“playgrounds for our souls”

Do You Feel Needed?

… In an essay from 2000, published in Wired and titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” the computer scientist Bill Joy worried about society’s direction: by 2030, he predicted, we’d be able to build computers “a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today,” making “the prospect of human-level computing power” realistic for the first time. (By some measures, today’s most advanced A.I. chips can be about that fast.) Joy feared that such technology, coupled with genetic engineering and other advancements, might “replace our species”—an anxiety that becomes even more credible when you realize that it’s existed for nearly two centuries. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man argued that individuals had become “piano keys” that could be played on command, in a composition coördinated by supposedly rational rules. In “Signs of the Times,” from 1829, Thomas Carlyle warned that we were entering a “mechanical age,” in which not just “the external and physical” would be “managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.” Leo Tolstoy, in his 1886 novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” imagined a man who was basically successful but who realized, on his deathbed, that he’d lived on autopilot. These thinkers suggested that we might internalize modernity’s logic of redundancy, finding ways to be unnecessary not just to one another but to ourselves. From this perspective, the development of technologies such as A.I. is just a furtherance of a long-standing trend.

Will A.I. really take our jobs? Will scientific and economic developments actually render the traditional human way of life obsolete? Maybe (hopefully!) not. But even the possibility of such outcomes wounds us. How can we insist upon—and really feel the existence of—our necessity, when so many forces seek to minimize it?

It helps to recognize that, just as there’s a rich discourse of redundancy, so there are many perspectives that clarify how and why we’re needed. In his book “Deep Utopia,” from 2024, the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who studies A.I. and coined the term “superintelligence,” asks how we might find meaning in a “solved world” in which A.I. does everything for us. He imagines people devoting themselves to hobbies, spirituality, the arts, sports, food, conversation, and “other domains which can serve as playgrounds for our souls,” and which will allow us to learn about each other and develop “our virtues and potentialities.” Hobbies, conversation—these seem slight against the steamroller of modernity. Yet my wife sings in a choir on Sundays, and, because there aren’t many altos, she can’t miss a rehearsal without letting the group down. Our participation in communal life really does make us necessary; it conjures, out of nothing, a place we need to be.

In “The Dignity of Dependence,” Sargeant suggests that, by believing in our own autonomy, we create the very conditions that obscure how much we’re needed. In his book “Dependent Rational Animals,” from 1999, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that we should do the opposite, by acknowledging that both needing and being needed are fundamental to our existences, from our vulnerable childhoods to our dependency in old age. Across our lives, MacIntyre wrote, “in order to flourish, we need both those virtues that enable us to function as independent and accountable . . . and those virtues that enable us to acknowledge the nature and extent of our dependence on others.” One of the complexities of being a dependent, rational animal, he pointed out, is that we’re not always needed and needful at the same time; in life, there are some periods when we give help, and others when we receive it. If you feel needed today, know that you’ll have needs later; if you feel unnecessary now, the odds are that you’ll be relied on down the road. Apocalyptic thinking tells us that we’re on a one-way journey to obsolescence. Actually, we’re on a wheel...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/do-you-feel-needed#intcid=recommendations_the-new-yorker-mobile-app-homepage_90f74c5d-2066-4e44-b6d7-6cf86d23959f_cygnus-tny-app_bkta