How to Talk to People - How to Know What's Real: How to be Immortal Online

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

With digital spaces regularly evolving and updating, and the infinite scroll beckoning to us at all times, this episode questions if we have, as a culture, fully embraced the end of endings. Hanna Reichel, an associate professor of reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, helps illuminate how the emergence of godlike AI and the rise of creator culture compare with the reformations and transformations through which people lived (and died) in the past. Write to us at [e-mail].  Music by Forever Sunset (“Spring Dance”), baegel (“Cyber Wham”), Etienne Roussel (“Twilight”), Dip Diet (“Sidelined”), Ben Elson (“Darkwave”), and Rob Smierciak (“Whistle Jazz”). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's the Golden Moment. Triumph on the podium, Golden Hand. But with Corona Cerro, Golden Moments go beyond the Winter Olympics. They're enjoying sunsets, time outside, reconnecting with nature, and laughs shared with friends. For every golden moment at the Winter Olympic Games, enjoy your own with Corona Serro, 0% alcohol and a source of vitamin D. Corona Cerro, the official non-alcoholic beer of Milano Cortina, 2026. So the Ouija board was a very controversial toy in my house growing up.

I think my mother was just very much against having one because of its associations with magic and the occult. But I was able to finally convince her to buy me one because I pointed out to her that it was manufactured by Parker Brothers. And I figured if they could create a board game like Monopoly, that the Ouija board must not be that dangerous. I mean, that is a winning argument if I ever heard one. Yeah, yes. I'm Andrea Valdez. I'm an editor at The Atlantic. And I'm Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic.

And this is How to Know What's Real. Andrea, when I played with Ouija boards, which was exclusively at slumber parties, and exclusively to ask this mysterious portal to another world about people we had crushes on, I remember feeling really entranced by it, but also a little creeped out by it. And I think I still might feel that way just a little bit, even though I know now the science behind it. You know, Ouija boards work through something called the idiometer effect where thoughts in the players' minds in a way that's pretty unconscious to the players themselves end up guiding their movements across the board. Which is actually a nice metaphor, I think, for the web. and really for so much of what we've been talking about the season of the show, you know, this thing that initially felt mysterious, it turns out was human the whole time.

Oh, that's so interesting. And I think that the really human thing about all of these fortune-telling devices is that they provide answers. And as humans, we really, really crave answers. And I think that that's also maybe why the web, I mean, really the Internet at large, it felt so magical for so long because it's this gigantic answer-providing machine. So it starts to make sense to me that we've collectively imparted a certain sort of deified state to the Internet because it's this seemingly omniscient oracle. Ah, yes. But then also because the Web is made by humans, it's also limited in its vision, right? which is a pretty big flaw, oracle-wise. And the fact that the web can seem omniscient,

just like you said, I think can make it even more jarring when the glitches show up as they inevitably will. And when we think about the reality of the Internet, when we consider it in light of how to know what's real, that hope for omniscience, I think, is also really instructive because many of us do invest tech with a certain spirituality. But I'm really interested in why we do that and especially what the consequences might be. So I spoke with Hannah Reichel, who is an associate professor of

Reformed Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Professor Reischel has a particular interest in what they call Theologies of the Digital, which means basically that they take one of the core interests of theological thought, you know, questions about how humans interact with the higher power and apply that to digital technologies like social media and AI. Professor Reichel thinks really expansively, but also with remarkable nuance about tech as a form of faith. And their insights are clarifying, I think, for anyone who is grappling with technologies that are made by humans, but that can feel at times just beyond our grasp. If the 20th century was the century of power, we might say the 21st century.

century is the century of knowledge. People often talk about data as the new oil, the new gold. This whole question of technology and the kind of superhuman power it affords and how that intersects with human freedom and agency seemed super interesting to me. And actually is something that theologians have been thinking about for a long time, right? Centuries probably going back to Botheus in the sixth century to think about like if there is someone and who knows everything about you, what does that do to human freedom? How can we still think about the openness of the future? Is everything predetermined or not?

