Intimations of immortality

Meditations on a WALL-E future

Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
                      But for those first affections,
                      Those shadowy recollections,
                Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
                Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
                To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
                      Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!

— William Wordsworth, excerpt from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"

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In Pixar’s “WALL-E,” the charming, wide-eyed robot tasked with cleaning up an uninhabitable Earth ascends to a starship populated by the remaining members of the human race — corpulent, sedentary beings who drink their meals out of a sippy cup while glued to hover chairs and holographic screens. These humans want for nothing, and are tasked with nothing; everything they need and desire is delivered to them with a few button taps by robots catering to their every whim. They communicate solely through video calls, even if their conversational partners hover beside them, as their chairs speed around the starship owned by mega-corporation “Buy ’n Large.”

“Welcome to Economy,” a neon banner flashes in the domed auditorium, alongside other signs to “Buy Shop Live” and “Eat Eat Eat.” A chipper artificial female voice comes on the intercom: “Buy ’n Large: everything you need to be happy. Your day is very important to us!”

Everything we need to be happy. Constantly fed, entertained, stimulated, without a single responsibility or care in the world. Isn’t this the promise of technology: to satisfy all our needs, fulfill every desire at the touch of a button, and liberate us from the mundanities and difficulties and frustrations and frictions of our everyday lives?

Some believe so. In a16z founder Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” he applauds the ability for the “techno-capital machine of markets and innovation” to satisfy “infinite” human wants and needs: 

“Falling prices benefit everyone who buys goods and services, which is to say everyone. Human wants and needs are endless, and entrepreneurs continuously create new goods and services to satisfy those wants and needs, deploying unlimited numbers of people and machines in the process.”

In Andreessen’s techno-capitalist vision, humans are considered a resource to be “deployed” and exploited, a means to produce an endless stream of commodities to fill the gaping, insatiable maw of our own desires. He asserts that as we want more and more, and produce more and more, we’ll inch closer to a world of material abundance, where we can “place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.”

Follower of Hieronymus Bosch. The Vision of Tundale, circa 1485.

The question of whether Addressen’s techno-capitalist vision of infinite “abundance” can be achieved is less important than the question of whether we want to achieve it. It’s not hard to draw the connection between his depiction of people as vessels of endless appetites who can only be satiated through endless consumption, and the portrait of humans aboard the starcraft in WALL-E. Perhaps we can consider the humans in WALL-E to be happy; perhaps the satisfaction of shallow, artificial pleasure is enough. But it’s hard to watch it without feeling sympathetic toward, if not deeply disturbed by, this vision of a human future.

The future depicted in WALL-E is disturbing because the humans seem to have everything a techno-capitalist society promises, and yet, we cannot claim that they lead a particularly inspiring or dignified life. Though they live a life of indulgent abundance, they’re purposeless and helpless without their technological aids.

WALL-E points to the core problem of Andreessen’s vision: when we try to satisfy moral needs through material goods, we find it unfulfilling. Technology feeds our endless pursuit of material satisfaction, but the seduction of endless material abundance often comes at the cost of an atrophied soul. Human virtues that enrich our lives — traditions and rituals, friendship, obligation to others, a sense of rootedness, appreciation of beauty — have deteriorated, in part due to technological developments. Mutual reliance is what forms strong bonds; when we come to rely on technology and commodities to fulfill the needs for which we once relied on each other, our connections become more tenuous and superficial, our communities more fragile.

Attempting to address moral or spiritual needs through technology dampens the appetite but does not truly satisfy the need. We can create tools that mimic human care — chatbots that can pretend to be friends or lovers, robots that can care for children and the elderly — but there are human costs to this. Technology cannot truly replicate the depths of human care, even if they can perform tasks more efficiently and predictably. It has the same effect as chugging a factory-made nutritional slurry rather than enjoying a homemade meal —it gives us the necessary calories to survive, but it’s neither delicious nor holistically nourishing in the same way.

Technology has always challenged our notions of reality: who we are, what is possible, what is sacred. But today, core truths about humanity are called into question. Is human creativity inimitable? Must babies be developed in a human body? Is Earth the only habitable planet in our solar system? Is death truly inevitable? We can transcend the limitations of our mortal bodies by embracing a world of seductive technological “solutions.” But what will be left of us in the end?

Each of us is more than just a corporeal body of wants and needs, but a soul that requires tending and attending to. Though these needs of the soul are less tangible than our bodily ones, if they are not satisfied, philosopher Simone Weil warned, “we fall little and little into a state more or less resembling death, more or less akin to a purely vegetative state.”

The questions we are now confronted with are not merely about what is possible, but, rather, what kind of future is worth wanting, and what kind of humans we aspire to be. How can we shape a relationship with technology that does not lead to a frictionless, effortless, colorless existence, but instead one that encourages richer lives of our own making? The answers, I suspect, lie not in shiny promises of Silicon Valley’s newest technologies, but in the eternal, ineffable truths embedded in our hearts.