Technology and the lure of ancient Athens

Philosopher's Zone

The episode explores the historical and philosophical parallels between modern technological promises, such as AI, and the idealized vision of ancient Athens as a

Key takeaways

• The use of ancient Athens as a model for automation often relies on an 'ennobled' version of history that ignores the role of enslaved people and women.
• Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, expressed deep ethical anxiety about how new technologies would impact a post-WWII world marked by devastation.

Main topics

• Automation and Ancient Athens
• Cybernetics and Norbert Wiener

Notable quotes

Whatever is coming is coming into the world of Belsen and Hiroshima.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a cautionary reminder that technology's impact i

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Written from us. Written into us. These are the pages to which Australia returns. Speaker 3 (0:19) The ABC Radio National Top 100 Australian Books Countdown. Speaker 4 (0:24) Voting closes October 1st. Speaker 3 (0:28) You don't have long. abc.net.au slash top100books. Vote now. Speaker 2 (0:40) Hi, this is David Rutledge. Welcome to the Philosopher's Zone. We're currently in an age of technological development that can often seem unprecedented. AI is very, very new and it's throwing up questions that feel very, very new. What's going to happen to our jobs? Is the technology going to make us more productive? Is it perhaps going to free us from work altogether? And if it does, what on earth are we going to do with all that free time? But it turns out that we've been asking versions of these questions for a very long time. And one of the places that people have repeatedly turned to for answers is ancient Athens. The ancient Athenians have long been imagined as having enjoyed something that automation might eventually give to all of us, freedom from labor, and therefore the time to participate in politics and to pursue philosophy and culture and live what we might call a genuinely flourishing human life. Now, whether or not that's an accurate representation of ancient Athens and how well ancient Athens really functions as a touchstone for some of the issues that attend our current technological moment are all discussed in an excellent new book by my guest this week. Automated Athens, Ancient Greek Ideals in the Early Age of Automation, traces the idea of automation as a route to human freedom. from ancient Greek philosophy through some very interesting 20th century thinkers, including the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener and the almost forgotten automation enthusiast Alice Mary Hilton, and asks why the dream of a technologically liberated democratic society has proved so persistent and so elusive. And of course, we're now having that dream all over again, perhaps more vividly than ever in the age of AI. Michelle Kennelly. He is Associate Professor in Communication Arts and Sciences and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Your book begins with a very interesting claim, which is that people have been linking the idea of automation with a certain idea of ancient Athens for much longer than most of us realize. Why has Athens provided such a powerful and such an enduring image for thinking about machines? Speaker 1 (2:51) Well, I think it's largely because new technologies of all sorts disorient. So we're desperately seeking orientation, and we cast about for antecedents, precedents, models, even anti-models that might guide us through the new, that might help us shape our values and vocabularies and demands, and hoped for outcomes. So I think partly it's that desperation to find something we can grab onto that has happened before that can help us chart a path. But why ancient Athens in particular? I think... Really, we have to start with just this general fact that by invoking ancient Athens in any context, one annexes or attempts to annex all of its cultural authority. It's the purported origin place of democracy, of philosophy, of rhetoric, of tragedy, of comedy. And all these words come to us from ancient Greek words. So almost invariably, to make some sort of analogy between ancient Athens and X, is to elevate and ennoble X. But I think the Athens and automation connection comes from the belief that automation will diminish or entirely do away with work. And the idea is we've been so culturally conditioned by capitalism and Christianity to work, work, work, to give us purpose and to keep our hands from being idle, that we won't really know what to do with ourselves when labor is lifted. But there was a culture before capitalism, before Christianity, that might offer us a model of how to live and what to value other than work. And that is ancient Athens. So elite Athenians and elite visitors to Athens whose writings we still have did not think very highly of work or of workers because working pulled one away from what was thought by those folks to be the highest human activities. Thinking, and acquiring self-knowledge. For most post-Socratic philosophers, civic participation ranked lower than philosophizing. But we, of course, have abundant evidence from Democratic Athens that participation in the business of the polis, of the city-state, was expected of everyone. And insert the big footnote here that by everyone, I mean those included in the demos, which was a pretty circumscribed group of... people, more on that