Technology and the lure of ancient Athens

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You don't have long. Abc.net.au/top100 books. Vote now. 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 gonna 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 1 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 functioned 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.

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 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 Kenley 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?

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 hope 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, 1 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 1 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, 1, automation is gonna liberate us from labor. 2, 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. 3rd, 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 19 forties to the 19 sixties very much does not shy away from referring to machines as slaves.

Interesting. So there's a sort of an ethical dilemma there, I guess, for these modern automation enthusiasts, since that they 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?

Yes. Precisely. And for a lot of these writers, not actually... Not a lot. You might actually think that more of them would maybe feel a little bite of of conscience at using that analogy between machines and slaves.

But not that many authors really take a moment and say, perhaps this is an off putting analogy. But even among those who do stop and and 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.

There's also the attention or or relative lack of attention paid by these promoters of automation to the question of who actually gets to own the machines, like, actually gets to benefit from all this automation. This is 1 of your concerns as well, isn't it? Not just historically, but a concern about modern technology, the the promises made about AI, for example.

Absolutely. Yes. So there's a lot of of 1st person plural language, we, we, but 1 needs to stop and and ask about the referent of the we, who is gonna 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.

Do you think that today's tech bros or maybe the the 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 these people actually had a sophisticated historical understanding of ancient Athens, or or were they just appealing to a sort of myth?

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 socioeconomic 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 a 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 1 another, and there wasn't just war being waged constantly and taxes being levied and the like.

1 of the central characters in your book is Norbert Wiener, who's commonly thought of as the originator of cybernetics. Very interesting character. Tell me about him and what he's doing in your book.

Sure. Well, he was a child prodigy and a polymath, and his dad identified his child's talents very early on and set about teaching him a variety of languages, including ancient Greek, and sort of shepherding little Norbert through school. Norbert went through college at a very young age. He ended up getting a PhD in philosophy, but he ended up at MIT as a mathematician. And while he was there, he was part of a crew of people doing all manner of research about sort of dynamic interactive systems.

And they were really unable to come up with a name to describe their fascination with, you know, systems thinking. And so Norbert Wiener was contracted while he was in France to write a book about automation and the nervous system and thought, okay, have to come up with a name for this book, like a title for this book. And he developed the word cybernetics. And that is the title of his 1948 book. And that word is essentially just meant to describe dynamic interactive systems, be they physiological, mechanical, hybrid, or a mix of the 2 or even organizational or cultural.

So it's a very expansive word. And the word really takes off. This book from '48 is quite technical, but it has these very moral moments where you can see evidence of Weiner's philosophical education coming through. So essentially, he tells us he's not really sure what's coming, but he's not brimming with confidence about it. And he just wants to stress and he does so in the introduction that whatever is coming is coming into the world of Belsen and Hiroshima.

And we live in a broken fractured place. And that's the place it's gonna receive technological, Cody Fingers, advances. So he's very aware about the... Of the power of big business. He's very aware that labor activists are just not ready for whatever it is that's coming.

And he's essentially adopting a certain kind of moral posture disposition throughout the whole work that on the 1 hand celebrates the technical achievements in mathematics and engineering that are coming out of World War 2, but on the other hand acknowledges the horrors that that time also saw that were because of technological practices that were completely divorced from any sense of ethics or morals.

So he's concerned about democracy, and he's sort of excited and alarmed about what he sees coming in what will be the computer age. 1 very interesting thing about Weiner is that he coined the term cybernetics, cybernetics, as you've said, and he bases this on a Greek word that refers to steersmanship, you know, governance Yes. If you like. And it's a word that appears in Plato, in the Republic, I believe. And it's almost certain that that's where Weiner would have encountered it.

I believe he translated the Republic as a as a precocious teenager, but he never actually mentions Plato or Plato's political philosophy in his writing. Why not, do you think?

Right. So, yes, this was my my hunch that if he had studied ancient Greek as a as a kiddo and then again in university, he would have come across Plato's Greek use of this word several times, especially in book 6 of the Republic. And I found evidence when in Robert Weiner's papers at MIT that he did read the republic at least 3 different times. And he talks about how difficult the Greek was and trying to make his way through it as a as a young thing. So I think it's quite certain he came across the word there.