And theologians have, of course, thought about these questions in relation to God. And here we have a long tradition of thinking through these questions that might also serve as a resource to think through some of the versions in which these questions appear in a technological age. And what are some of those versions in particular? What are some of the connections you're seeing right now between religion and tech? It's just in public discourses about technology, how often metaphors of God get invoked, right? Like the all-seeing eye in the sky, the divine puppet master, the idea of eternity and infinity and transcendence, all these ideas that are traditionally associated with God.

God as the original creator, everywhere that we see technology as a creation, people suddenly refer. on what it is like to be a creator. So we're kind of putting ourselves in the position of God as technological makers. And on the other hand, we're experiencing ourselves as to some extent also under the power of technology. And to me, one of the very interesting also early AI applications that I saw was one that was literally called God in a box. It was a GPT3.5 powered thing that you could subscribe to on WhatsApp. And it was, you know, for a mere $9.00. a month. And people use it as an Oracle. You could ask it anything. And that was so fascinating to me as like, you know, both it's the God in a box. So I kind of have this power. Now I can consult it at any

time. It can give me advice. There's something, you know, very interesting about that. But also I control it, right? It is in a box and I can put it in my pocket. But also this tendency that people would ask questions to these AI bots that they might not feel comfortable asking a friend or a pastor or a counselor, which is really interesting. So there's an almost therapeutic and spiritual function of like me and my secret, really secret questions that might be too embarrassing. And this, by the way, goes much further back earlier, like the earliest versions of AI, you know, when people start a coming of touring tests to see is this other thing a person or not. If you put two bots in conversation with one another, they would start insulting one another and they would start

asking religious questions. Like, interestingly, these were the two things they did to mimic human behavior. But so kind of, I think, right, the idea of God here both often functions as signaling, either a utopian promise or this dystopian horror, and that, which it turns out to be, partially hinges on the question who we perceive to be in control. Are we in control of the technologies? Are the technologies in control of us? Or who, you know, steers them mysteriously in the background, which corporations, which political interests, and so forth? You're reminding me, actually, of that great line from Arthur C. Clark, any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, which captures so much, I think, not only about tech itself, but all. also about the human power dynamics you're talking about. Because magic is something that almost by definition, we can't control, right? It's just there. And so we don't question it. And I think that's part of why magic is invoked so often, almost as a sales pitch really with AI,

you know, with branding that treats the tech, not just as a new consumer experience, but also as a new existential fact, you know, it's the idea that this is just the reality now, you know. So, So I guess to question the magic, how should we be talking about AI? Is it a force, an agent? How do you think about AI in linguistic terms? That's a very good question. I think one of the key theological terms that applies would be that of a creature, right? A created being.

And one of the interesting things, right, if in a theological imaginary we think of God as the ultimate creator and creatorship as a divine quality. And we think of ourselves as creatures as being in our being dependent on that creator, having been generated by that creator, but also kind of continuing to have our being from that source. But then as human beings, we're in this unique position that we're kind of created co-creators. The Christian tradition uses the language of the Imago De,

of kind of seeing our own capacity to create as reflecting something of that divine creativity. But so there's now an iteration of an iteration where we see ourselves capable of creating beings that now also have the capacity to create things. And so that becomes kind of an uncanny chain, right? And there are so many different, I guess, links in that chain, right? Because, you know, with AI, we are very directly creating other beings in our own images and trying to make these pieces of tech that very self-consciously resists. resemble us as humans, but we're also doing something similar in a less direct way, I think, on social media. There's a kind of aptness, I guess, to the fact that we talk about content

creators and the creator economy. We talked so explicitly about creation there, except with our videos and selfies and posts, we're not creating other beings. We're just recreating ourselves. The desire to make oneself transparent and to share everything and to be seen, to be recognized by the big and small others, maybe in a religious terminology, we could also say, right, to achieve some sort of permanence, right, to write one's name into the book of life. If I see the sunset and have this meal, didn't even happen if it isn't, you know, written into some sort of record and shared with others. So there's also almost like a frantic work on fashioning and curating a self and a persona out of these bits of our self presentation. You know, there's so much anxiety right now about social media and the kind of the cruelty really on social media and the fact that forgiveness seems to be such a hard ethic for people to embrace right now. And I just, I wonder what you think about that. Does that ring true to you?

