This is why ‘the Machine’ concerns me

“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.” (E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909)

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometres an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.” (Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, 1954)

“Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.” (Confucius)

“Sorry, a machine can’t forgive your mistakes.” (Anon.)

“Books don’t need batteries.” (Nadine Gordimer)

"Now, a machine however subtle does not feel love, does not pray, does not have a sense of the sacred, a sense of awe and wonder. To me these are human qualities that no machine, however elaborate, would be able to reproduce. You may love your computer but your computer does not love you." (Kallistos Ware)

Source: https://twitter.com/nasahistory/status/951861340557234177

This is why ‘the Machine’ concerns me. Not that it might one day determine what I might eat or drink, or whether I can drink or eat at all, but that it will not hear my cries. That it will know nothing of physical thirst or of gut-wrenching despair. How can ‘they’ not understand this? It will have no comprehension of forgiveness. It will never wipe the slate clean. There is no delete. No such thing as absolution. It will deny to give me a fresh start [another more terrible dimension to DoS attack]. Mercy does not run through its microcircuitry. Don’t rush to embrace it too soon, this Trojan Horse which comes as a peace offering to the gods. The Creator has mercy for us, “[t]hough your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool” (Is. 1:18). The ‘Machine’ which is ‘spirited’ by power to apply force and control, is unmoved to our petitions, “Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye” (2001: A Space Odyssey). This is the elephant in the living room. Something holds us back, a foreboding, a premonition perhaps, that keeps us from directly addressing this subject.

It really is difficult to see people broken, humiliated, and in some instances to have their lives taken away from them because of something they might have said five, ten, twenty or more years previously. For someone, for whatever reason, to dredge up ‘sins’ of the past in order to hurt, or more concisely, to cause irreparable damage to the other. Who among us hasn’t said something which they haven’t later regretted, or where our words and sentiments can be elicited to carry a meaning or an attitude not originally intended? These can be errors of speech, peer group pressure, or the result of youth and immaturity. Yet it is there, it has been recorded. It is ‘played back’ oblivious to the context. Context is that which “throws light on meaning”.[1] We all make stupid mistakes. It takes time for wisdom and life experience to meld. And in other instances we get to a certain age and become anachronistic dinosaurs. The ‘Machine’ [input-process-output] is calculating and efficient. To ‘terminate’ these people is to simultaneously terminate ourselves. It is to do to another, that which can be done back to us. The ‘Machine’ defines us by our mistakes. It groups us in categories and dumps us in information silos. Is this the fate of the human spirit, to be “born into this?”[2] Imprisoned inside the “big iron” mainframes… like Ted Hughes’ proud Jaguar in “prison darkness” in its cage?

To forgive is an expression of one of our highest elevations as human beings. It is nobler than our finest literature, our greatest art, our most beautiful music. It is greater than all these when practised with a true heart for it takes us into the realms of the deepest mysteries of our combined representations of the Divine. In our religious experience we do not awe at the Creator’s ability with the harp or the writing of celestial sonnets, but rather we are amazed at the expression of God’s mercy and forgiveness. To the extent that we ourselves do the same with our fellow human, that is, to extend our grace towards those who we perceive to have wronged us, we are in the “image and likeness” of the Creator (Gen. 1:26).  We forgive that we could enter more genuinely into the space of compassion, that we might go on loving. The root of “forgive” is the Latin word “perdonare,” meaning “to give completely, without “reservation.” (“perdonare” is also the source of our English “pardon”).  We give up the desire or the power to punish.[3] The ‘Machine’ knows nothing of compassion. It will not forgive because it cannot love. Algorithms don’t have soul; they are devoid of incorporeal essence:

“You can’t forgive without loving. And I don’t mean sentimentality. I don’t mean mush.” (Maya Angelou)