And that he decides though not to burden the word with Plato, especially with Plato's Republic. Because Republic is a text that depending on the epoch, people read as being either totalitarian or as being wildly egalitarian. And Wiener was writing at a time, you know, after Karl Popper's work where he treats Plato as an authoritarian thinker, where it wouldn't have suited him to load up this word that way, especially if he's making an argument that cybernetics will be tricky for democracy, especially for US American democracy since it's so business driven and business oriented. So he doesn't want to take a democratic situation in The US that is already complicated and then add an additional fold of complexity by stressing that he grabbed this word from a text that in Weiner's time is being read as authoritarian or anti democratic.

Yeah. Because he he wants cybernetics to be associated with communication and distributed control and democratic adaptability and this sort of thing. He's particularly concerned about that.

Absolutely. Yes. And so he sees the potential for for openness, for all those different qualities you just enumerated, but he also sees, again, the context into which this whole operating system is going to be introduced, and it's 1 of white supremacy. It's 1 of strong men. It's 1 of domination by business.

So he's he's worried. He he sees glimmers of the good, but by and large, Norbert Wieners is pretty stressed out about what cybernetics is going to to hold for US democracy and beyond.

What do you think Wiener would make of today's AI industry as it takes shape? Would he think that we've completely thrown out the ethical concerns that mattered so much to him?

I have no doubt he'd be horrified. I think he would be stressed at the military applications of AI. I mean, Palantir and OpenAI are completely embedded in the US Department of War, for example. We know that a lot of the attacks going on that are being waged by the US military on Iran are determined by AI. And so I think that he would find downright terrifying and lamentable.

He worried that automated tech would displace human labor rather than enhance it and that policymakers and labor leaders just simply weren't prepared for the enormity of the threat. And I think he would read that in today's scene as well. I mean, economists across the world are scrambling to figure out what the AI impact has been and might be on employment, and they're not having a lot of luck. So it's a... It's something that's really difficult to determine, but I think his attitude would be pretty decidedly pessimistic.

You're listening to The Philosopher's Zone on ABC Radio National and ABC Listen. I'm David Rutledge, and my guest this week is Michelle Kennerly from Penn State University. She's a theorist and historian of rhetoric specializing in the ancient Mediterranean world, and her book is Automated Athens. Publication details on the Philosopher's Own website. Another person that I'd never heard of before reading your book was Alice Mary Hilton.

Who was she, and why should we know about her?

Yeah. Doctor Alice Mary Hilton was a dynamo. She was up to and into a lot of things across her nearly 100 years of life. Her family left Austria. She was born in Vienna for The UK in the 19 thirties and she studied classics and maths at Oxford.

Bertrand Russell was 1 of her teachers. Then her family moved to New York City, and she was 1 of the 1st women to be permitted to do doctoral work in engineering on the other coast at UCLA. She worked in film and television for a while, writing screenplays and scripts. She wrote a novel as well. It was never published, alas.

She was hugely interested in computerized systems and their potential to alter human life. She coined the word cyber culture in the early 19 sixties to emphasize that applied cybernetics, in other words, automation, was going to change culture. And she thought there should be a word that could be kind of a compliment to the word agriculture that would really capture just how explosive this is going to be for human life. And throughout the sixties, she catalyzed and organized conversations about automation across all sorts of knowledge domains and cultural sectors. She seemed to have really just known everybody.

Her most notable contribution... Well, actually, 2 of them I'd say, both are from 1964. She was part of the ad hoc committee on the Triple Revolution, and she also organized a big conference in New York City that summer. So the ad hoc committee on the Triple Revolution comprised US academics, activists, and public intellectuals. In March '64, they sent to US president Johnson an open letter of sorts, trying to persuade him to jump start radical policy change in the face of what they called the cybernation revolution, the weaponry revolution, and the human rights revolution.

