I never thought I’d write this, but I’ve been thinking about it for days. Michel Foucault more than I would like. And a back pain is to blame. It was a couple of weeks ago, it was one in the morning and the house had been quiet for a while. That’s where the puncture came.
I could have woken up my wife who was 30 centimeters away and, well, she is a doctor; I could have searched on Google; I could have even asked on an Internet forum. And yet, I opened ChatGPT, asked what was bothering me, and shortly after turned off my phone to go to sleep.
And I fell asleep right away.
But a few days ago, this analysis by Javier Lacort about ChatGPT Health It left me thinking. Not because AI was fully entering the world of health and “medical advice” (something that, on the other hand, I knew firsthand); but because of something that was commented on in it: that “we prefer to ask a chatbot have to wait three weeks for an appointment or have to bother a friend at eleven at night.
It hurt a little. There was something interesting there.
Eleven at night; one in the morning
“The ChatGPT Competition”, Lacort continued“it’s not so much with the doctors as with the emotional support network that we used to have. We asked our mother, our partner, the friend who studied nursing.” But for some time now, “upsetting someone has become emotionally costly.”
That last phrase is devastating because it contains the key to something that goes far beyond chatbots with medical uses. Something that goes through Millennials’ problems with calls, with the fishmongers, with sex or with any interaction that is not mediated by a screen: the deep cultural aversion that the modern world has generated to ‘social friction’.
And it is curious because, although only in recent years do we see the most striking consequencessociology and cultural analysis have been pointing out what was happening for decades.
We have Norbert Elias, for example, who I was convinced that (as part of the prolongation of the civilizing process) the thresholds of shame and discomfort are shifting. What fifty years ago was perfectly normal—calling without warning, asking a favor from an acquaintance, interrupting someone with a question—today borders on the intrusive. What’s more, today we have internalized it.
Sennet spoke of the decline of the public sphere (we know how to handle ourselves in privacy and in public transactions, but not in the middle ground); the sociology of emotionstalks about the success of therapeutic lexicon and how that has changed the way we relate; Hartmut Rosa cblame social accelerationprecariousness and lack of time, the loss of effectiveness of reciprocity networks.
That is to say, we have many theorists thinking about the same thing: that we are a new type of subject. A subject who has internalized the rules, who manages himself, who evaluates his relationships in terms of emotional cost-benefit and who, above all, experiences direct reciprocity as something frictional, uncomfortable and potentially invasive.
And, just then, chatbots appear. I’m not talking about the technology behind it, nor its ultimate nature: I’m talking about the same historical process that has created subjects like this, has created something that “listens to them”, that “is empathetic”, that does not judge them and that helps them as and when it can. Honestly, it would be strange not to throw ourselves into his arms.
Can Foucault help us understand all this?
Google DeepMind
That’s where, I’m afraid, Foucault becomes interesting. In his courses at the Collège de France from the late 70sthe French philosopher explored a whole series of different dimensions of power that, although not obvious, were inseparable from the Modern State.
In the past, the State was mainly about controlling borders and collecting some money. But not anymore: now the State manages populations (what it called ‘biopolitics‘ and includes things such as vaccination programs or birth policies) and, at the same time, deals with each subject in its particularity (the so-called ‘pastoral power‘ who through family doctors, social workers, school counselors or psychologists listen to us, advise us and “lead us”).
He called the combination ‘governmentality‘: a power that (excuse the ‘expletives’) is at the same time totalizing and individualizing.
And those, totalizing and individualizing, are features that seem half-made of technological solutions such as ChatGPT Health. A chatbot that, on the one hand, advises users about their problems, listens without judging, guides us in micro-decisions and knows us (or ‘pretends to know us’) in our particularity; and, on the other, it performs triage, implements protocols, normalizes thresholds, generates aggregate data and, in a short time, will integrate with insurers and health systems. Pastoral and biopolitical, at the same time. And with an incredible infiltration capacity.
The difference, and this Foucault could not foresee, is that now this power does not depend on the State, but on a corporation. What was previously a community or ecclesiastical function, then partially state, is now outsourced to private, for-profit infrastructures. It is a privatization of power.