Yeah, I mean, there have been, so partially, right, if there's an urge to preserve one's memory or to have things recorded, there's obviously also the terror that comes from things then also being preserved and not being able to change them anymore. This pertains to our relationship to time, of course, right? Things are kind of set into this record and other people can see what we did last summer or the thing that we said in an unwise moment to someone very quickly. and there have been even legal processes now in the European Union to say we need to achieve a right to be forgotten, not just a right to be remembered, because it seems that even our humanity or our ability to have a future that is in some ways different from the past that we have already lived and produced.

It needs to be safeguarded. And that's also to me a very interesting iteration on this idea of divine judgment where memory kind of reproduces who you are. And that may be a kind of cut of who we have been yesterday or three years ago is sometimes a means of grace of being able to become a different person. I'm so glad Professor Reichel brought up the right to be forgotten laws. You know, they've been introduced in a few countries. They're probably most famously enforced in the European Union. And they aim to do as they say. If a person has some information about themselves on the web, that they want to be taken down, they can request that that information be taken down. And there are lots of caveats about what exactly you can request to be deleted. And in fact, some people in the U.S. have one of these laws. But, you know, the big argument here against them has to do with the tension between our First Amendment law. and some privacy laws. But ultimately, the reason right to be forgotten laws are so interesting to me is they're trying to codify into law this ancient and sort of religious notion of mercy.

Oh, that's such a good point. And especially because mercy isn't just a religious concept, right? It's also a more broadly cultural one. And the fact that it's both, both religious and cultural, I think, forces us to clarify. things for ourselves. You know, in the sense of religions have concepts like, you know, confession and reconciliation and atonement. They have rituals and rights that if you do believe in them, basically offer you a kind of clarity when it comes to mercy, you know. In those ideas, it is God who gives you mercy and this is how you can seek it. And, you know, the right to be

forgotten for all of its legal and ethical and, like you said, pragmatic complications, I think is an effort to bring some of that clarity to a secular context and to the web. It's trying to answer this very broad and quasi-religious question of, you know, when the web remembers everything, how can we create mechanisms on it that will encourage us to forget, which is also to say, to sort of give each other and give ourselves grace. Yes. And in many religions, the dual force to mercy is justice. Yes.

And the Internet and technology more broadly, it has certainly been a tool that's allowed for more justice with various social movements and you can capture injustices on camera. But I think the difference is in a pre-Internet era, human laws, cultural constructs, they, used to allow people to seek justice and receive mercy, and then we could collectively, for the most part, move forward. I mean, we were imperfect at moving forward to be sure. But in a digital world now that we live in, in which the mantra is everything on the internet's forever, we don't seem to get those same resolutions. Yeah, the web in so many different ways really does bring kind of, you know, the end of endings. Structurally, it's this. this constant collision between permanence and impermanence, you know, because in one way, it's made of all these seemingly endless feeds and loops and streams and infinite scrolls.

