemisphere, which operates in partnership with each other to quickly make sense of the World and adapt to changes, accordingly. Using the ruler/manager analogy is a great way to think about this. The right hemisphere is the “ruler” side of our brain because it can understand the larger picture and create overarching priorities to achieve. The left side is the “manager” part of our brain. Unlike the right side, the left cannot understand the larger picture. But it can understand and perform specific tasks to achieve it.
So for example, the right side of our brain might understand that we’re choosing to work out, eat healthily, and practice swimming because we have this larger goal of becoming an Olympic swimmer. But it doesn’t understand how to do those specific tasks. The left side, however, fully understands how to do these things, it just doesn’t comprehend the larger picture.
This is how we formulate big ideas and execute them into concrete action, such as taking the nebulous concepts from the Enlightenment Period and applying them to a new governing system. That is the direct result of individual heuristic minds partnering up and utilizing both the “manager” and the “ruler” sides of our brains to create more effective ways of living.
Our brains are fantastic machines for creating and executing newer and better ideas. But if we don’t understand this ruler/manager partnership and how fundamentally important it is for both hemispheres to balance out, then we end up with problems. This, of course, is something we’ve seen time and time again, including this particular moment that we’re in, right now.
The Rhythm of History Rhymes With the Rhythm of Cognitive Dissonance
Think about the patterns of History. Generally speaking, there are moments when everything is fine. But then suddenly faults within the system are exposed when something new is introduced. Sometimes it’s a natural event that impacts people’s day-to-day living. Other times it’s a new technology, which makes certain practices and institutions obsolete. In some cases it can be new ideas that challenge the status quo. But often it’s a combination of all of these things. From there we generally see wars and revolutions before things settle down. A new “World Order” emerges, and we find peace again…That is until the process repeats itself.
This is the age-old ebbs and flows of human progress, and if you relate it to how our brains work, this pattern makes perfect sense. After all, we are the ones collectively creating those ebbs and flows. Think about it. During the “good times,'' there is an alignment between the larger picture (ruler side) and the individual tasks that go into fulfilling that larger picture (manager side). And because things have been running well for so long, it’s mostly under the control of the managers.
Then something new is introduced, leading many with ruler-dominant-sided brains (i.e. philosophers, intellectuals, artists, etc) to go, “Woah wait a minute. This system is flawed, and here’s why.” These new ideas begin to challenge the manager-dominant-sided brains (i.e. bureaucrats and politicians) who are like, “Wtf are you smoking?! We need to double down on our current system to continue making progress. There’s no other way!”
Friction forms, leading the good times to slip back into the bad times as this tension creates opposing sets of belief systems that lead people to clash and fight until a synthesis emerges. And it’s this synthesis that brings the managers and rulers together to form a consensus. A new “order” is born before it repeats itself, again and again.
So it’s pretty clear that the general rhythm expressed in History is society’s cognitive dissonance or collective dissonance, as it’s formally called. What goes on in your head when reconciling two competing ideas that need to fit into your worldview is, more or less, expressed at the societal level.
The Crumbling Paradigm
When you look at it this way, it becomes easy to recognize that we’ve hit the peak of an old paradigm that was working for a long time but is no longer as functional as it used to be. This could be attributed to our culture being dominated too much by the managerial sides of our brains.
And with all of this new technology in the loop, we’re accelerating a society that can create so many powerful things but can’t manage or direct them toward achieving any big-picture goals since we’re no longer in touch with the ruler sides of our brains. It’s the ruler side that helps us see the whole picture, so without that we’re stunting our ability to move society forward in a way that’s meaningful to us.
Today, we’re mostly managers running around in a sort of “default setting”, blindly achieving goals for wealth and safety. And that’s dangerous because it can lead to things like doom-scrolling social media platforms filled with rage bait, which stifle public discourse, or dating apps that condition you to further disconnect from stronger relationships. After all, if dating apps create long-lasting relationships, then they lose money. If social media platforms can’t maximize engagement, then they’ll lose out to their competitors.
But even worse, you end up with behaviors that mirror the negative stereotypes of Americans far too closely. From the outside, many of us are seen as fat, lazy, ignorant, self-serving, always after instant gratification, gluttonous, arrogant, narrow-minded, and overly materialistic.
Now, don’t freak out. I’m not saying all Americans are like this, but you know what they say about stereotypes…There’s a little bit of truth to them.
And our stereotypes, being what they are, are no mistake within the context of The Ruler/Manager dichotomy of our brains and how this duality reacts to the changes in our environment. All of these attributes are characteristic of someone blindly walking through life, never considering the consequences of relishing in such convenience.
That’s the subtext in these behaviors. And, it’s extremely telling of how our problems arise when we manage ourselves with preconceived notions for how to live instead of ruling over ourselves by questioning and modifying the values and assumptions we make about life with the changes to our environment. It’s like that Road Runner scene when the Wildly Coyote runs off the cliff. He didn’t modify his behavior and stopped when his environment changed, so he fell.
Conclusion
The anti-AI people are right in a deeper sense. We are running off a cliff, and this time there may not be any recovering. So what do we do? How do we translate all of this heady stuff into actionable items that can be accomplished right now in our individual lives to stop us from killing ourselves?
Well for starters, I think we need to drop the Luddism because this technology isn’t going away, which makes banning it about as useless as banning the written word. But at the same time, we also shouldn’t fully embrace it with open arms. Instead, I think a better approach is to re-examine our shared values and modify them accordingly to shape how we use AI. This way we can get all of the benefits while retaining all of the qualities that make us happy and in love with the societies we’ve built.
So that’s it for Part I. In Part II I’ll go in-depth on a few simple choices we can make right now in our everyday lives, both as people and as storytellers, that could make a meaningful difference in how this whole thing plays out. It sounds naive and silly, and perhaps it is, but It’s better to explore the possibilities than to perish never having tried.
Until then, best of luck in your creative endeavors!
Story Prism
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