I have commented on Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” in a previous episode – 51 to be precise. The story is about how a village has a yearly lottery where one person is randomly selected to be stoned to death by the rest. It is a tale about public execution, in other words, which, on its face, is shocking enough were it not for the fact that the vast bulk of the story is civilized. The characters engage in a civil exchange about what they are to do. It is all quite matter-of-fact. They will follow a well-regulated process to make their selection. It is only in the final line of the short story that we bear witness to their brutality. Jackson concludes the story with “and then they were upon her,” leaving it to the imagination of her readers exactly how that act of violence looked.
I explored this short story in a recent face-to-face class. We discussed what might be the true nature of our species in how we build violence into our society and have been doing so since time immemorial. Why?
Arguably, AI, ChatGPT, and other such applications are going to make this worse. Consider, dear listener, what happens when a toddler does not get his way. He pitches a fit.
We all know the answer. The inability to articulate one’s ideas often results in violent outbursts. With AI, we are now walking away from the opportunity to hone our ability to articulate our ideas and are, instead, deferring to what a program can produce. Hear me on this: Our increasing lack of the ability to articulate our own ideas ourselves will result in more cases of violent outbursts. Eighteen-year old, nineteen-year old, twenty-year old toddlers.
Add to that our clear proclivity to commit violence, and then we get a recipe for the unthinkable. Had Shirley Jackson composed “The Lottery” today, there might be a lot more to come after the line, “and then they were upon her.” We might get the disturbing details of the public execution. How one stone broke her jaw. How another stone knocked her down. How yet another stone made contact with a lifeless body. There might be more details today because, as my students quickly pointed out, we are desensitized the violence. We see it every day. The shootings. The mobs. The military conflicts. We have access to the images and the videos. We are drawn to them. And what does this say about us?
From my vantage point as an educator in an institution of higher learning, the prognosis does not look good. Ten years ago, the struggle was to get my students to read. Now they are not even writing. They come to class without the reading, without notebooks, without writing utensils ... only their phones. They never forget their phones. And I wonder what, exactly, we are trying to accomplish.
If there is some intentionality about getting individuals – mostly the young – to stop thinking for themselves, to stop even trying to form and articulate an original thought then those who are perpetuating this mission are doing a bang-up job. Pretty soon, we might start abandoning what Jean-Jacque Rosseau called a “social contract” -- that loose set of rules and regulations we use to maintain order and preserve the peace. The more we embrace and even celebrate that primal proclivity to commit violence, the more we might be tempted to walk away from any artifice of sophistication. We will not care if we cannot articulate our thoughts. It will not matter if we depend upon AI and ChatGPT to communicate for us. Nothing but our base instincts will matter. Meaningfulness will not be pursued, only the material, the superficial. Friedrich Nietzshe’s notion of nihilism might be realized. Nothing matters. Nothing has meaning. Only the dog-eat-dog worldview holds any sway because we are nothing but animals at heart – or worse! Creatures who indulge in the unspeakable. Creatures who have relinquished their ability to speak at all. Toddlers wielding clubs, mindlessly grunting our mutual hatred.