in a minute, and that kind of participation was highly valued. So labor was being done in ancient Athens, though, of course. Who was doing it? Well, you have involuntary workers, that is enslaved people, who were regarded as unsold property, as Aristotle infamously put it. You had free women running households and not usually allowed to go far outside of them. And then you had all sorts of artisans and craftsmen making shoes, shields, ships, what? have you. And those sorts of people were excluded from political life. Or in the case of artisans, elite writers like Aristotle thought they ought to be because they're too busy working with their hands. And it's keeping them from thinking about what Aristotle would consider to be more important matters. So just to sum it up, the thinking is, one, automation is going to liberate us from labor. Two, that ancient Athenian patterns of living show us what we can do when we don't worship work. We can think, we can plumb our own depths, we can devote ourselves to public life, we can do creative writing, so on and so forth. Third, we can top ancient Athens because we won't need to enslave people or confine women to the home or artisans to their workshops to do the tasks that hold us back from active civic engagement and playwriting and philosophizing. Machines will do that work. And automation discourse in the 1940s to the 1960s very much does not shy away from referring to machines as slaves. Speaker 2 (6:58) Interesting. So there's a sort of an ethical dilemma there, I guess, for these modern automation enthusiasts in that they look back to Athens as a model for the good life, the good society, but they see slavery there. And so their way of addressing that or resolving that. ethical problem, is to imagine that with machines and automation, there will be no further need for slaves. This is what you're saying? Speaker 1 (7:22) Yes, precisely. For a lot of these writers, actually not a lot, you might actually think that more of them would maybe feel a little bite of conscience at using that analogy between machines and slaves, but not that many authors really take a moment and say, hmm, perhaps this is an off-putting analogy. But even among those who do stop and Speaker 1 (7:45) kind of pause on that analogy, there isn't a lot of reflection about how only talking about enslaved people as if they only existed in ancient Athens allows for a lot of sidestepping or just flat-out ignoring of slavery in much more recent... contexts. So the United States, for example, if you're using the slave concept and you're just retrojecting it back onto ancient Athens, that allows you to ignore dealing with issues of the ongoing history of enslavement within the United States, which is of course an issue bound up with how automation and what it does offer us won't be equally distributed. Speaker 2 (8:28) There's also the attention or relative lack of attention paid by these promoters of automation to the question of who actually gets to own the machines, like who actually gets to benefit from all this automation. This is one of your concerns as well, isn't it? Not just historically, but a concern about modern technology, the promises made about AI, for example. Speaker 1 (8:48) Absolutely, yes. So there's a lot of first-person plural language, we, we, but... one needs to stop and ask about the referent of the we, who is going to be the recipient of all this abundance? Where is the wealth going to accrue? And we find that the new patterns look very much like the old ones. Speaker 2 (9:08) Do you think that today's tech bros, or maybe the tech bros of the mid-20th century or the late 19th century, we can go as far back as we like, I guess. Do you think that these people actually... had a sophisticated historical understanding of ancient Athens, or were they just appealing to a sort of myth? Speaker 1 (9:25) Well, I think their vision of ancient Athens does tend to traffic in exaggeration of the good things and omission of the bad. So for example, there's a tendency to believe that all ancient Greek people, but ancient Athenians in particular, hated work and didn't do it. And that, of course, ignores the fact that there were working poor. in ancient Athens who were fully enfranchised, who participated in civic life. So to say that all ancient Greeks hated work and didn't do it is to exclude the working poor. And Aristotle, in fact, called democracy the rule of the poor. So I think it's a pretty self-serving argument on behalf of very well-placed socioeconomically wise people to ignore that fact. There's also a tendency to believe that all ancient Athenians were incredibly eager, informed, thoughtful participants in their democracy. That's probably not 100 % true. I don't know that I'm saying we should believe everything Aristophanes mockingly says about people participating in their democracy having to literally be roped into it. But even so, to say that everyone was eager to orate or deliver a polemic. or deliver a speech of praise on behalf of their city, or just offer an idea, is probably not the case. And there's also a tendency to ignore Athenian imperialism. There might be mention of enslavement, as we were just talking about, or maybe gender inequality, but there's not really ever mention of Athenian imperialism, as if it was only kind of this inward-looking place where neighbors were trying to figure out how best to talk to and learn from and listen to one another, and there wasn't just war being