And that can, I think, make a lot of the stuff that we share about each other and learn about each other seem extremely temporary and almost disposable, right? You know, you see it and then it disappears. But then, just like you said, the Internet is forever. The Internet never forgets. And I do think that helps to explain why, like Professor Reichel said, the feelings the web invokes in us can align so naturally with spiritual ideas. Because the Internet gives us a form of immortality, or at least it seems to. At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health, from the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led, full-body checkup that provides a

a clear picture of your health today and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease and cancer. The healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan, live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Professor Reischel, we've been talking about the web as an idea in large part, and now I want to ask you about the web as a physical place and a physical thing. It's easy to talk about the web. It's easy to talk about the web as something endless, and it feels endless in so many ways. But it's also a very finite thing, right? The technological resources, we should not forget that. They're also limited, right? A lot of these metaphors that we have of the cloud, they seem like these are disembodied, almost spiritual,

transcendent structures, but they rely on very concrete material resources, rare earths, server plants, metals, energy. There are hard stops to the expansion of that economy. It's probably already got to be pretty unsustainable in our lifetime just in terms of the energy and the resources that it needs, let alone, you know, questions like climate effects and social and political inequalities and instability that it produces. So maybe this promise of like eradication of uncertainty and overcoming of finitude turns out to be more of an illusion at the end of the day. Even though the cloud in reality is a series of hulking server farms scattered across the landscape, we experience the data it holds as almost metaphysical. And humans every day live out a version of that disconnect. You know, we want to be more than our bodies, whatever the more might mean for us. But we have to do that wanting while knowing that our physical lives are also in their own way limited resources.

religion is fundamentally about grappling with contingency, right, with the fact that we have limited control and that we have limited lives and that religion is kind of what provides mechanisms and practices and frameworks to not overcome that, but to come to terms with that. So we could think more generally about religion as having to do with this attunement to our affinity that is temporal and in so many other ways also expressed. what of course is interesting is how technology itself not just its creators but the technologies itself become an instrument of faith or even an object of faith, right?

That tech will make us better. We'll achieve perfection. We'll overcome all these things that kind of tech will save us from all the things as a religion and of itself that I think many of these founding figures actually believe in. Which I think goes back to the problem of definitions in a way, right? Because when we're told that tech will offer us a form of

salvation, it's not always clear what precisely we're being saved from, or really for that matter, what the tech in question actually is. And that's partly because, sure, the tech itself is evolving so quickly and so chaotically. But I wonder whether it's also because we haven't fully articulated what we want the tech to be doing for us and where its limits should be. You know, regardless of the questions of actual interiority and consciousness and so forth, which I do think might probably not be so close as we think. But we actually build meaningful relationships with artificial beings. Right, right. You know, I don't know whether we will ever be able to upload our minds into the cloud and live forever.

Probably not. But we can, you know, train a machine to talk to us like the deceased loved one. If we just have enough of their letters and recordings, and they will look and sound and talk like them. And we will feel like we relate to that being. And there's all these debates about what AI can do better than humans and what it can not. In many ways, it's maybe alien intelligence more than artificial intelligence. So we need to artificially make the appearance that this is artificial when it's actually programmed and fed and trained by human beings who have to make. distinctions and data sets and so forth. So sometimes, and we know this also, right,

there's a lot of reproduction of the same kinds of things that we see in human knowledge that comes out of AI and that's sometimes even amplified. So all the biases and the original data set in our assumptions and expectations get reflected back to us. And then there's the question of what happens when those reflections keep going and when the biases keep scaling. And really at what point, we meaningfully lose control over them. So many religious traditions have considered that question of overstep, basically, in the context of humans' relationship with the divine. And I wonder whether they might have insight when it comes to the relationships humans are building with our machines. How can we check this power that we've unleashed? I mean, I think you see

this actually as a trope in many religions. So you have the story of Daedalos and Icarus. who harness the power of technology and fly too close to the sun and get burned. You have the idea of Prometheus who invents fire, right? You have the story of Pandora's Box. Very ancient ideas that there's an unleashing of a power that is a created power that spirals out of control. And I think so many of our contemporary debates around technology

ask this question, right? Like, should we try and have that power? It's a question that we ask around atomic power. It's a question that we ask. And I think it has something to do with this law. We always overestimate the short-term effects and underestimate the long-term effects. We are actually not capable of really estimating well the actual consequences that some changes in technology will have. We just see that there are these landslide moments.

