I recently read Freddie de Boer's essay on AI apocalypticism; and I thought that the diagnosis of AI utopianism and doomerism as two sides of the same coin and a successor to apocalyptic ideologies of the past was very good, and that what the piece argues about human nature holds whether or not AI doom or another apocalypse comes for us all.1 But while I agreed with many of the essay’s diagnoses, I found some disagreement with its concluding paragraphs, which begin: “I am telling you: you will always live in a world where disappointment and boredom are the default state of adult life.”
Glibly, I say from this that de Boer should move to Northern California, where the everyday is so easily beautiful, but my larger disagreement with this conclusion was that there can be many positives and even transcendence in the quotidian and physical.
The essay juxtaposes the unexcitingness of the embodied tasks like taking out the trash with the exciting life of the mind — whether that be AI doom, religious apocalypse, or even sitting around and doing the meta-thinking about these things.
A lot of the male Western (and other) philosophers who extol the mental over the physical had wives to cook for them and take care of their children. Today, because having a wife who does all the cooking would be sexist, the tech workers outsource cooking to caterers and restaurant workers.
One of my favorite pastimes in AI-doomer Berkeley (I've lived a lot of lives in the last six years) was to sit around and tell idealistic or pessimistic young men who'd spent their lives on their computers to go take up landscaping or work at a restaurant or something. And maybe they'd come out of it still believing in Huel or that humanity’s greatest achievement would be uploading our minds to the cloud, but at least they would've seen — felt — the other side of things. I don't think I would've made them all exactly like me (I do know people who are very into AI who have myriad other physical interests), but I do think it's important to experience as much of what human life has to offer before trying to shape the future of humanity.
As de Boer touches on, being removed from the physical is maybe how you end up with doom cults and AI utopianism, where the pinnacle of human progress and maximum well-being is seen as minds unattached from bodies or something that isn't really human.
I find my disagreement with male Western philosophers and Huel drinkers and de Boer’s nihilistic conclusion in the same direction: I see that the physical can be transcendent and the life of the mind needs to be supplemented by something else. I don’t think this is particularly novel but probably most people who think this are outside working or hiking mountains instead of writing think-pieces.2
Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, if I understood her correctly in my sophomore year of college, has an interesting response to this. She sees St. Teresa of Avila, a nun, as the woman who has come close to being transcendent – to have a mind and achieve transcendence beyond the immanent tied-to-embodiedness that most women inhabit. The urge to escape from immanence and become a transcendent figure with a life of the mind had resonated with me a lot as a young adult, but I — and de Beauvoir — had found the idea that we have to escape from our human physicality to become more fully human limiting.
“It is nonsense,” she writes, “to assert that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion, would become impossible if man and woman were equal in concrete matters; the contradictions that put the flesh in opposition to the spirit.”3
The ideal state for humanity is therefore not becoming an AI or disembodied mind, but one where all people can be free to exist and be seen by others in spirit, mind, and body — embodiedness coexisting with transcendence.
I don’t think this specific part of de Beauvoir’s argument is necessarily gendered; awareness of our embodiment doesn’t have to be a uniquely feminine thing. That said, I don’t think de Beauvoir’s gender is incidental: women have almost always had cleaning and cooking and laundry and farming as part of their daily routines, and thus have had to discover the beauty in the physical or succumb to nihilism, have understood the ways in which the body is inseparable from the mind.4 A good thing about modern America is that even many heterosexual men also cook now, they change diapers and clean up throw-up – and also get to experience the joy of teaching their children to ride bikes, or cook stir-fry, or recognize bird-calls. And everyone must grow old — and maybe this is why these ideologies are widely held by the young.
I think the stereotypically masculine way (although of course these things aren't strictly gendered; I tend to err more this way) of escaping reality is being consumed by the mind, while the stereotypically feminine way is to be consumed by one's own embodiment, to become attached to the idea of salvation if one reaches an idealized version of oneself by starving or dieting or plastic surgery.
So everything in moderation. I'm hesitant to come to the conclusion that embracing the physical is the only way to live, since it leaves people out; maybe all of us, really, if we become old enough. But if you are able – going out and touching grass is really nice. Yes, death comes to us all, but maybe death is the mother of beauty; and growing older and wiser and more aware of our limitations is not something to be feared. Like my grandfather, you can transition from tennis to pickleball, and cut your mango tree to a manageable size, and continue to clip fresh green onions in the garden. Maybe it's all we can do to stave off the apocalypse.
Thank you to Maggie Shen, Al Fernandez, and Obasi Shaw for their comments on the drafts!
This was a friend’s critique of the essay that I agree with strongly enough to include here: that the essay's flaw when it argues against AI doom is that it "conflates what technology is not yet with what it will never be" — even without more speculative scenarios, weapons have gotten far deadlier than people 100 years ago likely could have predicted and AI will likely accelerate this progress; and just because we haven't destroyed humanity yet doesn't mean we won't; in this sense, de Boer's essay verges on being too optimistic
I have always been a bit of a jock. I love running and cycling and cooking; I'm more on the eat to live than live to eat side of the spectrum. I miss working as a landscaper and an early-career researcher on farms. I find the physical and mental inherently linked, which I think is pretty normal; give me ten miles of uninterrupted walking and I'll spit out three essays. I would be deeply unhappy as a disembodied mind, if I was even still me.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953. p. 731
I realize this is an almost naively positive take — gender disparities in housework is a topic near to my heart and mind; it will be a subject of a future post but was too large of a topic to cover here
I found this so thoughtful - the reality of the body is so important. I keep thinking about the things you can learn from existing within skin that can break and muscles that tire and ears that can hear music. There are truths about the way the world is and the way it is to be human that can be known only in our own fleshiness, not by poring over words and distilled ideas, life in the abstract. Loving the world through my funny and limited has formed me on ways I don't always recognize, perhaps because it's so ordinary. I completely agree that AI researcher types (both the doom and the optimism sides) all too often lose sight of the ways that our bodies make us hummus as much as our minds