In life not all acts of fellowship are received well or reciprocated. When the grace we give is not accepted and is returned it can be brutal. It is a place of heavy tears. We are living increasingly in a world which keeps us isolated one from the other, and where we might be called-out or cancelled as swiftly as the swatting of an irritating fly. This is not because people are wicked, on the contrary, most people are generous and kind-hearted. We are all fragile vessels on an oftentimes bumpy journey. We can crack. And this is the tragedy, the irony, that this very fragility draws us into systems and networks and ‘mobs’ where we do things so that we, ourselves, might not be hurt. It is increasingly becoming a survival technique. The online world especially has hurt and devastated people by its millions, either by their own hand [addictive behaviours] or cyber-attacks [bullying, misinformation]. “As rapidly as technology advanced,” writes Joseph Carvalko in his prescient novel Death by Internet, “goodness declined…”. Communication technologies are not exempt. They are the voice of ‘the Machine’. The apparatus has no spiritual knowledge of humility and so it cannot practise repentance. Computational empathy or affective computing, is mimicry at worst, and simulation at best. The ‘Machine’ possesses no natural ontology, knowledge representation and reasoning, does not automatically equate to higher consciousness. It cannot possess “human memory”. And therefore it does not know what it is like to be human. I dread to think, if the present-day capabilities of our 21st century technology were available to past totalitarian regimes [especially Advanced LBS and monitoring systems], how enormously more multiplied and innovative their crimes would have been.[4]

To meet likeminded spirits along the way means so very much. It could make all the difference in the world, to have the strength, to hold onto the courage, to keep pushing apart that impalpable space between the light and the darkness. How good to have a friend who is real and co-substantial. To receive an encouraging message to remind you of your humanity, to have sympathy for you precisely because of your flesh and blood. To be accepted for all your faults and list of misdemeanours. And if need be, as it sometimes will be, for one or the other to say “I am sorry”, and to hear those marvellous words in reply, “All is good, I understand.” Not just a graphical control element, or a voice on the other side of an interface, or a recorded message with push button instructions. A machine could be programmed to ‘speak’ all the good things in the realm of metaphysics, but we will always have the perspicacity, that penetrating discernment, that it is artificial, and synthetic. Those words, the programming languages [even if they should ever become distinctly compositional], will never, cannot ever come from the heart [“the blood-beat” of the poets], the place of will and intention. Technology, of course, in and of itself, is not the problem, but our connection to it needs to be kept under constant vigilance, that is, we must keep awake as to how it infiltrates and attempts to redefine our very existence as human beings. When we are in need of some light and succour all the artificial intelligence and interconnectivity in the world will mean nothing. It is like being trapped in a vault of bullion of an unlimited value with no means of escape or communication. What then the benefit of all that precious metal? What good if we are building towards this terrible prediction:

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” (George Orwell)

We give our technology compelling names and dress it up with the most dazzling colours and logos. Many of these technologies, ultimately the most potentially dangerous, we make anthropomorphic. We dress up for example, and give large adorable eyes to the robots. We make-believe that we are understood and can even be loved by ‘the Machine’, that its cold intelligence will keep us warm at night. ‘It’ will seek those divine attributes which we ordinarily attribute to Deity: omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnificence. But being created in the image and likeness of the creation itself it cannot by definition ever achieve them. And so it will incrementally grow to become commensurately desirous and aggressive. The monster built by Victor Frankenstein eventually turns on his creator in murderous rage for making him hideous and incapable of fulfilling its integrated dynamism [5] . The singularity will not breathe new life into us to make us immortal. It could one day make you the ‘undead’, but never immortal. We would do good, as well, to not quickly forget the lesson of the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9). Technology gone awry on account of the hubris of the builders and the resultant breakdown of communication.

We know ourselves better than those who might be wanting to hurt us and much better than ‘the Machine’ which wants to imprison us in its central repositories and data warehouses. Their efforts to cause us pain, to potentially bring us to some humiliation, pale in comparison to our own battles, the fight against our compulsions, and those myriad fetishes within. We know much better than our real-life adversaries and the ‘electronic eye’ of the darkness fighting, assailing our souls, as we try to limit its impact on our lives and on the lives of others. If only they [both the adversaries and the ‘comptrollers’] knew the whole truth, had some insight of the context, they would be ashamed and terrified at the same time. Big Brother and uberveillance as much they might try to get inside the head, to get to the “whole truth” with their own particular strains of watching techniques, can only endlessly fall short of the mark. Our life is a mystery infinitely inexhaustible. We are so much more, much more than our search history and CCTV captures. It is weight enough to grasp what those words below from Miłosz mean for each one of us, before even ‘the Machine’ goes after our self-discovery to take away that private space where away from prying eyes we do our living and our dying: 