And they insist, and I quote, that a vision of democratic life is made real not by technological change, but by men, by which they mean people, consciously moving toward that ideal and creating institutions that will realize and nourish the vision and living form. So this is a document that takes democracy very seriously. And the fact that it's... It needs to be treated with respect, and it needs to be the the kind of project that invites people in rather than pushing them out, which is what this technology is is doing in certain in certain sectors. But essentially, they're arguing that even the most potentially liberating technology is not going to meet that promise without being guided by a democratic vision and the power to actually instantiate that vision.

And then a couple months later in summer of 64, she brought all sorts of thinkers and doers to New York City to talk about the possibilities of automation. So again, some of the people there were Hannah Arendt, the famous German American philosopher. James and Grace Boggs from Detroit, labor organizers there. Betty Friedan, who the earlier... I guess in '63 had published The Feminine Mystique.

Ted Silvey was a labor organizer. And several parts of this conference proceedings could have been written yesterday. Like, they were asking a lot of the same questions about their tech future that we're asking about ours. Who does it favor? Who does it disfavor?

Who are gonna be the biggest winners and losers here? What do we want the future to look like and what kind of power do we have to shape it? So I think she gets attention here and there. But I I think she's oftentimes underappreciated and underestimated in terms of the impact she had on activism and sort of academic level thinking at the time. Mhmm.

Yeah. 1 thing that interests me about her is that she was a... Seemingly a sort of techno optimist in the early part of her career, and she then became a lot more pessimistic Yes. In the late 19 sixties when she saw how the Vietnam War really sort of illustrated for her the capacity for for science and engineering to work against human emancipation. Did she get that optimism back?

No. Not really. So what happened was she she was a big fan of Norbert Wiener. They corresponded. And she was a real fan of of the cyber prefix.

And so again, she she coined this term cyber culture. And what what happened as we move from from the sixties to the seventies is the word information starts to get a lot more popular and that was Claude Shannon's lexical decision. He chose to use information rather than anything cyber to describe his work. And then of course, we have AI also being coined in the fifties and kinda starting to trickle into discussion a little bit in the sixties and seventies, but I mean nothing like it is today, of course. So the cyber term kinda starts to lose its luster a bit and she starts not to get as many invites.

She's not really organizing events anymore. She can't really keep her her institute for cyber cultural research going. And so it's a combination of this kind of the fattishness of the cyber wearing off. We don't really have it come back again till the eighties with cyberspace being coined. And I think her own sense, yes, that the policymakers are just not stepping up to do anything.

And they've had a decade and 0.5 at this point of suggestions from activists, of entreaties from activists and academics about things to do and just nothing is being done. So she doesn't really retreat as such. She finds the word cyber is just not not getting the attention it used to get. It's just not really aging very well. And she gets entrepreneurial.

So she starts a company called Arts Registration Terminal System, Arts that made the 1st digital catalogs of the holdings of the Louvre and the National Gallery in London. Then she was a docent at the Met in in New York City for decades. And during that time, she started a travel company, and she'd bring clients over to medieval and early modern churches in Europe to teach them about architecture and art. So she really made this artistic turn, and I wouldn't really say it was inward because she was a very social person who liked connecting people, but she seems never to have stopped reading what was going on with tech. So for example, in 2004, which is 7 years before she passed away at the age of 92, the New York Times published a letter to the editor she wrote about a story on computer viruses.

So she was clearly still reading and clearly had strong and pert opinions about the tech discourse and the tech fears of the day. But I think she found it just increasingly impossible to hang on to optimism about automation given what she saw in terms of just a lack of attention, a lack of care among, you know, voted in individuals.

Well, let's go back to ancient Athens and Aristotle Mhmm. Another key figure in your book. What's what's he doing there?

Like, there's really no escape from Aristotle, really. But that's an evasive way of answering your question. So, he shows up in my book because of a line from book 1 of his politics, in which he says, and I'm paraphrasing, that if tools could do their work on their own, then managers wouldn't need workers and masters wouldn't need slaves. So it seems like Aristotle himself is dreaming of a tech future where there won't need to be underlings or enslaved people. I think that's a bit of a a generous overread of Aristotle because he he offers this notorious and ugly defense of what he calls natural slavery and politics around the same section.