And when that happens, it's difficult to put the genie back in the box. In the Jewish tradition, you have the legend of Rabi Lov, who creates the golem, right? And you have Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster. You have Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's legend of the magician's apprentice who bewitches the brooms and they start cleaning for him. And then there's just, you know, he can't control them anymore. They're good creative powers. But they can kind of spiral into ungodly forms, which has less to do with like violating concrete moral codes or religious codes and more with this understanding of like leaving this position of what it means to be a

creature that then does not result in punishment from God, but the thing itself creates its own punishment, right? Like the genie that runs out of control, the atomic power, the bomb, like the thing that we created enslaves us. What Professor Reichel just said, that's the big fear, right? that we create something to solve a problem or just to create something cool, and its consequence is more sweeping than we imagined. For me, one of the technologies I'm convinced we'll have wider ramifications than we're aware of

is this idea of resurrection. Like Megan, do you remember that hologram of Tupac performing at Coachella? Yes. Oh, wow. Yes, I do. Yeah, yeah. So this happened in 2012, and since then, we've had a few of other performing holograms of performers who have died, for example, Selena. And I just have to say, these things really creep me out. Yeah. Yeah.

As you were talking about with Professor Reichel, these tools where you can recreate a person who died using images, videos, recordings of them, they just feel very ethically dubious. I mean, even though you said that, recreate a person. Oh, my goodness. Mm-hmm. And in one way, those are really rarefied ideas, right? I mean, very few people will be converted into holograms. But I think there are also questions that we'll all need to grapple with in one way or another. And especially so with the rise of AI and the chatbots that Professor Reichel mentioned, which, you know,

claim to allow their customers to, quote, unquote, chat with their departed loved ones. But then chatbots like humans can be error prone. especially in their earlier iterations. And there have been stories recently about those types of bots that seem to have a problem with glitchiness. And one woman who was chatting, again, quote, unquote, with her deceased former boyfriend, was told by him that he was in hell. Oh, my gosh. How awful. Well, you know, I'm just very intrigued by this idea of who gets to define or own a legacy or the memory of a person. Yeah. When you're thinking about someone's memory, it feels pretty harmless to theorize about what a person might say or think or do, you know, like if they were alive today, you know, that sort of thing.

In the case of these, say, holograms, you know, they're attempting to push your fantasy onto a literal projected reality. Yeah. So, I mean, it's one thing to daydream, and it's quite another to make those daydreams a manifested reality. And questions about how we treat the dead, I think, are often really questions about how we should be treating the living. And I think that's part of the fantasy idea that you're talking about. It's really easy to imagine a world where people's legacies become subject to so many of the things that we've been talking about throughout this season of the show, you know, to misinformation, to confusion, to this kind of. uncertainty about where the person ends and the tech begins. Because I think as with those other questions, a lot will come down to our ability to clarify the risks we're facing and maybe even

more importantly to clarify the kind of world we want to live in before those risks become our reality. Professor Reichel, this season of how to has taken on a question that might seem philosophical at first, but I think is also becoming in very practical ways ever more urgent. How can we know what's real? How can we build a reliable sense of the world? And so far we've looked at ways that new technologies are blurring the lines between fact and fiction in our relationships, in our informational systems, in our entertainment, really in our daily lives. And I want to end by asking you how that question of what's real, to spirituality, whatever form it might take for us. And if we're looking for meaning in the chaos,

how can we know what's real? Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, and what is reality is also one of the oldest questions of humanity, right? What is real and what is illusion? And how do we even know that we don't exist in a matrix or in a cave and that's just ideas, right? I just assume we're in a matrix all the times. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, one important question would be like, what difference does it make? I mean, you know, but there's a tendency sometimes, right, to talk about the virtual as, or there's different meanings of the term virtual. Sometimes we say virtual as in not quite real, right?

