It’s a longstanding cliché we parents repeat that our kids can have more fun with a box than with the toy that comes in the box. It’s still true, and we still don’t trust our own wisdom in this regard because presenting a kid with an empty box for his birthday or some other occasion is a risky bet that I personally have yet to make with any of my own kids. I’m also as guilty as many parents out there who’ve gifted children with tablet “readers” that are admittedly used most of the time for every feature they offer except reading. We do limit our kids’ time with devices and computers, and when they have to read or choose to read, they still pick up physical books most of the time. This is partly because we just happen to have a lot of books in the house, but there remains something to be said for narrowing the range of options in one’s periphery or at one’s fingertips in order to derive the most enriching experiences. Sometimes, you just gotta sit and study the empty box for a moment before you discover its many possibilities.
This story from NPR reports that reading among teens has sharply declined over the last decade, according to a study by Common Sense Media. Jennifer Ludden’s report emphasizes the need for parental involvement in helping kids learn to moderate their use of devices that offer so many attractive diversions and eat up time that might be spent exclusively reading. The story caught my attention of course because it is yet another example of why more access to something like literature does not automatically result in an increased benefit to society. Technology companies that want to scan every book ever written “for the greater good,” and copyright critics who cry foul over the volumes of works not yet in the public domain are ignoring the fact that society will not necessarily behave according to the idealism they promote. Personally, I don’t think it’s counterintuitive that more books more cheaply available through more portals can fail to produce more literacy. There are too many factors at play that determine a teenager’s or young adult’s choice to read for pleasure, and the many diversions offered by eReaders and other devices is just one of these factors. I’d certainly stop short of outright blaming digital technology for driving down reading; but at the same time, anyone who says more has to be made available for the “good of the people” is either very naive or more likely has a multi-million-dollar axe he’s looking to grind.
On Friday last week, a Q&A appeared on The New York Times website between journalist James Estrin and photographer Ami Vitale. The story pertains to the now widely recognized hashtag campaign #BringBackOurGirls, meant to raise awareness and perhaps pressure officials in our own countries to do everything possible to rescue nearly 300 schoolgirls kidnapped by Islamic terrorists in Nigeria. At issue are three photographs of young, African women that have to a great extent become the faces of the campaign, spread throughout the Internet and featured on mainstream news broadcasts. The problem is that these three photos, used without permission, were taken by Ms. Vitale as part of her documentary study of the society in Guinea-Bissau, a country located more than a thousand miles from Nigeria and whose residents have nothing to do with the victims of these kidnappings.
Vitale is angry for several good reasons, I think, not the least of which (if I may paraphrase) is that the appropriation of these images, even in the name of a cause as dire as the Nigerian situation, implies a tremendous cynicism about the civil liberties pertaining to the likenesses of the subjects; and in this case, is further aggravated by cultural insensitivity. In other words, nobody’s image should be used without permission as though it were a generic stock photo — I know I’d be angry if my daughter’s picture were featured in an anti-sex-trafficking campaign without our permission — and this particular misrepresentation implies that faces can just be interchanged because, well, they’re African, and nobody around here really knows the difference. Ironically, that homogenous view of Africa is an impression Vitale is seeking to contradict with this particular series of photos from Guinea-Bissau. To quote:
“I wanted to put a human face on conflict. But when I got there my story changed. Because I realized the way Africa is generally portrayed in mainstream media is either wars, famine or stories like this terrible abduction. You see the horrors or the other extreme, beautiful safaris and exotic animals. There’s nothing in between.”
Photographs can, of course, be very powerful; but the power of a single image I believe is tied to the manner in which it becomes encoded into long-term memory rather than passing through short-term memory. And the tendency now to gist our way through constant absorption of images through social media could well be turning us into short-term memory beings, who outsource long-term memory to the cloud. Certainly, this would be consistent with some predictions coming from technologists who promote this modification as an enhancement to the human condition. But if this is in fact the new reality, it seems to me, that when images like Vitale’s photographs are stripped of their legitimate context and applied to another context of tremendous gravity, that what’s being lost is anything but trivial.
No matter how this horrific story in Nigeria unfolds, doesn’t it matter if Vitale’s photos of the girls in Guinea-Bissau could theoretically become icons associated with a completely unrelated story? Wouldn’t this betray the principles of journalism and all non-fiction storytelling? Or does a hashtag campaign like #BringBackOurGirls exist as some collective activism similar to but separate from journalism in which the goal of awareness-raising is more important than the integrity of the story tied to a single image? Personally, I don’t think so.
Cynical as it sounds, I think we have to admit that hashtag campaigns about highly complex and deadly serious issues have a somewhat contradictory nature. On the one hand, there is a measure of practical and social value to the kind of global vigil being held at this moment; but on the other hand, sadly, the Nigerian kidnapping story is just what’s “trending” this month alongside celeb gossip and other bits of fluff. In this recent article in The Daily Beast, terrorism expert Christopher Dickey suggests that when our momentary attention to this story wanes and the girls are very likely still captives, that what may well effect their release is the unsavory option of a large ransom and a slow negotiation with the devil. Whether that’s the case, or intelligence services and special ops can locate and rescue these girls, the hashtag campaign is, to an extent, just something the rest of us do because we can do nothing.
Dickey’s assessment is based on several decades worth of knowing who the players are in global terrorist organizations and about the motives of individual actors. And this relates the work of Ami Vitale in an important way. When we all move on to the next story from the safe distance afforded by our devices, it’s the photographers and journalists and documentarians who stick around in places like Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia, and Guinea-Bissau so they can tell the rest of the story. And it is essential that those stories be kept intact and not casually remixed, even with the best of intentions.
