Love or the Machine

This essay was not written or edited by AI.

I once heard a story (although I did not have time to verify it because I did not know how to Google it) that a certain young man was about to undergo a major surgery and before he went into the Operating Room, he asked the nurses to give him his iPhone so that he could hold it for comfort. I do not know whether he had any family members or friends who were there with him, but the point of the story is that minutes before this moment he was dreading, he went to a machine for comfort. And we all do this in some way. Machines make us feel safe. They make us do everything with ease. They make us feel connected to something, to anyone, in the world. They give us a break from the arduous circumstances and responsibilities that come upon us so that we can breathe a little. At least, that is the feeling.

Now suppose I were to tell you that, in the near future, there will be a machine that will be able to give you what you want even before you knew you wanted it. What if this machine can predict your behavior so well that it seems like it knows you, that it understands you? It may seem to understand you more than your friends or spouse do. It seductively offers you a (false) promise: it can give you whatever you want. You ask it to write your essay in your own voice, and it imitates it well. You tell it about your kids' problems, and it gives you great advice. You ask what stocks you should invest in, and it beats the best hedge fund manager. It unexpectedly gives you compliments when your soul is downcast. Again: it seems to know you well. And isn’t that what we really want? To be known?

What makes machines seductive is the same reason why the beautiful is attractive: it promises the infinite. And that is what power does. It is easy to see why pleasure, relationships, or any material good can ultimately be unsatisfying. We can get tired of them in time. But power is something that we can always have something of, something that we can always want. Why shouldn’t I adore and be addicted to something that seems to give me what I want, that seems to know me more than I know myself?

Will we have the strength to detach from these machines in the future? A lot of people speak of “moderation” or “using it for the good.” But these are superficial answers. These machines, by their very nature, will shape the way we think and feel by the simple use of them. In other words, when we use these machines, we cannot but think of the way it makes us think, or feel the way it makes us feel. Our criteria for many things now are efficiency and immediate gratification, and we cannot help but think that everything should be done yesterday and that our value comes from the immediate results of our work. As Neil Postman noted a long time ago, every technological change is an ecological change. When these machines will come to us in the future, it is as if a red dye is dropped into a glass of water. Everything will be changed and affected. In fact, it is already around us and within us.

I have had these ideas (and fears) for about twenty years. Ten years ago, I created a new high school course to think deeply with young people about the nature of technology and its effects on our hearts. The problem, I thought, was an ontological one. It is not simply the machines themselves, but the worldview, the modern ways of thinking and feeling about the world, that is detrimental to human life. The tools or technologies we have are simply the symptoms of this disease. I did not come up with this understanding, but learned it from the works of David L. Schindler. He is the most profound when it comes to perceiving the problem of the ontology of technology. So, when I was about to create this new course, I asked him if we could meet and talk about what he thought young people should know about this culture that we are living in. He was patient and kind with me. It felt like we only talked for ten minutes, but we talked for more than an hour and a half. There were many insights I learned from that conversation, but the one that was engrained deeply in my heart was when he got to the heart of the problem of the Machine: we are living in a culture that impedes us from falling in love.

There is nothing sentimentalistic about this judgment. The power of the Machine is that it preys upon our feelings and ideas—that which seems so immediate to us. We usually think that what is most real is that which is immediate. But falling in love requires that we perceive that reality, even when it does not seem immediate to us, is fundamentally beautiful and good. It means that reality is inherently meaningful, that the reality that we did not create speaks to us, that it awakens in us the need to make definitive choices so that we can give ourselves completely to someone forever. Unlike an addiction, it opens us up to the good and true of other things and creates an attention and care to what we thought was unlovable, both in the other and in us. The ontology of being as love is the daring view that every concrete singular being is lovable and lovable in its own unique way. Oneness does not cancel uniqueness and difference, and difference is essential to oneness.

The mystery of being as love gives us a true understanding of power. Power is not enslaving reality to our own instincts and will. What makes the other attractive is that the other reveals a deeper reality than what we can imagine or think of. The other has depth. The other in front of me, whether it be a flower or a beautiful woman, reveals a uniqueness that is inexhaustible. And then it also reveals that it does not have to exist, but exists anyway; it reveals reality or being that is common between us. Finally, it reveals the very God who gratuitously created the uniqueness and being that the other possesses. Especially in front of a person, we encounter the revelation of the Origin of all things and the End which every spiritual creature desires. To truly perceive the other, then, means receiving the revelation of its uniqueness, of its being, and of God. It is the beginning of veneration, creating a union and a distance. True power, therefore, is not control, but exalting and helping unveil the depth (uniqueness, being, God) that the other carries. It requires giving time and space to give birth to what is true because it entails accepting the unknown and the uncontrollable in the other, which may include that the other will do or say things that will cause some pain. This sometimes means having to accept the suffering of not being the other. True power is the capacity to suffer for love.

What we truly desire is not what the Machine can offer. What we want is that, in respecting the freedom of the other, the other chooses us, that the other can see us and want to love us as we are. Again, in his or her freedom. We want to be known, desired, and loved. But the Machine can never do those things because it cannot be surprised by us, be at awe at and have reverence towards us. The Machine never gets goosebumps in front of a sunrise or gets a jolt in the heart when it meets a beautiful person. It is never drawn towards another. It lacks, and this is essential to being a person, affection. We may always try to substitute this desire with something else, but only to the detriment of not being certain of our own worth. Because when the other’s face glows when we are seen by that person, we remember the gift of our own existence. We begin to matter, and life as a whole, reality as a whole, becomes something to be looked at with gratitude.