Intervista a David Hildebrand

In the academic year 2023-24, the Almæsthetics research center and the RaMo research group organized a seminar series titled “Fringes of Pragmatism.” Within this seminar series at least two talks addressed the topic of the relationship between aesthetics and A.I., exploring it from different perspectives. This topic is also the focus of a research project currently ongoing within the internship offered by Almæsthetics, the AIsthetics Project. The following interviews, carried out by some of the interns involved in the project, aim to make the main contents developed during the talks by Prof. David Hildebrand (University of Colorado Denver) and Prof. Ossi Naukkarinen (Aalto University) available to a wider audience.

Interview with David Hildebrand 

1) In your conference “Preserving meaning in an age of algorithms and A.I.”, one of the key concepts presented was the creation of meaning and value in our experience. 

According to John Dewey the act of meaning-making is at the very core of what it means to be human, as it allows us to elaborate our experience and give value and significance to our interactions with others and the environment.

Considering the significant difference of the human experience between Dewey’s time and ours, how would you now define the meaning-making process, taking into account our current world circumstances? 

DH: I wouldn’t expect the change in human experience to be as great as you might be imagining. While I’m not a scientist, would we expect the fundamental ways of experiencing – biologically, sociologically, anthropologically, etc. – to have changed so much in the last 100 years? People still need time to enter into, dwell and enjoy, and conclude an experience. To take simple examples, wouldn’t we expect that the same temporal rhythms exist from Dewey's time to ours for experiences such as reading, looking at a painting, having a conversation, eating a meal, helping a child, listening to instructions? Perhaps some of our tools have shortened or abbreviated some of the logistics for enabling these experiences, but I expect that the experiences themselves – and their meaning-making dimensions – are not that different.

2) In the conference you talked about the concept of time and how new technologies make us sacrifice the processuality and the slowness of problem solving in favor of the instantness of the solution: is it possible that one of the reasons for this is the importance given to productivity in a capitalistic society? Is it possible that, in order to be a functioning citizen, you have to solve the problem by being productive and skip the “useless” struggle of being human? 

DH: In my view, the answer is obviously “yes”. Time is perhaps the most important commodity, and the efficiencies of the factory and computer have been made available to all of us with our smart phones, appliances, and other devices. Ironically, of course, these efficiencies are also ways of establishing companies’ dominance over our lives, ways which can both control our time and keep us involved with devices for extended periods. In the tech industry, the word for apps which do this is “sticky,” meaning the user has (perhaps unconscious) difficulties breaking away from the app and using their time more autonomously.

I’m not sure how to answer the second part of the question; “citizen” means different things within a country and between countries. One interpretation of the question might be that there is, in many countries, an increased alignment between “being a citizen” and “being a consumer or worker”. In those situations, a business-dominant definition of “productive” would occupy the ideological messaging within the society, both in schools and in the everyday vernaculars of advertising and marketing.

3) Do you think we should actively seek out some level of challenge and struggle, despite having the chance to skip it altogether and jump to the solution, in order to maintain our traditional mental capacities, our ability to exert agency over our lives and our overall faculty to create meaning? 

DH: This question is very general, as there are many different kinds of people and tasks. What is important is that we try to understand all the various aspects of a task or challenge before we accept the opportunity to take a short-cut and save time. Some tasks, such as simple addition, subtraction, etc. are not teaching the educated adult anything, and so saving time with a calculator or computer makes perfect sense. (The young child, in contrast, would benefit from the experience.) Other tasks, such as creating an outline for an essay, might involve a lot of imagination and exploration which, if given over to A.I., would deprive a person of discoveries which would benefit them intellectually and personally. Again, what is most important is to understand is that different forms of automation replace different functions.

4) In your experience as a professor, to what extent do you think these new technologies and the connected obsession with productivity are changing the way students go through university? How do you explain the fact that after investing thousands of dollars in their education students are likely to use A.I. and other tools to speed through their time in these institutions, while at the same time sacrificing the very experience of it? 

DH: New technologies are usually introduced with promises about productivity and time-saving, but there is usually little discussion about what is lost or why we need to be more productive. Productivity is a value which finds important roots in economic manufacturing, especially in the work on industrial management by Frederick Winslow Taylor. It is hard to say to what extent these newer technologies are changing students’ methods – it is a new phenomenon and I’m not sure how to measure it. You’ve asked a difficult empirical question, and I've not seen, for example, ethnographical studies on this, yet. (Perhaps you could survey some students?) 

In some ways, it is natural to want to try new technology to see whether one appreciates and values the outcome, compared to the older way of doing things. Only students who have learned in the earlier style (without A.I.) will have a fuller perspective to compare “with” or “without” A.I. At least for a generation, professors will (in theory) be able to put into language what may be gained in the educational experience what is gained or lost by using A.I., but their students are always (and understandably) liable to distrust an older generation's interpretation of experience; after all, the older generation grew up in very different circumstances. The potential to trust a different generation’s experience requires some commonality of goals and values, expressed in ways that both generations comprehend and validate.

