Free Will in the Digital Age

My great-grandmother’s name was Leni. I was fortunate enough for her to still be around when I was a kid. She had been born in the 80s of the 19th century. I can still picture her at work in her small open kitchen in Germany’s Bergisches Land. When she cooked, she stood there in the smoke and fumes of her wood-fire stove. She’d send us kids out the back yard to ditch the glimmering ashes in the metal trash can and, fists firmly on her hips, she’d survey her handiwork after stirring the many pots on the hotplate with her seven wooden cooking spoons. Once all her hard work was done, a feast would spread across her creaking wooden table, its beams sagging under the weight of bowls, gravy boats, platters, and baskets.

Today, in the digital age, cooking is something we do on the side, a casual activity that takes up less time than it took Leni just to stack her stove’s oven with wood. Microwaves heat ready-cooked meals in a couple minutes. Convenience foods let us cook a Rhineland Sauerbraten in a bain-marie. Fridges exist that scan what’s left inside and read out recipes for what you could make using these ingredients. “Alexa, get milk and potatoes,” is still the new hotness today, but will likely be relegated to relic status one or two years from now. Because you won’t even have to ask Alexa to do her job, she’ll have ordered new supplies all by herself—second-guessing our desires from the data repositories and ingenious AI algorithms before these desires had any time to arise within us. That land of milk and honey, with its fried pigeons flying straight into our mouths, was a long time in coming. The digital age is making it a reality, now. The price of progress in convenience is a loss of sensuality. We are the children of our times, it is said. But are we still masters of our lives?

We believe ourselves to be, more or less, fully skilled in using modern digital assets, but we’re slow to realize how we’re losing other skills. We believe that skills grow one on the other, layer by layer, and without a second thought are convinced that we possess far more skills than any generation that came before. But we’re wrong.

We never for a moment stop to consider that it might be otherwise: that skills supplant each other rather than complement. Kids edit smartphone videos at a moment’s notice, uploading them to their YouTube channels. What they cannot do is use only a single match to light, without fanning the embers, a fire in a narrow oven shaft.

To meet our desire of staying abreast of our times, to be involved in the digital age, we pay a price—the slow, barely noticeable, yet inescapable sacrifice of other, previous skills. We’re not upgrading, we’re merely sidegrading. We’re massively superior to any ancient Roman in terms of communications technology. Caesar would turn green with envy if he could see how we transfer information from Gaul and Germania to Rome. Had he had access to today’s capacities and skills, he would have saved himself a world of trouble on both sides of the Alps. All the same, Caesar would have taken us out with a short sword before we’d managed to whip out a smartphone and call for help.

There’s a fair balance between the generations. Skills and the mastery over our fate are narrowly intertwined. I can make my own fate only if I have the capacities to act accordingly. In this, digitalization is now giving rise to a serious concern. Unlike earlier revolutions, such as early mechanization or the Industrial Revolution, digitalization does not seek to use steam and gears to enhance our physical strength ad infinitum. Instead, it exponentially increases the power of our minds, inexorably progressing from simple cognitive abilities to complex, sometimes unconscious and deeply hidden processes. Every time our digital aides and familiars delve further into the murky regions of our consciousness and the subconscious, they’ll take more onerous daily routines off our hands, make us even more cozy and accepting of the fact that we’re being taken care of, and supplant more of the old skills with new ones.

We cannot be indifferent to this. Because, what does it actually entail? If algorithms intervene in our nurturing of desires and fulfill desires even before they arise in us, then our capacity to develop desires will atrophy the same way a poorly trained and rarely used biceps does. Losing the capacity to grow desires for ourselves also robs us of our capacity to master our fate.

Let’s look at future automobiles as an example. While most people will think of electrifying drive systems in this context, it’s the field of control that is by far the more significant revolution. The true revolution of the relationship between machine and human will not begin until we actually have cars that drive themselves. We’ll be able to take our hands off the wheel—so far, so good. But as soon as an algorithm starts handling largely accident-free driving, it will begin feeding us suggestions for destinations in a similar way to the thousands upon thousands of suggestions the Internet already throws at us every day: “Customers who bought this book also bought this one,” Amazon lets us know. An autonomous car will speak to us kindly: “Absolutely right, the Rheinauen are a beautiful spot for a day out with the kids on a spring day like this. But perhaps you’d also like to check out the Phantasialand amusement park? Daytrippers there today save on sales tax.”

Artificial intelligence, smartly integrated into tomorrow’s car, will be able to eliminate tedious chores and, like our own private version of Fantasia, keep its ear to the door of our innermost, recognizing and fulfilling forthwith our most fledgling desires. All the data this kind of predictive planning requires is available in the information systems that already surround us today. All that remains is to link them up, evaluate them, and put them to use in our name. We will readily hand over management of our day-to-day lives to those assistants able to do so. The car will transition so smoothly to a locus of benign digital custodianship because it is capable of changing our destination and route. It will act as an agent of our subconscious desires by taking us to our place of yearning before we even recognize any yearning at all.

Lost skills are not recognized as a loss. We’re not aware of the majority of things we can’t do. We don’t miss being able to light a cast-iron stove with a single match, not least because we don’t have those kinds of stoves in our kitchens anymore. We never really miss a lack of skill these days, surrounded as we are by others who possess these skills no more than we do. In the same way, once hyper-precise predictive algorithms become prevalent, our losing that great feeling of making a plan or harboring a desire will not leave us feeling bereft of something.

A terrible notion, many might say. We’ll consider it far less terrible then than we do now. “Life is lived gazing forward and comprehended gazing backward,” the philosopher Rüdiger Safranski writes. A loss of mastery over our lives appears awful gazing forward and insignificant with hindsight.

I’m gradually beginning to understand why my great-grandmother wanted no part of gas and electric cookers. Leni swept all such notions aside, I firmly believe today, because she liked the smell of the fire. Because she enjoyed hearing the wood popping as it burned, liked feeling the smoke tickle her nostrils. She enjoyed feeling her mastery over the elements when she struck the match to set ablaze a whole stack of wood. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—have it too easy. That would have robbed her of the well-earned reward for her tough, frugal life. In short: cooking over the archaic fire seemed an anachronism only to our eyes. For my great-grandmother, it was a feast for the senses, a celebration of life. Her standing stalwart against any who would rob her of this pleasure was her mastering her fate.

We can only guess today at what moved Leni’s thoughts. Likewise, our own great-grandchildren will be at a loss to understand why we chose to suffer the agonies of deciding for ourselves in so many trivial situations, where all the while we could have been putting all that squandered time to far better use. Will our great-grandchildren, who will so monstrously fail to understand us, be more ignorant than us? No, they will not. They will simply possess different skills, a fact that we must accept.

GUEST AUTHOR CHRISTOPH KEESE, born 1964, is a successful author (The Silicon Valley Challenge: A Wake-Up Call for Europe) and has recently taken on the position of CEO at Axel Springer hy GmbH. Previous positions include manager at the media company Axel Springer, where he oversaw the business’s transition to an Internet company as Executive Vice President.

Text first published in the Porsche Engineering Magazine, issue 2/2019.

Text: Christoph Keese

Copyright: All images, videos, and audio files published in this article are subject to copyright. Reproduction in whole or in part is not permitted without the written consent of Porsche Engineering. Please contact us for further information.

You have questions or want to learn more? Get in touch with us: info@porsche-engineering.de