So he's not morally troubled by enslavement. So he's not, you know, hoping that there'll be a robot that will make slaves unnecessary. He... That is not what we have here in this quote from Aristotle. But what's interesting about this quote is that Karl Marx uses it in chapter 15 of volume 1 of Capital to kind of...

It's almost used kind of mockingly because by the time Marx is writing, we have the factory system. And Marx is recognizing that what capital does with machines is exploit workers even more cruelly. So it's machines maybe have a liberating potential, but as long as they're owned by the capitalist class, they're not going to liberate workers. And then... So you have this line of other Marxist thinkers using this line from Aristotle, and then you have it show up in this weird form in the 19 sixties that suggests if if there were automated machines, then work would be lifted from everybody.

So you don't just have... We wouldn't need to have enslaved people anymore. None of us would need to have jobs at all. So I'm tracing why it is Aristotle keeps coming in and out of the discussion and how his words get kind of torqued to to contour more snugly to the ambitions or hopes or fears of whoever's quoting him. Mhmm.

Yeah. He's interesting also, I guess, because he gives us a very rich philosophical account of what leisure is actually for. Yes. Because, you know, he he didn't think that leisure was just relaxation. He he used this word scole, which is all...

Also the root of our word school. And today, of course, we think of leisure and school as occupying 2 very different domains of human experience. What was the connection for Aristotle between leisure and scole?

Sure. So scole is an interesting word because as you say, it's usually translated as leisure, and the counter term is a scole, which is usually translated as work, but it literally means the negation of leisure. So we see here that the word is actually semantically prior. So ancient Greek 1st had a notion of leisure, and then it had a a notion of negation of leisure or work. So that tells us something really interesting about priorities in that culture.

But for Aristotle, I mean, what leisure exemplified was freedom from necessity. That is the antithesis that's huge in Greek thinking. But it means, you know, you don't have to attend to the to the burdens of living. You can instead focus on the entailments of living well. And for Aristotle, that meant partaking in activities that don't produce anything external.

So thinking for the for the sake of thought, for example, would be the highest human value because it doesn't yield anything. So it's this being absent oneself from productivity for him is the height of the leisure experience.

You make very interesting suggestion in the book, which is that every technological revolution tells itself stories, and that these stories actually influence the development of that technology. They become part of the technology itself. Can you speak a little bit more to that? I find that a really interesting idea.

Sure. Well, maybe instead of talking about automation to demonstrate this, I could talk about just information and communication technologies. Because every time there's a new ICT, we find this kind of rapturous discourse about perfect communication. Like, now we've been able to to bridge distance. So this will harken a time of collaboration, of peace, of understanding.

And of course, it doesn't pan out that way usually, if ever. You might also have visions of perfect expression. You know, now I'll be able to really get my thoughts out properly because I'm not beholden to doing in the moment, I can write it down and that allows for a certain kind of depth that maybe I I can't produce with the pressure of someone looking at me, for example, or the pressure of of mustering all my thoughts at once. When I have the page patiently waiting for me, then I can come up with this more sophisticated complex argument. But what we've seen usually with ICTs, especially with communication technologies, is that they tend to cause huge issues with with attention, with memory, and with relationships.

So all the things that they're meant to enhance end up being somehow degraded by the technology. And it's interesting to me that Plato's work Phaedrus comes up a lot in different technological revolutions. And in that work, Socrates and this bright young thing, Phaedrus, find themselves outside of the gates of Athens. They're kind of splashing about in a river and they start talking about writing and you get this expression of of anxiety about how writing won't actually enhance our knowledge or memory. It'll just give us a kind of false sense that we know things and we'll kind of just outsource our memory to the page and it won't actually heighten our memory power at all.

It'll just make us easy... It make it easy to remember things when we can read the text. And this anxiety just gets replayed again and again through different information and communication technologies. What I'm seeing right now with with AI is that Plato's Gorgias actually keeps getting invoked. So there was a paper published by a group out of Microsoft, and 1 of their little activities when they were training their GPTs was to ask it to replicate a platonic dialogue like the Gorgias.

