Suitability for purpose
On talking with dogs, ordering take-out, and knowing which matters are just too important to ask the wrong sources
An utterly dystopian ad now in circulation features a consumer asking a device, “Hey, Meta, what should I do with my life?”, and the chatbot dutifully sloughing off the answer. Ads often don’t reflect reality, but they do reflect what ad-makers perceive people’s desired reality to be. And there may be no speculation more dreadful than the prospect of directionless souls asking for life-fulfilling enlightenment the same way other people might place a DoorDash order.
■ Some questions deserve reverence. The act of asking the question is itself a sacred one. Existential questions like “What should I do with my life?”, if asked sincerely, belong in that category.
■ Such questions are for humans to ask other humans: Parents, friends, siblings, cousins, teachers, mentors, clergy, therapists, classmates, co-workers, neighbors. They are questions that embodied beings with real, sensory experiences of life can discuss with one another, knowing that communication about those matters isn’t just in the words but in the non-verbal responses we give, too.
■ Nobody would ask such a question of a dog, because a dog cannot comprehend the words nor the abstractions involved in the meaning of life. But at least a dog can have feelings, whereas a chatbot cannot even have that much. Only another person can dwell on the depths of what certain questions mean. Just because a computer can “talk” like a person doesn’t mean it is properly equipped to be asked.
■ We can and should consult the dead on these matters, too, by exploring what they have written and otherwise recorded for us. But even then, the seeker has to bear in mind that the dead cannot offer a two-way street of communication, and their judgment is strictly limited by what was known of the world until the time they passed. But, again, at least the dead were once alive and knew that the experience of life is far more than what can be ordered in words on a page.
■ Every tool can be useful, and we shouldn’t be afraid to test the outer limits of what our tools can do. But we also need to know that tools applied to the wrong tasks can be seriously harmful, and if we don’t consider some elements of life to be too important for puttering around with tools that merely impersonate human connections, then we’re asking for trouble in unimaginable aspects of life.