Wendell Berry's Creature-or-Machine Line, Turned on AI
An essay in The Conversation Canada reaches for the writing of Wendell Berry as a way to think about artificial general intelligence. Berry, a writer and environmentalist, drew the line this way: "The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines." The essayist reads Berry's book Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition as an eerie letter to the purveyors of AI.
The sentence works better as a question than as a prediction. It doesn't name a technology to ban or adopt. It asks what a person wants to be — which is the part of the AI argument that no benchmark settles.
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As a slogan it does real work: it drags the AI argument off benchmark scores and onto how someone wants to live.
A slogan isn't a plan. Creature or machine tells you nothing about which tools to adopt, refuse, or regulate.