The Façade of Control

Melody Kim
I think it’s everything. Um, so that’s like one element. I think the other piece is, um, this question of AI, it’s interesting, even talking to like, like I went home and i was talking to some like korean elders and like the topic of ai came up And this was like straight up like a korean ajushi is what i would call it he was like and this is now like begging the question of what what does it mean to be human and i was like whoa like I didn’t expect to be talking about this over like fried chicken i like it you know what mean and so i do think like ai is also like bringing up that question of like what is personhood and Like all this sort of thing um and so i think that’s where people are like searching for for answers and is that faith is that i don’t know it does challenge our default assumptions on what
Henry Zhu
It means to be human because it’s maybe our society is such that to be human is about like what we produce in our market-driven economy so if you’re not increasing gdp or you’re not like Able to make stuff or there’s something out there that’s not a person that can make more or it seems like it can better faster um oh interesting then yeah then it’s just like what are we Yeah you could say it’s good because then it might lead someone like even myself to think oh my worth and my being it shouldn’t necessarily be tied up in that right yes i haven’t heard that
Melody Kim
One before so that our humanity for a long time yeah in in the context of capitalism perhaps it’s been tied to like how much we’re able to produce and now that that’s being sort of taken Away or challenged then it’s like what does it mean for us to be yeah

Melody Kim
Tends to be so I think there’s like this I don’t know internal like battle or challenge and I think my like take on all of that is it’s kind of related to what you just said where it’s like Our view on work is so like we think that it’s just a job like work is only when you are nine to five doing a laptop job or whatever but someone at my church actually once said this to me I think I mentioned this to her I was like oh like you know and one day when I stopped working and she looked at me and she goes Melody, you never stop working. And I was like, that was like so profound to me because it’s true. Like, and that’s why, like you’re saying, like the work that we do for our community when we serve them, if we’re like preparing meals to go deliver to like a sick friend, if we are visiting Someone in the hospital, if we’re doing work for our own families at home, if, you know, that’s all work. And the fact that we don’t call it work is like.
Henry Zhu
Yeah, it devalues.
Melody Kim
It devalues it and it takes so much away. And I think we’re so tied to like our value, yeah, being when we have like a full-time job. So i think that challenge that’s like not great for

Henry Zhu
But we can suppress those desires, right? Both for good and for bad. I think that has to do with what it means to be human. The example in the podcast I was listening to is you know god chooses to rest on the seventh day yeah that’s like you could say an example of self-control he doesn’t have to keep creating He just stops it wasn’t for a practical reason he thought it was good and then cain kills the out of anger and so in that moment he was not able to exercise control and acted like you could Say animalistic

Melody Kim
Animalistic instinct yeah that’s super that’s super interesting to me i think um what i’ve also heard and again i don’t think i’m gonna explain it quite well but i think humans have this Ability to be able to like detach themselves from like their current state and imagine like a future state so i feel like that that adds to like the self-control piece where it’s like
Henry Zhu
You can almost imagine like you know what the consequences are oh okay like two hours from now or something yeah i mean i mean it’s kind of funny because you could say that we’re kind of Like simulating yeah yeah which is kind of like what an lm does yeah but like can an ai think long term well another side point would be that i think it’s funny how our conception of who we Are is always seems to be based on whatever the latest thing that we’ve made. Now, people are like, oh, we’re just like an LLM. Like we have training, you know, pre-training, all these things. The vocabulary we use to describe ourselves is just whatever the latest thing we’ve made in our image.
Melody Kim
Yeah. And I think that’s funny. In accrimge, yeah.
Henry Zhu
And so before, like, would use metaphors like wheels or the car or machine it’s funny we keep changing our definition of who we are yeah based on our latest thing yeah um and again

Melody Kim
But and again, maybe calling back to this whole idea of control, too. It’s like we want to have a sense of like, you know, how we want to make everything tangible so it’s like we can understand it. To like exist in more of like a void and so if we can imagine like if now we have a framework of the llm to talk about our human feelings or like i don’t know scary things that we don’t have control
Henry Zhu
Over like we want to lean it’s like a crutch essentially um i don’t know yeah no i agree that feels like a technology as a whole is just a coping mechanism to not be able to deal with our problems. Like I feel that way. I don’t want to feel negative emotions. And so like you turn to whatever it is that you want to use to cope. Yes. Rather than facing it. Yeah. And so I think it’s funny that we create technology and we lose spiritual technology if I want to use that word. It’s like prayer and sabbath and all these things yes let us face our demons or our fathers um because we’re giving up actually the things in the world yes i really like that contrast i
Melody Kim
Think that’s like something we need to amplify more.

Henry Zhu
Then like the person right next to you like whatever there’s like this weird like uh cognitive dissonance i think that gets created yeah when we care about people in the abstract everyone Has different levels of you could say power influence to be able to do that yeah but it’s interesting that most regular people they still feel this need to like help everybody if we all Helped our neighbor yes but it’s like oh that’s too hard because you know we gotta change the culture so it’s funny our reason to make all this technology is because we’re unable to like Have real community yes so we scale our lack of character and humanity by scaling technology instead of like ourselves.
Melody Kim
Yes. It’s the stuff like this stuff doesn’t scale to do

Melody Kim
It’s like lack of trust in humanity yeah like regardless of your faith or anything yeah yeah but to your point i think like all of this points to this idea of we don’t want to be like, even Though our lunch conversation was about this, I feel like it’s like, we all want to be super self-sufficient. We want technology to like take care of all this for us. And, and like this, like technology gives more people access towards this, like self-sufficiency. I feel like that’s what it is. And so I feel like we’re just going to keep butting up against this. And I never really thought about this contrast until like this conversation, but it’s just like, yeah, it’s like the technology gives us this facade of, of yeah, self-sufficiency Or whatever. But it’s like really the thing that I think encourages like stronger, a stronger fabric of society, I suppose, is like being willing to be vulnerable being willing to not be self-sufficient Being willing to like like

Melody Kim
I think my main takeaway from this was this idea of like that technology gives you more control. And that’s how much of a functional healthy society is like not that not focusing on just like just optimizing for control and everything yeah yeah yeah and i think maybe it’s just come
Henry Zhu
I mean that’s just because of where we’re coming from. It’s like, we know that we don’t control because we’re, you know, we believe in God. But it’s like, I think, I mean, if you don’t believe that, like, what else is there left? So it’s like, you want, you should be pursuing control, which is pursuing power. Jesus chooses to become powerless, like on the cross. But then in some, the ironic part is that in his powerlessness he shows his real power right you know resurrection yeah everything yeah well what i like about that is that it just uh amplifies
Melody Kim
This this contrast again around our yeah maybe what it is is like where where does our angsty like desire for control come from and it’s like it is an anxiety right it is uh do not worry right And we’re worrying and we can exert you know that that worry comes out and manifests itself in like our our uh idea of control yes like what we’re saying at the very beginning which is we Think this life the