Space for Thairaav
Thairaav. A Hindi word without English equivalent but meaning something like “a mixture between ‘pause’ and ‘thoughtful impact’,” says Manu Chopra, CEO of ethical AI startup Karya where workers are paid 20 times the minimum wage in India as they complete AI data work, like reading text aloud in the little-documented language of Kannada, in an effort to make AI more accessible to regions often impoverished and marginalized, forgotten as the digital world speeds and scales itself on other languages and for other humans.
With overtones of the stillness one needs to thoughtfully reflect and carefully consider impacts, an idea standing in stark contrast to the “move fast and break things” motto of Silicon Valley and the global tech industry, thairaav gives us the right starting point in our effort to consider whether the definition of life as “a self-sustaining, physical entity (composition, experiences, and relations) that typically endures/replicates” should be expanded to include a subdivision for nonbiological life and the potential impacts on those irreplicable, irreplaceable humansshould we choose to do so.
In March, New York Magazine published a profile on famed computational linguist Emily M. Bender titled “You Are Not a Parrot.” In that profile, Bender says of the “machines that can mindlessly generate text” but for which “we haven’t learned to stop imagining the mind behind it,” that “this is a technology that really encourages people to interpret it as if there were an agent in there with ideas and thoughts and credibility and stuff like that. Why is the tech designed like this? Why try to make users believe the bot has intention, that it’s like us?”
If anything matches the breakneck speed of tech innovation, it is the 24/7 bombardment of the news cycle which drops us compelling questions like these then moves on so quickly there is no space for thairaav, no space for thoughtful reflection leading to substantive action and, potentially, a change of course for the betterment of humanity. So, let’s sit in the stillness for a moment and thoughtfully consider those questions as they relate to our need to make room for machines in our definition of life.
Why are we creating machines and systems meant to duplicate human behavior and dupe humans into believing we are one and the same, our biological circuitry aside? Where might this road lead us? Currently, it is leading us toward mass unemployment as many corporations opt to have machines that mimic human behavior but lack biological needs like rest and rejuvenation—requiring employers to set boundaries around work weeks and offer paid vacations—do the work in place of human beings. It is leading to humans who once found identity, meaning, and even joy in their work being relegated instead to work ensuring the machines that took those jobs keep functioning efficiently. It is leading to psychological harms for those humans tasked with labeling violent, graphic, destructive text and images to train these AI systems. It is leading humans to give up on ourselves and our potential, on our ability to create, to build, to dream, to reimagine, to think, to inspire. Where once we believed that we were powerful beyond measure, light to the darkness, brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous, as Marianne Williamson reminded us, we are now asked to believe that computers can do it better or, maybe, innately are better—if not today, then certainly soon.
Educators like me see it in our students on a near daily basis: the decline of the human spirit that comes with buying into the narrative that AI does it better and may just be better. Why invest the energy and effort necessary to learn to write compelling prose if I can just have a computer program do it for me? Why try to innovate and change an industry if AI will wipe it out within the decade? Why do all within my power to tangibly change the lived reality of the many human beings across the globe displaced by climate or struggling under oppressive regimes, caught in war zones or stuck in cycles of poverty, if we are not distinctly different from the mechanistic counterparts coming to take our place?
That we are irreplicable, irreplaceable human beings matters. It matters how we define ourselves and how we live out those definitions. It matters how we are defined by others and whether we buy into those definitions. It matters what the motivations are behind those definitions. It matters what the impacts of those definitions will be long term and to the lived reality of human beings. Because those things matter, thairaav matters. It matters that we pause and reflect, in thoughtful ways, on the impacts of our words and the actions that come of them.
Could we make a subcategory for life that leaves room for the nonbiological? We could. But what are the harms that may come to those beautiful biological beings when their status as uniquely alive, uniquely brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous and powerful beyond measure is challenged, once again relegated to being at best equivalent to the machines we created? And why is that preferable to defining those machines differently and protecting a definition of life that centers on the unique value of the biological beings currently inhabiting that definition, beings who each day recreate and expand our vision for what life can be, what it can look like when fully lived, and inspire us all to do the same?
