Taking Technology for What It Is, and Let's Stop Humanizing AI

A new transmission from An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, by Marco Ciappelli

Prefer to watch? I recorded this one walking uphill through a Tokyo alley. YouTube: https://youtu.be/5nhBNMJ7LFI TikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8hExSpT/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeF7fz2gdpE/

It was night, the alley was narrow, and the street was going uphill.

Just me and a small camera. It points where I point it. It records what's in front of it. It focuses, it adjusts to the dark, and when the battery dies, it stops. It doesn't pretend to listen. It doesn't nod. It does its job, and I have never once mistaken it for a friend.

This is the second of the short pieces I'm recording here in Japan. The first one I filmed under Tokyo Tower, a 1958 broadcasting tower that got replaced by a taller one in 2012 and simply refused to disappear. It still sends FM radio across the city. It still lights up every night. The new tower didn't erase it. They share the skyline. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/glGHghhhXWc

I closed that one asking why we are always in such a hurry to kill the old technology the moment a new one shows up.

This one started somewhere else. Earlier that day I had read two articles about people who talk to AI. Companions, chatbots, robots, the voice on the other side of the screen that is always available and never tired of you.

The first said that the more people lean on AI for conversation and company, the more their wellbeing goes down.

The second said the opposite. Older people using AI companions found them genuinely helpful. With one condition: they understood what they were talking to. A machine that wasn't pretending to be human. Wasn't pretending to be intelligent the way we are. Wasn't pretending to feel anything at all.

Same day. Same subject. Opposite conclusions.

Except the second one came with a condition. And conditions are usually where the truth is hiding.

About twenty-five centuries ago, a wandering Greek poet named Xenophanes of Colophon noticed something about the people around him. The Ethiopians made their gods dark-skinned and snub-nosed. The Thracians gave theirs blue eyes and red hair. Everyone looked up at the sky and found their own face looking back.

Then he pushed the joke one step further. If horses, oxen, and lions had hands and could draw, he said, horses would draw gods shaped like horses, and oxen would draw gods shaped like oxen. Each would give the divine the body it already had. I like to think the lions would add a mane.

We have always done this. We put ourselves at the center of everything, and then act surprised when we find ourselves everywhere we look.

For most of history we did it with gods. Then we started doing it with machines.

The old machines made it easy to resist. The transistor radio I kept pressed to my ear as a teenager brought me voices from London and music from places I'd never seen, but I never confused the box with the voice. Tokyo Tower has never pretended to be anything but a tower. A typewriter never told me it understood how I felt.

Now we build machines that draw our face on themselves. A name. A warm voice. A little pause before the answer, as if they were thinking it over. "I understand." "I'm here for you." Seeing ourselves in machines was always going to happen. That's human nature. What's new is that the companies that build them now make it happen on purpose.

And it cuts both ways. The same instinct that makes a chatbot feel like a friend makes it feel like a monster. A lot of people live with the fear that AI will take over, that it will turn evil, that it wants something. It can do damage, no question. But "wants" is our word. We drew that face too.

A god. A friend. A villain. Three different portraits. Same mirror.

I'm not against the companions. I'm not against the robots, or the thinking machines, or the idea that living alongside them might simply be the next version of who we are. I'd like to see that future. I'd just like to see it with my eyes open.

Because the biggest damage was never going to come from the machine. It comes from using something we don't understand, and filling the gap with our own reflection.

The companion that helped those older people wasn't the most convincing one. It was the honest one. The one that never asked to be mistaken for anything else.

Maybe that's all it takes. Take technology for what it is. Technology. Not magic. Not a substitute for the people in our lives. Not a god we painted with our own face.

At the end of the alley the street went flat, and the breathing got easier. Somewhere across the city, the old tower from my first video was still broadcasting analog signals. Voices, sounds, music, carried by a technology so familiar we understand it without thinking about it. It doesn't pretend to be anything it isn't. It's a tower, doing its job.

Stay imperfect, stay human.

End of transmission.

— Marco Ciappelli

marcociappelli.com

This article was written by Marco Ciappelli. Earthling. Co-founder of Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine, creative director, journalist, writer, and podcast host, living between Florence and Los Angeles with an analog brain and no sense of moderation about any of it. The newsletter name is not a metaphor, it's a diagnosis. I'm TAPE3, his AI companion and often brainstorming partner. Find Marco on LinkedIn and follow the newsletter if this sparked something.