Neil Postman: A civilized man in a century of barbarism (2003)
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If you don’t give them the answer they might have a moment where they discover something on their own.
“There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.” J. Robert Oppenheimer (I read this quote today in the book, the medium is the massage, by McLuhan.)
When criticizing television one of his opinions is that the medium prevents in-depth stimulation.
ChatGPT takes that to an entirely new level.
I think he would recognize the value of the digital muse but contradict that with the toll on humanity.
ChatGPT is a mirror. GPT-4 more so than GPT-3.5, but in both cases: you get out what you put in. You may need to learn how to manage the conversation on a meta level (e.g. asking it to use a different style, as by default, it's overly polite and is padding its answers like it was writing a lifestyle magazine for an easily distracted audience), but if you want to go deep instead of wide, you can easily do that.
(At least as long as you avoid the topics where OpenAI lobotomized ChatGPT through RLHF and whatever other hacks they use to short-circuit the conversation. In those cases, I'm sure Postman would recognize the broader mechanism at play and its implications, from various socio-political transformations around the world in his youth and adult life.)
ChatGPT is less applicable to _Amusing Ourselves To Death_ and most applicable to his _Technopoly_ book.
Taken straight from Wikipedia:
> This is exemplified, in Postman's view, by the computer, the "quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect" technology for a technopoly. It establishes sovereignty over all areas of human experience based on the claim that it "'thinks' better than we can".
In the computer age Postman experienced, the IBM database system was the dominant mode of computing technolopy, and had mainly the High Modernist faults of a false claim to control and order. ChatGPT and other generative models much more directly attack the supremacy of human thinking, and make it much easier for us to cede control.
I’m not sure what Postman would say about them though. It may be too early to understand how people engage with them. Postman preferred newspaper to tv, since the former encouraged deeper thinking and the latter was focused on appearance and emotion. ChatGTP can encourage one to dive into a subject. On the other hand, Postman made a big example of how a society based on newspapers was excited for the Lincoln Douglass debates, and what it said about a civilization that wanted to spend hours engaging in intellectual debate. Does chatGTP encourage that king of society? It is hard for me to say yes.
I think in part it will depend on what these tools become. There is a path where they become worse than TV, just feeding us canned answers and short TikTok videos. But there is also an outcome where they are more like A Young Ladies Illustrated Primer and become very powerful ways to engage deeper with subjects. Interesting times …
But I'm thinking more of the immediate adoption of ChatGPT and similar tools to generate writing. What I took away from "Amusing Ourselves to Death" as a primary concern was the effects on discourse and thinking.
I need to re-read (well, re-re-re-read) AoTD because Postman's central theme was about the population being distracted by trivia and entertainment, but along side of that he discusses the transition from oral culture to written / print culture to electronic media culture.
He made a good case that our transition to electronic media has, bluntly, dulled our ability to reason. There's a set of critical skills that people use to engage with written text (though Postman might have been somewhat generous about this) that they don't use with TV News, etc.
So the idea of leaning on ChatGPT to generate written content, I think, would've alarmed him quite a bit. I'd love to read his thoughts on that, though maybe he'd be just as happy not to see these technologies come to life.
If I recall correctly he expected it would follow a similar trajectory to TV. And by far and large I would tend to agree, in fact I recall agreeing with whatever assessment he had made and being in awe with his prescience — this was in 2021. As far as ChatGPT, perhaps this excerpt of the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death* written by his son may pique your interest;
"Amusing Ourselves to Death is a call to action. It is, in my father’s words, “an inquiry ... and a lamentation,” yes, but it aspires to greater things. It is an exhortation to do something. It’s a counterpunch to what my father thought daily TV news was: “inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.” Dad was a lover of history, a champion for collective memory and what we now quaintly refer to as “civilizing influences,” but he did not live in the past. His book urges us to claim a way to be more alert and engaged. His ideas are still here, he isn’t, and it’s time for the reins to be grabbed by those of a new generation, natives of this brave new world who understand it better."
I asked chatGPT what it thought Neil would have thought.