Despite the bad reviews, I had to go see the film Transcendence last weekend. Given that its plot is based on certain theories pertaining to the technological singularity, how could I not go see it? Indeed, it was very much not a good movie, and although film criticism is outside the editorial scope of this blog, the the story opportunity I think was missed is relevant for discussion here.
Johnny Depp plays Dr. Will Caster, a top computer scientist working in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) along with his wife, Rebecca, also a top computer scientist. The adoring couple believe absolutely that human “transcendence” through symbiosis with computers into a newly evolved condition is a virtuous pursuit that can only benefit mankind. Unfortunately for them, a group of hacker/terrorists led by one of Caster’s former students believes that advancing AI toward the technological singularity — the moment computing intelligence surpasses human intelligence and becomes self-aware — is a dangerous abomination. At the start of the film, this underground group assassinates several leading AI researchers, and one of their operatives shoots Dr. Caster, which at first appears to have been a non-lethal grazing but is soon revealed to cause radiation poising from a polonium-tipped bullet. With her husband having only weeks to live, Rebecca, along with the help of their colleague and dear friend Max, upload Caster’s mind into the core of their highly sophisticated computer and succeed in giving his consciousness new life. Once Rebecca connects Caster to the Internet, he becomes omnipresent and nearly omniscient. And then the movie really starts to blow.
What unfortunately transpires after Caster’s transcendence is a stock action thriller complete with paramilitary personnel towing around a piece of WWII-era artillery for no particularly good reason. By the time supercomputer Caster begins to “heal” sick and wounded people with nano-tech that tuns them super-human and immortal as long as they’re connected to the network, Rebecca finally catches on to the fact that she’s started something pretty dangerous. Together with Max, the underground hackers, a smattering of federal agents, and the wise old scientist (played by Morgan Freeman of course), they determine that the only way to stop the conscious computer is to send in a virus. This is ultimately accomplished when Rebecca volunteers to be infected with the virus and lets Caster upload her into the system. Stopping Caster has the unfortunate side-effect of plunging the planet into darkness because, of course, they infect everything that is networked worldwide.
As my son and I left the theater, we joked about the fact that that film leaves us with the world “saved,” if we can call civilization reduced to a primitive sate and about to erupt in medieval chaos “saved.” But that joke is exactly where I think the more interesting plot point was lost in the movie that got made. The existential question asks which is the better choice: to shut down all systems and let humanity try to rebuild civilization from the destruction that would surely follow, or to allow all living things to artificially evolve into a new state as networked entities with what might be described as kind of holographic consciousness and probably no free will? Would it even be humanity?
This is already a question for our times, if one is to take seriously the very real utopianism of AI scientists like Ray Kurzweil, presently the director of engineering at Google. Plenty has been written about Kurzweil himself, his obsession with immortality underscoring a relentless pursuit in a lab that enables him to work at “Google scale,” as the offer was apparently put to him when the company courted his employment. AI research is no science fiction, and neither is the probability of singularity, but as theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking warns in an article published yesterday, nobody is really taking the implications of this inexorable march toward possible self-destruction very seriously. Never at a loss for wit even when dealing with weighty subjects, Hawking writes, “If a superior alien civilisation sent us a message saying, “We’ll arrive in a few decades,” would we just reply, “OK, call us when you get here – we’ll leave the lights on”? Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI.
Hawking warns unequivocally that, while AI could bring about some miraculous achievements in the short term, that computers able to reprogram themselves, outwit financial markets, and even build weapons could very easily transcend human control and become the recipe of our sudden extinction. Personally, I think there are enough hazards to be considered right now, including experiments with autonomous weapons that can decide who their targets are, and consolidated, corporate control of the research, data, and the agenda itself. It seems to me people are just beginning to grapple with the implications of how much invasive data mining we’re allowing a company like Google to do, so how long will it take before anyone talks about the possible doomsday algorithms being tinkered with in its labs? Cynically, I believe I know the answer to that question, and it will have something to do with whatever The Biebster is up to next week.
Anyone who reads this blog knows I write in defense of copyrights but not necessarily why. It’s easy to get into debates and squabbles over the particulars of that body of law and to get caught up in what I believe to be a false debate over progress vs anti-progress. I defend copyrights for the same reason I’m uncomfortable with drone warfare and don’t want to see autonomous weapons, even if they might make my own kid’s future job in the Navy less hazardous. Copyrights, I believe, are merely one way in which we affirm that humans maintain dominion over their technology. When we reduce our intimate thoughts, ideas, and creative expressions to the banality of data, we take a step closer toward abdicating that authority.
We should probably pay attention to anyone of Stephen Hawking’s stature, but I find his voice on this particular subject uniquely poignant. After all, Hawking is probably about as close as any human has ever come to a life manifest as Descarte’s cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”), existing almost entirely as a mind without a body, and most importantly, a mind blessed with the capacity to travel well beyond the boundaries that contain most of us mortal thinkers. We are lucky to have had Hawking live as long as he has with a disease that was supposed to take his life many years ago. I’ll stop short of calling him a prophet, but maybe somebody should at least report what he’s saying on the news or something. Perhaps they could split the airtime for round-table discussion between the fate of Donald Sterling and the fate of all humanity. In the meantime, Transcendence was indeed a box-office flop for Alcon Pictures, and from my point of view, it’s because the filmmakers let the interesting story go for the sake of a lot of boilerplate action sequences. Maybe that in itself is a lesson.
The Illusion of More is my personal blog from December 2011 to December 2025. As of February 2026, I am no longer posting new blogs or other content, but I hope you enjoy this archive. Please do not attribute any of my writings here to my current or previous employers.
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