5) While speaking of the effects of new technologies on epistemic practices, you mentioned John Dewey’s explanation of inquiry as a process that’s articulated in different phases, pointing out the involvement of memory in all of them. You then highlighted the way tools like A.I. can eventually lead us to lose some skills, such as our capacity to retain information, along with other mental activities.

How would you respond if someone were to object, saying that we are not simply deskilling ourselves, but substituting our old skills with new ones that are up to date with the technological advancements and more effective to navigate the fast-paced world we live in?

DH: There are various kinds of memory, which are put to a variety of different uses. The concern raised by “offloading memory” onto devices is not really concerning in many situations – just as offloading addition and subtraction onto calculators (by those who already understand those operation) is not a concern. For example, a grocery list or an airline flight number is the kind of thing which a machine can remember for us without negative consequences. 

But now consider a different example. When someone remembers your birthday, it feels good – right? They care enough about you to make your birthday something which is worth remembering; this act effectively says, “Our lives are intertwined, and I care about you”. Now consider the role that social media plays in this relationship. Ask yourself, “What does it mean when someone remembers my birthday because Facebook reminded them?” This is trickier; perhaps they are simply responding to an algorithmic prompt and then sending you a message, largely automatically? It is very difficult to know the true reason for their birthday greeting; it could mean that you are part of their life and important to them; but it could also just be a causal chain reaction, empty of intimacy or care. Again, the point is not that we can determine which interpretation is necessarily correct; but what we do know is that an algorithm has inserted itself into a human relationship and created an ambiguity (about intimacy, care) which did not exist before. There is now more obscurity in communication, more doubt about person-to-person authenticity.

The cases of memory which we’re concerned with, then, involve things (events, objects, emotions, birthdays, etc.) worth remembering. Here, one might think about the English noun “member” and the verb “remember”. A member can be part of a logical set; there, the member is not special or unique. If we think, on the other hand, of a “family member”, or the member of a club, team, or society, we are dealing with a unique individual who has value and unique relationships to others. To recall, again, what Dewey said about remembering:

“Remembering is membering or joining things together again; that is, taking facts of our experience and putting them together to make a living organized whole […]. Genuine remembering involves control over our past experiences” (“Memory and Judgment”, LW17: 325).

Notice how he puts this – genuine remembering involves control. What makes remembering “genuine”? To understand that, we need to see how memory is critical for judgment. The things we commit to memory, or which wind up in memory because of the importance of the event, are brought back to consciousness – re-membered – so they can be available for us to use in judgment. Dewey writes, 

“When we come to remember a thing, putting together the various parts of our experience so as to make an orderly whole with proper perspective, we are practically judging and cultivating our faculty of judgment” (“Memory and Judgment”, LW17: 333).

We remember things because they could be useful for judgments; we might even think about them from time to time, before their actual use in an important judgment. Because they are in our minds (and not a computer) they can mature; memories can accrue a valence and a character, and are not mere “information” or “data”. Then, when it is time to make a judgment about something, such memories enter into judgment. Their valence and character lend impetus and direction to judgment. Dewey writes,

“A man of judgment has on hand a great stock of accumulated facts and can use them to advantage because he knows their relative value [...]. When we get into difficult positions we need a good many suggestions to select from; and the man who has not observed widely and memorized sufficiently, will not have the data for wise judgment” (“Memory and Judgment”, LW17: 334).

The point here is simple: if we understand that memory and judgment are connected, then when we offload (important) memories to technology, we likely deprive ourselves of tools we need for wise judgment. As Dewey put it, “Memory is judgment in the process of making, and judgment is memory completed and defined” (“Memory and Judgment”, LW17: 334).

The practical upshot is this: when we use technology to aid our memory, we need to know what we are asking machines to do versus what we are keeping to ourselves. Some things are trivial and not critical for judgment; others are significant and need to be kept close – reflected upon, mulled, and made part of us. Only then will they eventually be genuinely useful for judgment. As a final thought on this question, consider the opposite outcome. Imagine that we let devices do most of our important remembering. What kind of judgment can we exercise if our machines are doing most of our remembering? 

When it comes time to make a judgment, we will understand the relative weight of the ingredient memories, and so will not know what is important. We will not be able to judge adequately. We will be perplexed. In such a state, won’t it be tempting just to let technology judge for us? This is a dystopian outcome, obviously, because once we give our important judgments over to technologies, we have stopped trying to make meaning with our lives.

6) You cited Zuboff’s “The age of surveillance capitalism” on the matter of extraction architecture of tools such as ChatGPT and LLMs in general. Zuboff analyzes these tools in the framework of surveillance capitalism, as they extract data from users and sell them to advertisers and companies that buy them as prediction products. This makes the users, as she eloquently put it, “the object from which raw materials are extracted”, and allows these companies to nudge their behavior in a particular direction, undermining their autonomy and agency. Do you think that these practices impair the users’ ability to create meaning in their experience tout court, or can they still carve out some space in which they are free to do so, despite the micro-domination they’re subjected to? 

