309 - Jacob Howland - Technological Cannibalism
The Symbolic World
Jonathan Pageau
4.8 • 933 Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2023
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We discuss the notion of memory and recollection, Plato’s Phaedrus, the Biblical notion of garments of skin, ChatGPT and AI, work and leisure, technology’s effects on human capabilities, paganism and idolatry, intelligence, and “the matrix”, the internet, intuition, and much more.
Jacob Howland is the Provost and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX, commonly known as the University of Austin.
His latest book is Glaucon's Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato's Republic (Paul Dry Books, 2018): https://www.amazon.com/Glaucons-Fate-History-Character-Republic/dp/1589881346
Jacob Howland’s website: https://www.jacobhowland.com/
His articles on Unherd: https://unherd.com/author/jacob-howlandunherd-com/
YouTube version of this podcast: https://youtu.be/o468OtytbVQ
Timestamps:
00:00 - Coming up
01:02 - Intro music
01:28 - Introduction
01:59 - Different narratives about technology
04:09 - Technology from the Greek perspective
05:01 - Plato's Phaedra - and fixing words
08:16 - Egypt
09:29 - Suppressing recollection
11:13 - The garments of skin
15:02 - Work - sorting chaos
18:17 - Human capabilities diminishing
19:53 - ChatGPT cannibalizes itself
22:06 - A pagan god that feeds on humans
23:52 - Human batteries
26:03 - Intuition - direct access to reality
28:49 - What do we mean by intelligence?
30:47 - Understand AI as idolatry
32:19 - The gold of the golden calf
34:53 - The tabernacle
35:33 - A body of power
37:39 - card: Beasts in Revelation
39:16 - Work and leisure
47:45 - Monastic life and leisure
49:18 - Not anti-technology
50:54 - The Henry Adams curve
56:56 - The Beast kills the whore
1:00:17 - Plato's cave
1:01:19 - There is no "solution"
1:03:24 - Prometheus’ cycle of desire
1:05:58 - The flip side of all of this
1:10:15 - Paradise Lost
1:11:09 - The need for transcendence
1:12:26 - Re-engage at the human scale
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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just to take one example. Now we have this chat GPT and already students are using it to write their papers and professors are using it to write their lectures, right? So it's like two machines talking to each other, you know. Or for example, you know, there are these programs you can speak into it and then I'll translate it into Spanish or something like this. So, but every step that we take in that direction are human capacities like reading, writing, and so forth, begin to sort of rust and disuse. |
| 0:27.4 | Yeah, not only do they rust and disuse, but at some point there'll be a kind of cannibal element. |
| 0:31.8 | Once they reopen chat GPT and it starts to now continue to analyze what's coming in terms of writing and in terms of |
| 0:38.6 | it'll start to eat its own children. |
| 0:41.2 | Yeah. |
| 0:41.6 | And it'll create a cannibalistic monster that will start to devolve because it's going to be basically |
| 0:47.1 | cycling back its own, its own output. |
| 1:03.0 | Yeah. This is Jonathan Peugeot has been on the podcast before. |
| 1:21.4 | He is the provost of the University of Austin, and he is an expert both on ancient thinking in terms of the ancient Greeks, but also biblical |
| 1:30.2 | thinking as well and rabbinical thinking. So this is going to be a great conversation. We're going to |
| 1:34.6 | talk about the question of technology and all the way leading up to the issues of AI and all of that. |
| 1:40.9 | So Jacob, you're exactly the person I want to have |
| 1:44.3 | this conversation with. Well, thanks. I feel the same way. So my big question, my first question |
| 1:49.1 | for you is, have you thought a bit about the different narratives about technologies that we |
| 1:54.8 | find both in ancient thinking, whether mythological or philosophical, and the way that the Bible |
| 2:00.6 | portrays the question of technology, |
| 2:03.2 | let's say. |
| 2:03.8 | Yeah. |
| 2:04.3 | I mean, you know, I think that a lot of the issues that we're confronting today were already |
| 2:09.0 | identified by both of those traditions. |
| 2:13.0 | And maybe one way to put it is, if we go back to the Platonic text, Plato makes a distinction between acquisition and production as sort of kinds of sciences or arts. |
| 2:25.9 | And philosophy is categorized under acquisition. What does that mean? The acquisition of knowledge, which is a kind of openness or receptivity to the world, right? So there's a kind |
... |
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