Book Review: The Spirituality of Awe: Challenges to the robotic revolution

The Spirituality of Awe: Challenges to the robotic revolution

Kirk J. Schneider (2017). Cardiff: Waterside Productions

About halfway through Dr. Schneider's latest book, he recalls a memory of the '…religious experience of the secular…' (p 61). While standing in the main quad of Columbia University in New York, he feels a combination of sensations and emotions: thrill, trepidation, fear, belonging, wonder and reverence for this 'cathedral' of learning. This is an example of the 'Awe' that he believes is detrimentally dwindling in the age of the 'Robotic Revolution' and that he urges us to recapture in order to retain our sense of what it is to be human. This is his central concern.

This slender volume is a manifesto (my term, not his) spurring us to preserve life-affirming and humanistic/existential values and practices, in the era of Robotics. The term 'Robotics', in this context, appears to act as a broad catchall word to express the generality of technologies and related services being ushered into the world through advanced computing, complex algorithms, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, biomechanics and many other broadly scientific developments advancing on multiple fronts. In particular, Schneider connects these developments with what is known as the 'Singularity', a term popularised by the Silicon Valley luminary Ray Kurzweil to describe his culmination of human evolution in a seamless and complete super-intelligent human/machine integration. The term 'transhumanism' is also used to label a putative next stage of human evolution that transcends existing humanity. In the parlance of the computer age, one might dub this humanity 2.0.

If you are a techno-utopian, like the Kurzweil's of this world, then this is an end devoutly to be wished for – the final crescendo of human achievement ushering in a bright new age for super-humankind. If one is of a more dystopian frame of mind, then this book aims to illuminate some of the existential problems that these technologies are already posing and point to ways of resisting its powerful temptations.

The ills that Schneider seeks to diagnose essentially boil down to one thing – the role of technology is distancing us all from a direct experience of Being-in-the-World. As I mentioned, this is a slender volume and one aimed at a general readership, not necessarily a readership steeped in existential literature, and/or psychotherapeutic practice. Heidegger and all the usual existential suspects are not rounded up here, although their influence is palpable. Instead, Schneider parses some of the more fashionable contemporary writers exploring advanced technology and its utopian or dystopian dynamics – Ray Kurzweil (see above; optimist), Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens and Homo Deus; sceptical optimist), Sherry Turkle (Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together; hopeful pessimist) and others. There are other writers in the field… a lot actually. There is presently a busy and fertile hunting ground that Schneider might have referenced including Curtis White (We, Robots; angry pessimist), Jaron Lanier (You Are Not A Gadget; techno-savvy sceptic), Adam Alter (Irresistible; suspicious) and Bernard Stiegler (Technics and Time and The Re-Enchantment of the World; angry, suspicious, French pessimist)… and those are just the ones on my own shelf!

To underpin his diagnosis of the threats of the Robotic Revolution, Schneider posits the notion of the 'Chaos Complex', a fear of the complicated and the uncertain that has acted as a driving force in the history of the 'Western world' to simplify, de-risk and make more efficient the mechanics of Being. This has had the effect of effacing of ourselves as whole and spiritual beings capable of wonder and awe at Nature's bounty, and we are now at a critical juncture. Schneider hints at a sense of time that is at least teleological, if not fully eschatological, that is, driving toward a fixed goal/end-of-times and that inevitability is swamping free will. This diagnostic strategy tends to undermine what are otherwise sound observations about where technology may be taking us. Technological innovation has been a feature of humankind (Western or otherwise) since the taming of fire. Many of these innovations were, at least partly, the result of an entirely healthy and natural need to create stability, predictability, and safety in the world for the greater prospering of humankind. There were some mighty strides made for the flourishing of humankind on the road to Candy Crush Saga. Pre-lapsarian dreams of a world of peaceful hunter gatherers are the reductio ad absurdum to each generation's own cut-off point – the point at which the technologies with which one has grown up, and then thrived amongst, start to be overwhelmed and the new technologies presage foreboding.

If the spirit of invention and innovation was especially strong in the countries and cultures of the West Asian peninsula, including the Mediterranean littoral and the North American diaspora – and maybe it was for a while – it is certainly not exclusive to these regions of the world. Thus, this needs to be accounted for much more carefully, or simply omitted from the argument. Better still, start from the point where the spirit of innovation may have turned darkly against us to become the obsessive and smothering quest for total security, swaddling us in a creepy, faux-comforting blanket of electronic infotainment and surveillance. There is a fair point buried here. Perhaps the accelerating pace of technological development allied to a hyper-kinetic commercial energy is producing ever more marginal goods and services that progressively dis-intermediate our daily interactions with the physical and inter-personal worlds. But equally, Schneider may be prone to nostalgia here. To be middle-aged, in a certain manner, is to be cursed and blessed at the same time. It is to be cursed with the not entirely reliable memories of a once familiar world, fading forever, but to be blessed with enough remaining energy to stand defiant against a Being-in-the-World that is forever shrinking to a Bargaining-with-the-virtual-World through the graces of our digital entourage.

Moving beyond this, Schneider asks his readers to imagine what an embodied sense of awe would be like when deployed into the key settings of life – childhood, school, the work place, government and faith, and, finally inter-community/inter-cultural relations. These vignettes are inspiring and one can see glimpses of this kind of attitude in well-funded schools, kinder workplaces, among enlightened civic activists, ecumenical religious practitioners and so forth. His idea of an 'army' of depth psychological facilitators to be recruited, trained and then deployed to foster Awe in institutions and communities, to be funded by taxes on share transactions, more rigorous imposition of the tax code and on closing tax loopholes, has a quixotic charm to it. One wonders how seriously Schneider really takes these proposals beyond their symbolic value as dreams from which some kind of workable reality might be fashioned.

What then, is to be done? Schneider offers a number of simple ideas, tailored to the individual and all of which appear sensible, moderate suggestions for living a more engaged life with an openness and curiosity toward the world: use technology less, take up a creative hobby, cultivate

Richard Swann