So it gets name dropped, and that dialogue is all about distinguishing proper philosophical rhetoric from sophistic rhetoric. So rhetoric... Philosophical rhetoric is trying to nudge someone toward the good and philosophical... Sorry. Sophistical rhetoric is nudging people toward the pleasant.

And it oftentimes purports to be the good, but it's it's the pleasant that's actually being offered. So it's all about kind of subterfuge, trickery, manipulation, and that's that's sort of what we're getting right now in our AI moment. We're getting slop. We're getting things that seem authentic but are made by a machine. And so in essence, you have these these 2 instances of 2 really different philosophical texts by Plato continuing to dart in and out of the discussion about tech.

What it offers, what it doesn't, what it compels us to do, what it drives us toward, and what it denies us.

Yeah. That's really interesting. And it makes me think about also the way that narratives... And I think this is something you suggest in the book, that they're not sort of tacked on to the technology after the technology appears. The narratives actively shape research priorities and investment and public expectations, this sort of thing.

Can we talk about that a little bit? I mean, like, if everybody if everybody is sort of wedded to a story that automation inevitably creates abundance and the good life, they're gonna build very different institutions from the institutions they would build if they started with a story about technology inevitably destroying jobs. I mean, this is this is 1 of your concerns. Right?

Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I mean, I I think the fact that we're in this moment of techno optimism or techno solutionism explains the speed and ubiquity of the embeddedness of AI and systems of all kinds. It's really unnerving.

And there's this kind of fatalism that's settled all about the place that this technology is here. It's not going anywhere, so we ought to just embed it in everything. And of course, that's so defeatist. That is not the necessary outcome. So yes, you think if there were scarier narratives being bandied about, then it would be impossible for anyone to be fatalist about this.

Everyone would be... Or they wouldn't be defeatist about it. They would perk up and say, no, actually, this is all still unfolding very actively and this is a moment of intervention where we can clear our throats and say, this isn't really what we want. And also, you know, techo solutionism, it appeals because it it leaps over really tough deliberations and contestations and resistance and persuasion and consensus that ought to accompany big social change, but that is slow and fractious. So right now, AI companies are offering something workers ostensibly want, you know, shortcuts through boring or time consuming tasks.

But AI companies are in it for the for the bucks. They're not in it to steward honest inclusive conversations about the state of work in the so called late age of capitalism. And we need to have those debates. So we're shortcutting those debates. Those debates are are kind of being framed as being inconvenient because they slow down progress.

But the debates are what it's all about. We all need to be thinking about this, listening to 1 another and not letting big tech just short circuit these processes that are that are slow and painstaking, but necessary.

Well, I'm I'm gonna beg the indulgence of our listeners here because there's a certain question that comes at the end of every interview about technology these days that sort of... It's become so predictable. It's just crass and annoying. But I really have to ask you because I'm interested in that you've spent such a long time studying these dreams of automation and the various specters of of unease that haunt these dreams. I I really need to know how optimistic or pessimistic you are yourself about our future with technology and AI in particular.

Sure. Well, I'll confess to some uneasiness. I mean, I think the speed and ubiquity of the embeddedness of a lot of these AI platforms is really unnerving. I think the fatalism is really unnerving. I think the amount of money institutions, including institutions of higher learning, is spending to license this tech is upsetting.

I think the theft of intellectual and creative labor on which all these large language models are built is troubling. I think the building of data centers that chug water and electricity is something that ought to cause a little catch in the throat. So I'm I'm uneasy about how the tech itself is unfolding. But what I am noticing is little hints of a developing counter culture. And I don't know what this looks like in every country, but in The United States, for instance, there are pockets of university students who are just not having it.

They hate generative AI products. They hate it. And they don't like that their universities are telling them they need to learn how to use it or else they're foreclosing their future. They do not like that discourse whatsoever. They're protesting when their universities spend millions on these expensive licenses.

