Do we really have no choice beyond this binary: to either fight AI or embrace it? If fighting AI seems self-defeating and embracing it self-destructive, then why are we letting tech companies continue to develop ever more powerful AI programs? And if even the CEOs of these tech companies are worried about the potential threat to humanity, then why should we continue to pursue AI at all? Of course, it could be argued that the fears concerning AI are either the result of misunderstanding or mere hype designed to make AI seem more powerful than it really is. Is AI really a threat to humanity? Or is it just a complex—and scary-seeming—tool that, like any other tool, is designed to make life a little bit easier?
A compelling answer to these questions comes in the work of an intellectual who died long before ChatGPT, or even AI, came into existence. Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) was a French philosopher, sociologist, theologian, and professor who authored more than fifty books covering topics such as politics, propaganda, violence, and Christianity. In a recent book about the life and work of Ellul, Jacob E. Van Vleet and Jacob Marques Rollison argue that Ellul’s writings can be separated into two strands: sociological and theological. Alternatively, these two strands can be labelled as pessimistic and optimistic, for while his sociological texts have led academics to dismiss Ellul as a dystopian fatalist, his largely overlooked theological texts instead center on hope and the need for political engagement. Most importantly for our purposes, Ellul’s work in the 1950s focused on the growing concern about the relationship between technology and society.
According to Ellul, we are living in a technological world not only because tech is everywhere but because we are living in a world of technique. By “technique,” Ellul referred broadly to the way we accomplish tasks. In the opening of his 1954 work The Technological Society, Ellul defined “technique” as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” Painters use different techniques for painting, chefs have techniques for cooking, comedians have techniques for telling jokes, and so on. But an increasing focus on how things are done rather than why they are done, Ellul argued, means that the idea of having different techniques for different goals is giving way. Instead, optimizers simply try to figure out how every task can be accomplished in the most efficient way possible. As Ellul put it, “The technological phenomenon is the preoccupation of the great majority the men of our day to seek out in all things the absolutely most efficient method.”
This concerned Ellul because efficiency is pursued not in accordance with our values, but rather because efficiency has itself become the value by which everything is judged. In other words, we judge whether something is good based on how efficient it is, because good and bad have come to mean nothing other than efficient and inefficient. “Good” workers—for example, Hollywood screenwriters—are now more likely to be judged by how efficiently they produce profit-making work than by the quality—the aesthetic merit in this case—of that work.
Machines, according to Ellul, are the ideal embodiment of technique because they are designed for efficiency: they do nothing but perform the desired activity in the shortest possible time with the least possible effort. According to the ideal of technique, the activity itself—its human meaning and rationale, the tradition behind it—does not matter. What matters is that a machine can seemingly perform any activity in the most efficient way possible. In a society driven by technique, which has thrown over all other values, the most important activity a machine can perform becomes the production of more and better machines. Factories are thus often made up of machines that make little else but parts to make more machines. We come to want machines to do every activity, and we come to see every activity as something a machine could do better—that is, more efficiently—than any human being.