DH: The claim that the manipulations of technological nudging are impairing meaning-making tout court is impossible for me to answer; it would depend on what we mean by impair, for one, and also on empirical studies in psychology which, to my knowledge, have not been done. There is, now, a lot of activity trying to connect digital and social media with depression and there has also been the rise of what some are calling “attention fracking” (see, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/opinion/attention-economy-education.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-d-graham-burnett.html) – these may be relevant to the question.

While by no means perfect, I think it is worth it to check in with yourself about the question – what do you find the technologies are doing to you? Ask your friends, your student or teachers, your family. Partly, this becomes an investigation into what makes for meaningful living, regardless of technological factors. In part, it may suggest experiments of removing oneself from the stream of extraction, to the degree possible, and then comparing how that affects whatever you consider “meaning”. It may also be the case that these are longer term phenomena, and the only way to really understand them is by looking back, say 5 or more years from now. 

7) At the end of the conference, you talked about the widespread tendency of compulsively objectifying experiences into pictures and screens as an attempt to cheat death: whenever in the presence of something that provokes our sensitivity, we freeze its experience into a frame and move on without even giving it the time to unfold. How would you say this behavior impacts our experience from a meaning standpoint?

DH: My comment about “cheating death” was perhaps too dramatic. Maybe not. The fundamental question is this: why would someone be so willing to deplete the richness of the present moment so they can defer it to some future present moment? What is the source of that response? Most people instinctively understand that the present moment is significant – they seek out pleasure and avoid pain. The storing up of the present moment by interjecting technology – taking a photograph, for example – is a way of destroying the enjoyment, the primary experience, occurring in that particular situation. The gain which supposedly compensates for that loss is the enjoyment which is stored up to be had at some future time. But that will be a different situation; it will have, injected into it, the contents of what is happening now. 

I speculated about death because there seems to be a survival instinct at work here – an attempt to “store up” good experiences for later, to not lose the present moment (which is what happens at death). This approach misunderstands both death and the value of the present. Dewey, in Experience and Education (LW13) wrote about this in the context of education, but it applies, pari passu, to our interactions with technology. Dewey writes, 

“A person, young or old, gets out of his present experience all that there is in it for him at the time in which he has it. When preparation is made the controlling end, then the potentialities of the present are sacrificed to a supposititious future. When this happens, the actual preparation for the future is missed or distorted. The ideal of using the present simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself. It omits, and even shuts out, the very conditions by which a person can be prepared for his future. We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything. All this means that attentive care must be devoted to the conditions which give each present experience a worth-while meaning”. [LW13: 29-30] 

The key takeaway from Dewey is pretty simple: the present can only be lived in the present, and the objectification of the present for future immediate experience is, pragmatically, a dismissal of the value of present experience.

8) The fleeting nature of experience can be unbearable at times, and the behavior described in the previous question spares us the trouble of the feeling of loss that comes with it.

However, as you pointed out, this happens at the expense of the aestheticity of the moments captured, which is inevitably altered. In a nutshell, capturing moments changes them. How does it change them and what does it do to our relationship with the environment from an aesthetic point of view? 

DH: The act of capturing something is very different than the act of enjoying it. Capturing always includes what Dewey might have called “secondary” or reflective experience – one selects certain qualities for emphasis or attenuation, chooses the timing of the capture, etc. All these are basic to the act of capture, and yet these factors dilute or undermine the rhythm and qualities which are immanent in the unfolding experience. (One might object by pointing out that Dewey’s view of experience would also have to admit that capturing is also an unfolding experience – but he might reply by pointing out that it is redolent with reflective and abstractive types of experience and so is importing into experience emphases which accentuate and amplify cognition, prediction, and control. This is what philosophy has done for over two thousand years. In the end, one has to remain in touch with oneself about whether those more intellectualistic aspects of experience are as valuable as one might suppose.) 

One way to think about the cost of capturing is to think about “surrender”. This is an important aspect of our aesthetic experience with art, and in many ways it applies to how we view everyday life as well. Brian Eno came to understand that part of his art's appeal came from the audiences’ desire to surrender to it. As Eno put it, 

“Sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another […]. The umbrella that they all exist under is this word, surrender, because they are all forms of transcendence through surrender. They are ways of transcending your individuality and sense of yourself as a totally separate creature in the world. All of those things involve some kind of loosening of this boundary that is around this thing you call yourself. In Gospel music you do it by surrounding yourself in the inner community, so you are no longer you and become a part of us”. [Brian Eno, “The Philosophy of Surrender”, The Polymath Perspective, 2009, http://www.polymathperspective.com/?p=9]

Eno has a light touch when he creates works of art; he doesn’t shepherd appreciators toward a prescribed, definite experience but rather provides tableaus for experiencing which leave a lot of latitude for mood and activity. In some cases, his audiences respond to their freedom by “surrendering” while others only pay incidental attention. Eno’s work provides an interesting example because it facilitates both the focus of attention – to which one surrenders – and the fringe of attention – ambient work which one lives with and retains in the background. But in neither kind of artwork is the appreciator’s experience “capturing” anything; both are open to what is present, in the present. This is a great example, in my view, of a Deweyan approach to art.