“To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labour for one human life.” (Czesław Miłosz)

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/context

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQJengH58ow

[3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/forgive

[4] https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1716&context=infopapers

[5] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/frankenstein

Pastoral experience and the practise of compassion

“Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.” (Henri Nouwen)

Many times I would be humbled if not completely heartbroken by my pastoral experience and it was this practical expression of the priesthood which often gave meaning and dimension to my calling. It was an education into the human condition not taught in institutions of higher learning and only occasionally captured in literature dealing with loss and suffering. It is difficult, if not impossible to be taught compassion. It is like a naturally good singing voice, you either have it or you do not. To be confronted head-on with absolute loss, some of this sudden and violent, some of it slow and agonizing, was a fast and hard lesson into the reality of unfathomable pain and the dreadfulness of death.

The one thing I could not accept even from the start of my little ministry was the ‘pious’ response to death, and I did try hard to avoid it. I am sure, however, that even with the best intentions I was not always successful. It was above all painful to listen to indefensible nonsense when it involved the death of a child when the words came from the mouth of a priest who should have known better, “A. is now with God, the Lord needed another angel.”  This is not the loving Creator of things both “seen and unseen” but little more than a cosmic psychopath. C.S. Lewis reflected with brutal honesty on the heavy grief of losing his beloved wife:

“It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”[1]

Mother Maria of Paris writing agonizingly and yet without the abandonment of hope, after the death of her beloved child:

“Into the black, yawning grave fly all hopes, plans, habits, calculations and, above all, meaning: the meaning of life… Meaning has lost its meaning, and another incomprehensible Meaning has caused wings to grow at one’s back… And I think that anyone who has had this experience of eternity, if only once; who has understood the way he is going, if only once; who has seen the One who goes before him, if only once- such a person will find it hard to turn aside from this path: to him all comfort will seem ephemeral, all treasure valueless, all companions unnecessary, if amongst them he fails to see the One Companion, carrying his Cross.”[2]

It goes without saying, I do not hold the answer, but I have made some reasonable peace with the hard reality of loss both in the context of my own faith and in the discernible movement of transfiguring love.[3] Like many of us, I too have experienced profound loss, and like most of us, it has for a season come close to paralysing me. I have yet to completely come to grips with the passing away of one side of our entire family or my darling Katina’s four miscarriages. I spoke of ‘transfiguring’ love, for this has been the implication and consequence of Christ’s own death and how from that darkest day in our human history, came the greatest solace to the human race, that death is not the end.[4] But this belief founded in a religious faith does not exclude those who are not religious, for the underlying lesson, the ‘meaningfulness’ of the resurrection [even if we should only accept it as a metaphor] is that death does not mean inertia. It is a movement and a response [both for the living and dead] from one condition into an other. There is hope for a better tomorrow, and should we endure through the dark night, there will come a time when at least something of our suffering, will make some sense. As impossible as it is to accept when pain has no words, a time of solace will come. And this ‘dealing’ will arrive for each one of us differently, at a different time and in a different way. For suffering is almost always an intensely personal experience. Even if in the meantime our loss is to be redeemed no more than with our dignity in the face of an overwhelming blackness, and our refusal to be fully broken.

My brave young friend Leo

I have been blessed to have encountered genuinely courageous souls, amazed at the vast and often immeasurable endurance of the human spirit. Hospitals and grave-yards are the unadulterated universities of our world. It is in these places of unmistakeable reality we can measure ourselves and learn to heal and to forgive. I met Leo when I was still in the early stages of my ministry, starry-eyed and believing that I could make a difference. I would often make unannounced visits at hospitals and do not remember ever being turned away. In a pocket to my cassock I kept a carefully folded piece of white paper. On it I would register the names of all those I would visit and next to their name put down the colour of their eyes. There you are, I share with you one of my great secrets. We should look into each other’s eyes more often. It is all there, the unabridged history of a life.