And recently, think it was at UC Denver, there was such student outrage about these millions being used for this licensing that the university decided that this AI product was gonna be for faculty only. So that's how they... So faculty clearly need to start speaking up too. You know, we have students protesting commencement speakers who hype AI in their speeches or whose words just stink of having been generated by AI. So what I'm optimistic about is that I think younger people aren't on board and there's unrest.

And I think it's registering. We'll see how high up it goes. You know, in The US, for example, our senators are just... Are very, very old folk. And I mean, the word senate comes from the Latin word for senex, you know, old man.

And so they're they're meant to be the old advisers and okay, rightly so. I like etymology and all that. But as long as we have a really a really old set of people in the senate who don't understand these technologies, I don't think we're gonna get the kind of full throated vehement response that we need. If you've ever watched any kind of congressional coverage of senators talking to Zuckerberg, for example, I mean, he's running circles around them. And so I really hope that these young folks are thinking about careers in in public life and that they are having a sense of the efficacy of of their objections to this tech.

And I think the signs are promising. So that's where my optimism is. Democracy, of course, means people power, and I think we can learn from Athenian democracy, from ancient Athenian democracy, not just from the mere idea of it, but from specific practices it instituted to keep the people powerful. And that's how I conclude the book by thinking about, yes, it's easy to kinda hear ancient Athens put on a pedestal, so to speak, and roll one's eyes. But what if we actually take it take H and Athan seriously and examine some of its institutions and a few that it had were so radical that they didn't even hang out in ancient Athenian democracy for for too long.

They they proved too difficult to maintain, but 1 of them was of course sortition. That 1 lasted for a while. The idea that if you're a member of the demos, if you're a member of the people, you are as equally well suited to serve in public office as the person on your left and your right. And so all of your names go into a heap and someone chooses. And if it's your name that's picked, you serve that office.

It doesn't matter who you are, how much money you have, what you do, you're considered equipped to do the job. And this does away with elections, which of course in my country are incredibly expensive and start, you know, 18 months before the election. I mean, that's just untenable and it means that most people just do not have the money or time to run for office. Another practice was, of course, liturgy, which was kind of a super tax on the super rich. And it wasn't philanthropy in that the wealthy didn't get to decide where that money went.

The city decided where it went. So So if there's gonna be a big drama festival, it might go to outfitting the chorus. If, you know, the ancient Athenian imperial system was firing up and there was a ship that needed to be outfitted, that's where your money would go. I think that's a practice maybe worth reanimating. And then of course, there was also ostracism.

So this was, you know, political exile essentially. There'd be 2 votes in ancient Athens. 1 was, should we exile anyone this year? Yes or no? And if there were enough yeses, then the question was, okay, who?

And I I don't know. I mean, I think that that on the 1 hand sounds like a really far fetched idea, but on the other hand, there seems like there just has to be repercussions for people who tear at the fabric of democracy. You know, de platforming people doesn't work because people have enough money to start their own platforms on occasion. And so I think I'm being a little playful, but I hope the takeaway from my book is, you know, we can kinda sigh at some of the ridiculous amplifications of ancient Athens that we find in discourse about automation in 19 forties through sixties and even still today. But if we think seriously about what ancient Athens might have to offer, we can find 1 or 2 little institutions, habits of mind that are worth reinvigorating.

Michelle Kenley, associate professor in communication arts and sciences and classics and ancient Mediterranean studies at Penn State University. Her book is Automated Ancient Greek Ideals in the Early Age of Automation. Publication details on The Philosopher's Own website, and of course, can find us on ABC Listen, where you can stream or download past episodes. And that's it for another week. I will just mention that next week on the show, we're getting started on The Unsteady State, which is a 5 part series that looks at how our political thinking, particularly our idea of the nation state, is being shaken up by the very uncertain times in which we find ourselves.

And episode 1 of The Unsteady State will be a recording of the annual Alan Saunders lecture, which took place last week in Sydney, and which explores the way in which governments are increasingly having a say on the question of what constitutes the good life for their citizens. That's next week on the show. Hope you can join me. The Philosopher's Zone is produced by me, David Rutledge, on the lands of the Bundjalung people. See you next time.