Typically, human endeavors go through three stages. The first stage is initial curiosity, or the wondering if something can be done. For example, a curious person might wonder if one can use compasses and a straightedge to construct a square. This person doesn’t have knowledge of geometry. Instead, they’re just curious.
The second stage is the development of knowledge of how to do a thing. At this second stage, people develop systematic knowledge. For example, the person who wonders about constructing squares might form a group. The new group develops the basic axioms of geometry. They prove the basic propositions: how to bisect a line, how to bisect an angle, and how to construct various shapes such as squares. The second stage provides a foundation to answer the curiosity of the first stage, and enables sustained activity to explore geometry as new questions arise.
The third and final stage of activity is the industrial stage: at this stage, many people become interested in the field and work on it because the field has become a matter of pure production. Although many people in this third stage may have been initially curious, sustaining their production is more about their prestige and their status within the organization. They may not be as interested in the results themselves any more: someone may construct a 17-sided regular polygon, another person may construct a weird arrangement of polygons, and so on. There is still beauty in the field, but since the field itself has become a sort of livelihood of people, they endeavor keep it alive more for the sake of itself rather than because they are really curious.
In this third or industrial stage of human enterprise, there may be some people who are happy to discover even more arcane secrets of the field, and they may genuinely enjoy themselves. But the interest of many is no longer pure. Instead, it is a combination of initial curiosity and the drive to succeed in the group. And although some people may still have some intrinsic interest in the group, the group itself becomes more important than the initial curiosity. This new group dynamic often arises spontaneously, even though no one decides for stage three.
The difference between the two is subtle. In the second stage, curiosity and passion are equal to or greater than the importance of the enterprise itself. In the second stage, people are more interested in using the knowledge they obtain or work they do to understand themselves. They believe in doing things because such work is personally enriching. In the third stage, work is too often done for superficial reasons such as self-promotion.
The third stage of human activity, moreover, has one characterizing trait: it is about optimizing a single variable. When it comes to our geometry example, the second stage of geometry is about answering genuine questions that arise out of curiosity. The third stage is about furthering geometry for the sake of maximizing the number of results because the people doing it have been trained to aim for total numbers. Of course, some people in the third stage may still be pursuing the activity for pure reasons, but the majority are heavily influenced by maximizing production.
In the case of geometry, what is the difference between answering questions out of curiosity and producing more geometry? Well, in the latter situation, someone might be tempted to continually generalize some result because it is easy to generalize, even if the generalization does not have much appeal to those interested in geometry.
The problem with the third-stage is this: if the activity becomes harmful, then the activity cannot be stopped or modified if such a modification would interfere with the maximization of production. That is why we use the word industrialization: the activity is now only about maximization of a variable. Such maximization often actively suppresses curiosity for the sake of efficiency.
Modern academia is in stage three, because modern academia is mainly about the maximization of a single variable: academic output, or the growth of academia as an institution.Thus, modern academics simply cannot make moral decisions about whether their research is harmful, because they are too allied with industrial production. Of course, modern academics do have some morals, but those morals either only exist because they help the academic system or because they need to be compatible with the relatively few morals of greater society.
For example, in academia, plagiarism is a sin. That’s because there needs to be a reliable way to determine who is the most useful to the academic system, and people who plagiarize are not too useful. Biological research has animal ethics boards, but that is only because hurting animals unnecessarily goes against the ethical considerations of greater society.
But when it comes to question about whether the technological research will ultimately hurt society, academia is silent. That is the case with AI. Although AI is certainly detrimental and we need to have severe restrictions on it, academia happily goes on with AI research. That’s a direct consequence of trying to maximize academic output: people will just publish as much as they can. If it didn’t really matter how much one published, then people might think twice about publishing their research, because only their genuine curiosity and passion would matter.
Yes, of course, academia has set up some ethics boards and ethics discussions about AI. But the base assumption in such boards is always that AI has ‘some risks’, and that we must decide what is risky and what is not. In other words, the research must go on, just carefully! (Yeah right.)
Academia isn’t the only field to have entered the industrial age or third stage of human activity. Most of society has gone into the third stage. Laws and governments are now in the third stage of policy and law ‘production’. Even art has succumbed to this. Photography now is about producing endless photographs instead of taking a few good ones. We have AI denoising software and cameras that shoot 120 still frames per second. Of course, that’s not to say that all photographers are concerned about pure production of photography. But they all feel the pressure due to the way the field has evolved. If you’re not producing photos, then you recede into obscurity. But photography could easily have stayed in the second stage characterized by Ansel Adams when he said ‘twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.’
In fact, theoretically, the best way to grow as a photographer might just be to produce just ten or twenty of your best photos in one year and show them to friends and engage in critical analysis. That’s not to say that we should all go back to film and shoot less. But what it does mean is that everyone probably has a different personal way of learning photography, and most of those ways are probably not compatible with the intense trend of posting endless numbers of photos.
For example, I’m a photogrpher. I’ve probably shown over a hundred photos online. But if I really had a choice, would I have really shown so many photos? No. Although I like sharing my photos, I’ve sometimes felt the pressure to share too much. Yet, this style is not compatible with ways to be a photographer, because the system has trained people to want to scroll through dozens of photos at a time, and sometimes there’s a feeling that I’ll lose relevance if I don’t share as much as I do.
In short, stage three is not a good stage. It’s a stage where industrial production matters more than human development, and it happens because industrial production is more efficient, economical, and profitable. This industrial production is the goal of the machine and of technological civilization, and activities are thus pushed and shaped into stage three because that is the way they are most useful for the system.
Is stage three inevitable? No, it is not. The Amish have rules for their society so that their activities do not go to stage three. They make enough for their living but they don’t make an industrial enterprise out of their lives and try to accomplish things to the aim of ultimate efficiency. They have rules for simple fashion so that their style doesn’t become an industry until itself.
It is still possible to pursue genuine curiosity and spiritual development in an activity even if it’s in stage three in modern society, but the pressure from the industrial level of production will always be an unwanted pressure and always attempt to interfere or convert you to a stage three mindset. That is why people who are genuinely interested in science often become scientists who eventually obsess about citations and the number of invited talks on their curriculum vitae.
Stage two, on the other hand, is defined by sustainability. When a tribe catches just enough fish for their tribe and makes sure not to catch too much to deplete fish supplies, their fishing remains in stage two. But when a commercial trawler catches endless amounts of fish not just for a living but for maximum profit, and constantly seeks new technologies to become ever the more efficient regardless of the long-term fish population, then that’s stage three. When we use some inventions like the wheel to make life easier, that’s stage two. When we develop AI that uses gigawatts of electricity so that we can make already easy things even more easy just for efficiency, that’s stage three. When we develop some basic medicines and health treatments to ease pain, that’s stage two. When we develop an industrial medical complex whose ultimate aim is eternal life, that’s stage three.
Stage three is succumbing to the machine. It is a stage where morality, spirit, and soul are stripped from human activity to make automatons of those in stage three.
If we want to remain human beings, we should avoid contributing to stage three activities at all costs, and take just enough for ourselves by staying in stage two. The moment we move to stage three, we become soulless, mechanical creatures, and that is a tragedy.