Leo K., a young man in his early twenties had been involved in a horrific accident with the worst of all possible results: quadriplegia with locked-in syndrome [LIS]. He was fully conscious but trapped inside his body. Neither able to move nor to speak. A drunkard had disregarded a stop sign and crashed head-on into the beautiful boy who was riding his motor-cycle. The next time my brave young friend was to wake up it would be without movement in his limbs and without his voice. Until his death a few months later, he would only be able to communicate with his eyes. I would pray some silent prayers. Other times I would want to hold him in my arms. Did he like to dance? I am sad that was something I never had the chance to ask.

Leo and I would communicate using a magnetic board with red letters. I would point to a letter and he would blink at the right place. Then we would move on to the next one, soon we managed to work out short cuts and this made things simpler. So we were able to drift into other places and explore additional modes of communication. Not once did he complain or express a desire to die. Often he would be smiling. His heart was at peace. Of course, needless to say nothing of this was easy. It took titanic strength. Years later when horrifying thoughts of suicide would unrelentingly torment me, I would many times recollect him and hold back until the next day. I asked Leo if it was okay for me to bring a recording of the Gospel of John. He replied, “Y.” I asked him if he still believed. It was the same response, “Y”. There were other things we spoke about as well, including rugby league. He told me he was a fan of the Sydney Roosters. Leo, who had the most penetrating green eyes, died from pneumonia a few days before he was due to fly out to Moscow for some cutting-edge treatment.

One afternoon I visited Leo with a new seminarian. He said to me, “[w]e have nothing to complain about, look at Leo.” This especially upset me. We should not find comfort in the suffering of another nor look upon suffering with pity nor patronize the wounded. ‘Feeling sorry’ helps no one and can diminish our companion’s understanding of hopefulness. On some bowed stringed instruments we find metal strings, they vibrate in sympathy with the stopped strings. These are not touched with the fingers or the bow. They are called sympathetic strings. Compassion is something like that, to feel sorrow for the sufferings or misfortunes of another. Compassion [from the L. compati ‘suffer with’] has much in common with that glorious word: sympathy. What is sympathy? It is derived from the Greek sympάtheίa which literally means “feeling with another.” It is good to be a ‘sympathetic string’. Yet it is not always easy and it can only happen in small increments of grace like the baby steps we take to enter into the mystery of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37).

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

At the conclusion of the last class when I was teaching regularly at the university, I would suggest a reading list to my students which was outside our information and communication technology (ICT) bibliography. This list included authors such as Primo Levi, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Viktor Frankl, and Jean-Dominique Bauby. JDB the editor of the French fashion magazine ELLE was made famous by his incredible book (which was published two days before he died), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.[5] In 1995 at the age of 43 he suffered the brain stem stroke (the brain stem passes the brain’s motor commands to the body) which causes locked-in syndrome. Bauby with the help of some good people, particularly Claude Mendibil, wrote and edited his memoir one letter at a time with the only part of his body that he could still control… his left eyelid. He did this similarly to the way I would communicate with Leo, by using a board with letters. This type of system is often called partner assisted scanning (PAS). And like Leo, he too, would die of pneumonia.

[1] The Quotable Lewis, Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root (editors), (Tyndale House Publishers, Illinois, 1990), 149f.

[2] https://incommunion.org/2004/10/18/saint-of-the-open-door/

[3] ‘The paradox of suffering and evil,’ says Nicholas Berdyaev [whom Bishop Kallistos cites in The Orthodox Way], ‘is resolved in the experience of compassion and love.’ These oft quoted words point back to the Cross but also to Saint Paul who understands suffering as a participation in the mystery of Christ (Phil. 3:8-11).

[4] The Paschal homily of Saint John Chrysostom (c.349-407) read on the Sunday of the Resurrection continues to inspire and to comfort believers across Christendom: http://www.orthodoxchristian.info/pages/sermon.htm

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Diving-Bell-Butterfly-Memoir