The tentacles of the State
In the previous section I said that “Foucault could not foresee it”, but I think that is not accurate. It is true that when this thinker theorized about “pastoral power” or “biopolitics,” he was thinking about public officials operating in state institutions. But the wickers were there.
After all, Foucault himself, in his last courses (especially in ‘Birth of biopolitics‘, dedicated to analyze ‘neoliberalism’ as arts of government), described a decisive mutation of our time: the State no longer thinks of itself as a provider of services but as a guarantor of the conditions for the market to function. The functions that were previously assumed directly (educate, heal, advise, care) can be outsourced to private agents.
In this sense, chatbots are neither an accident nor a distortion; are the logical culmination of the historical process of the development of modern power. From a very specific formulation of modern power.
Because the advice these systems offer is not neutral. To function at scale, you have to standardize: whether at the level of vocabulary (suddenly we’re all talking about ‘setting limits’ and ‘validating emotions’) or criteria (with implicit thresholds of when it’s ‘normal’ to worry). Its virtue is scale; its price is convergence towards the mean.
The problem is that, cAs Foucault himself reflected in previous coursesmodern power not only ’empowers’, cares for and produces capabilities; It not only trains us to self-manage, to “not depend,” to “not be a burden too.” It also isolates us from their extended social environment, ‘forms’ them, makes them legible (manageable) and makes them more vulnerable to the same technologies of governance: it makes us dependent. But dependent on him.
And that’s the hidden cost
Dananjaya Nugraha
Because, until now, Lacort’s phrase (“upsetting someone has become emotionally costly”) I’ve only discussed the ‘upset’ part. The other interesting part is ‘someone’. Because that dependency I was talking about has been, for a long time, he case belli of a war between the State and local communities, reciprocity networks, intermediate bodies.
To the extent that these new ‘advice infrastructures’ can replace those powers of State (and the functions of those networks of reciprocity) by offering universal, convenient guidance without relational cost: many human relationships will suddenly run out of gas.
In theory, freed from minor favors and trivial inquiries, we would have more time and energy for the relationships that matter. But the reality is different: without those ‘excuses’ for contact, bonds atrophy. They are already atrophying and so? It’s a huge problem (which we haven’t covered yet)
In 1973, in his famous article Regarding the strength of weak ties, sociologist Mark Granovetter explained something counterintuitive: that superficial relationships (the acquaintance from the gym, the classmate in a course, the friend of the friend) are often more valuable than intimate relationships for things like finding a job, finding out about opportunities or accessing information that does not circulate in your close circle. Strong ties give you emotional support; But weak ties connect us to worlds we would not otherwise know.
Until now, many of our social relationships (especially “weak ties”) were sustained by their epistemological value. It is not only “the friend who knows about plumbing”, “the school father who is a lawyer” or “the well-known doctor”; They are also things like having a trusted banking advisor or always taking the car to the same workshop. They were not very intensive (but fundamental) relationships that remained as strongholds of anthropological reciprocity.
As Rodrigo Villalobos and Fermín Grodira reminded usmost human groups based their existence on “helping someone not for an immediate benefit but with the trust that at a future time that person will help you in the same way.” This uncalculated reciprocity was the connective tissue of social life.
It is true that many of these social connections kept crazy ideas alive (I recently complained about the survival of ideas completely out of step with our time, such as washing chicken), but they also functioned as a counterweight to the capture of the regulatory power of the State (it is impossible not to think about how traditional cuisines have protected us, the population, from the industry manipulations on dietary and nutritional advice). We had distributed knowledge (imperfect but resilient) that did not depend on any centralized infrastructure and that is what we are losing by leaps and bounds.
I don’t know if reciprocity networks can survive when opportunities to help fall drastically. We may find new ways to bond, new excuses to maintain weak ties, new balances between efficiency and belonging. But I’m afraid that, for now, we’re too busy not bothering someone at eleven at night to realize what we’re losing.
Image | Xataka
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