![During this time, in that evocative phrase of Mary Oliver’s (photographed in 2013), we can 'let the soft animal of [our] body' just be. Photograph: Angel Valentine/The New York Times](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/TDURTOAD2SXNZJ77YYG4MHQOC4.jpg?auth=6d8050dbd455f32b85fb8231b031229bd0ee5ea13f4ebf073681daf29197a1a9&smart=true&width=1024&height=575)
“Twixmas” or “betwixtmas” is too twee, and “interstice” sounds too much like bad cystitis. I don’t have a good name for the time between Christmas and new year, and I know everyone is not fortunate enough to have reasons to love it.
But for those of us lucky enough to have free time with people we like and trust, this period signals a cosy kind of mild chaos where normal schedules are suspended, and no one is quite sure what day it is. For many women, in particular, it can be a time when we stop berating ourselves for our body’s flaws.
Anyone who still believes the truism normally attributed to Wallis Simpson that you can never be too rich or too thin, has never seen the internet pile-ons on unfortunate female celebrities now sporting a chin so pointy it could be held between a toddler’s thumb and forefinger. And being fat in the age of Ozempic apparently signals a criminal level of wilful self-neglect. But during this time, in that evocative phrase of Mary Oliver’s, we can “let the soft animal of [our] body” just be.
Being grateful for our bodies and the way they enable us to experience the world can be an act of quiet rebellion, and not just because of the ever-changing, arbitrary standards of what constitutes an acceptable body type.
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And given some of the ideas emanating from Silicon Valley, the internet body fascists begin to look moderate. This year, Ross Douthat of The New York Times interviewed Peter Thiel, the German-American billionaire and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir.
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It is difficult to overstate Thiel’s influence. In 2016, he decided to bankroll some US politicians, despite being notoriously dubious about democracy. (Or perhaps because he was dubious?)
He says he was worried about the stagnation of culture and ideas. He donated to Donald Trump in the hope that he would “slash regulations and crush the administrative state”. (He says he would not do it now.) One of the other politicians he funded was his protege, JD Vance.
In the NYT interview, Douthat asked him a question: “I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?”
A long pause ensues. When pushed, Thiel hedges by saying yes, but not humans as currently constituted.
Silicon Valley famously embraces transhumanism, where the human body is transcended to achieve immortality by using technologies such as neurotechnology, biotechnology and nanotechnology.
Thiel thinks this aim lacks ambition. He wants a complete transformation of every aspect of himself, while retaining his perfected body – rather than, say, uploading his consciousness to a computer. Many others in the tech world find retaining a body a bit ick.
Jaron Lanier, who coined the term virtual reality and was one of its early pioneers, is bemused and somewhat appalled by these attitudes. In a Vox interview, he described young AI scientists fervently declaring that they would never have a “bio baby”. (That’s just a baby to you and me.) It would interfere with their commitment to AI superintelligence.
Lanier says others believe that AI will evolve into a kind of god who will save us by “uploading us to a computer, or solving all our problems, or creating superabundance”.
Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, has repeatedly stated that our best option is to merge with machines. He said breezily in 2017 that “we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”
It is tempting to respond to all of this quasi-religious boosting of AI with a litany of all the things AI gets wrong, or assertions that it is incapable of true intelligence, just blindingly fast recombination of statistically recurring patterns.
That would be a mistake. In the 19th century, as science advanced, religious people retreated into defining God by making him the explanation for everything science could not explain. All it achieved was shrinking the space for God smaller and smaller – a God of the gaps. As Charles Alfred Coulson, a theoretical physicist, applied mathematician, chemist and committed Christian, said, “When we come to the scientifically unknown, our correct policy is not to rejoice because we have found God: it is to become better scientists.”
If we define ourselves in terms of what we can do that AI cannot, it is just a kind of humanity of the gaps. It instrumentalises human beings by suggesting that our worth lies in how effectively we compete with machines.
By embracing this humanity of the gaps, as AI’s capabilities inevitably expand, our humanity consequently diminishes. Our dignity lies not in any one attribute, but in the fact of our embodied humanity.
Even if Elon Musk fulfils his boast that there will be a billion humanoid robots in the US in 10 years, this kind of embodied artificial intelligence will still not be human.
We need to stop measuring ourselves in the reflective screens of our devices. Instead, let’s put down our phones, go outside for a walk, link someone’s arm, and rediscover the simple joy of flawed, mortal, human bodies.