Like I was so close, I was virtually there. Or as make-belief, right? It's not quite that or it's just pretend. Sometimes we talk about virtual as like indistinction from material. And I think that's how sometimes this distinction now gets used when you ask, like, is this real? Because it seems disembodied. But so maybe in that sense, we need new techniques to better connect the materialities and the virtualities, right, the hardware and the software. And to kind of make visible how and where they connect.

Because things are actually not disembodied. They're just often more spatially extended in their embodiment. Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And in many ways, right, the virtual experiences, even what we think of as like their disembodied forms are very real, right? They're actual experiences. There are actual relationships that I have formed on social media, media with people who actual professional collaborations and real friendships have emerged with people that I have never met and never touched. I would say real is what has an impact, what makes a difference in our lives. And reality in that sense can have different dimensions, right?

It can be more physical, material, spiritual, intellectual, and typically all these things at some point will connect again in the way that they make a difference. I love that. And it occurs to me, too, that, you know, even though we've been talking primarily about religion as a way to connect to a higher power, religion is also about people connecting to each other, right? It's community. It's faith in whatever form turned into something collective. And I wonder if that's part of the lesson here,

too. You know, community itself and the relationships that we build with each other are reality in this very direct and tangible and reliable way. They're the things we can trust even when so much else can feel unsteady. You know, images can be faked, information can be wrong, but other people in this very basic way, they're there, they're real. I'm thinking back to our first episode when we talked about Marshall McLuhan's ideas about media as extensions of man. And one thing I've been thinking about this season is whether extensions of man, as radical as that idea was in its time, actually might not go far enough.

You know, because in philosophical ways, but also in really bluntly practical, ones, I think it is becoming harder to know where we end and the web begins. And that isn't necessarily a problem. It's simply the reality for millennia now. People have tried to make distinctions between the physical world and the spiritual and between the sacred and the profane and the body and the soul. And now we're trying to understand the connection between our bodies and our data. I really like that. And Professor Ryshal said, and it's worth repeating, that what is real is one of the biggest

questions of all. And where we fit into things, that's what spawned 100 religions, a thousand works of art. I mean, in at least one podcast. But it's so true. That drive, I think, is such a powerful part of just who we are as humans, as a species. And because of that, it can be tempting to treat the world as its own kind of magic eight ball, basically, you know, to keep asking the same questions. And, you know, even if all we get is, you know, reply hazy or an ask again later, we keep going. And, you know, I think in a way

that insistent curiosity and that drive to keep asking and wondering and trying to figure out our place in the world, it is so cool. to us. And it's one way that we try to make peace with what's probably one of the hardest parts of being human, really, which is, you know, we're finite beings who want so deeply to know what infinity feels like. And I think that desire helps to explain why it can feel natural to approach the web, this machine in spiritual terms. It answers our questions. It responds to our desires. And it gives us a chance to be in a way immortal. Well, you know, since this is our last episode, Megan, it has me thinking about endings.

And, you know, to what you were just saying, one of the biggest trends in Silicon Valley right now has been this obsession with living forever. You know, the very famous technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, he famously talked about uploading our consciousness to the cloud. So even if that doesn't happen, it's this limitlessness, this idea of forever. That's what's so appealing. Yeah. And, I mean, I get it. But there are so many sayings that suggest it's completely unattainable. You know, nothing lasts forever.

All good things must come to an end. Even the idea of the Internet is forever. I mean, that's not quite right. There's a move to legislate forgetting. We'll run out of literal server space. The world and its resources, they're simply not infinite. Maybe something is real, not because it's tangible or maybe. material necessarily, but because it will end.

That's all for this episode of How to Know What's Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudina Bade and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-checked by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob's Merciac. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade and the managing editor of audio is Andrea

Valdez. Thanks for listening to this season of How To. If you like what you heard, share this season with a friend, post a link on social media or leave a review. How To will be back with you before too long.