The Proper Product of Humans is Humanity

The most important story of humanity up to the present day has been the story of socialization; humans creating ever larger and more complex societies. 

Social anthropologists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and economists may study this process from many perspectives, but the underlying object of study is the same: the long and continuing emergence of the humans as a social creatures in the widest sense. The emergence of humanity.

There is another perspective, however, one that emerges in the modern era and is closely linked to the self-understandings of modern humans. This perspective understands humans primarily in terms of production and consumption of things. Humans are tool makers, makers of art, makers of ritual, and builders of villages, towns, and cities. And they are consumers of the same.

This focus on production and consumption can lead us to forget that production initially served only one human purpose: the creation of societies. The earliest tools were used not merely to obtain food, but to obtain enough food to share. Plastic arts, rituals, stories, and the earliest shelters were all produced to draw people together even as they provided the means for doing so. Even weapons and war were products with the distinct purpose of protecting or allowing for the expansion of societies; and were often a direct means to the end of creating stronger social bonds.

The rise of the industrial age has obscured the relationship between production and the creation of the social human, or properly humanization and thus humanity. As production reaches new levels of sophistication individual products become less directly related to human uses, much less socializing uses. The final assembly of a automobile or a mobile phone both uses and obscures tens of thousands of component products with no apparent relationship to humans or humanity. And it obscures the fundamental purpose of both for communication between humans. 

An almost inevitable result is that more and more humans, perhaps the vast majority, are valued and value themselves not as producers of humanity, but as producers and consumers of artifacts. Add to this the fact that our products, which should serve to allow us the leisure for greater and greater human interaction, also provide the means for greater and greater isolation and we have the phenomenon of humans products implicitly supporting and even forming anti-social, anti-humans.

For those of us who are religious, that includes our products. The ritual worship we produce and the teaching we offer doesn’t necessarily support the creation of greater and more expansive societies and the deeper and deeper humanity of those within them. It can as easily reinforce tribal and even clan structures, or even (as it often does) isolate humans from their fellow humans - particularly when the focus is on personal salvation and personal success. 

My notes above clearly offer a way of attaching value to those things we humans produce: they have value only so long as they humanize. But such valuation and re-evaluation isn’t our greatest challenge. We are quickly coming to a time when more and more of what humans produce will be produced by machines. And I don’t just mean the things humans produce, although in that realm alone the dislocation humans as producers will be vast. 

Take a typical artistic product, something we humans believe is pretty exclusively our realm. 

This last few months I decided to produce a series of educational videos. In the old days of just a few years ago I could hardly have produced anything worthwhile on my own. Even if I possessed a video camera the process of editing, copying, and distributing video involved a host of professional video producers; each an artist with their own expertise. It would have been impossible without a community.

But last week I recorded my lectures, by myself, with two cameras (and two perspectives) in front of a green screen, using a teleprompter and with three studio lights. Old fashioned increases in theproduction of things, largely created by eliminating human workers and using automation, made the equipment available to me for less than $500.00. And instead of a human community, the final video could be created on my computer using smart technology that replaces, or allows me to replace, all of those artists who would have edited, color balanced, audio balanced, created backdrops and sets, etc.

Of course the final product lacked something. It was acceptable, but missed what is inevitably added by community. Its easy to forget there would be no Picasso without Paris, no Van Gough without Arles, no Rembrandt without Leiden. 

But most of us aren't them. So what about replacing me? Almost trivial given my acting skills. Computer programs exist already that could have created a digital lecturer giving my lectures in a digitally created environment. They are expensive now but they won’t be in the future. And writing the lecture? Without doubt computer algorithms are already absorbing everything written on religion into vast data banks and will be able to create not only sensible but even brilliant lectures. 

So if I value myself as a producer of lectures apart from the learning community that gathers around them,  then mine is a rapidly diminishing value. 

Do you value yourself as a salesperson? You are already being replaced by an algorithm that specifies where a computer will place products in a digital world, or a robot in a de-humanized store. 

Do you value yourself as a politician? Get serious. At any level above city councilman you could be replaced by a sophisticated Max Headroom whose image is entirely the product of marketing surveys. And those marketing surveys are increasingly surveys of digitally reproduced and refined versions of imagined humans. Why do you think a poll of only 1200 people can be accurate within 5%? Because a smart machine recreates an entire population of voters with its algorithms. And like you, but more efficiently and with no feelings of remorse or ethical distractions, Max would also vote for whatever attracts donors and insures reelection. 

Do you value yourself as a voter? A decider? Without a community of diverse humans and their views and interests you are a puppet of machine-driven marketing algorithms that know your habits and desires better than you know them yourself.  

And you marketers? Yeah, you are gone too. The focus group of the future will be an artificial intelligence evaluating the interactions of algorithms representing market segments and determining which product most appeals to them. And the product will be designed by a computer that observes consumption trends, analyzes them, and proposes new products. 

No matter what you produce, if you derive your value from production of things you are doomed to be valueless in the coming age of smart machines. With one exception, and only one exception. 

The only way to produce human society and thus full humans is through human interaction and relationships. Our true human value is manifest when we come together we make one another into a community, a society. These relationships may be mediated by things we produce - all forms of art, ritual, religion, teaching, therapy, and media come to mind. Yet the value of those things is derivative of and directly linked to our human engagement with each other. Producing things has human value only in so far as they are useful in the work of creating humanity.

And the corollary, the use of products has value only when they are used in the work of humanization. 

The reader can imagine the revolution in economics that is coming when most of us have no work producing things and all human activity must be re-valued. We will either begin to offer compensation to the humanizing, but largely uncompensated tasks now done by volunteers in their spare time, or have most of the population living idly on the dole. 

We will either begin to offer compensation for the kind of art that humanizes or see it disappear while smart machines create all the decorations and entertainment we could possibly want. 

We’ll either recognize that every human person has the capacity to humanize the rest of us, even if only by the demand on us to be humane. Because if we evaluate those who cannot efficiently produce stuff as worthless we will very soon join them in being worthless. 

Doctors, lawyers, politicians, computer programmers, CEO’s, CFO’s, pundits, and academics. All you thinkers. Do you think you are on the right side of Ayn Rand’s objectivist political philosophy? Well in the future you’ll just be a second-hander like everyone else because machines will out-think you. 

Schools and universities? We’ll either turn away from training producers of products back to the study of, and work producing, humans in human societies or we’ll be rendered irrelevant. We’ll either create humanizing communities around service, learning, and the arts or we’ll be rendered irrelevant. We’ll either serve the human task of producing humanity or we’ll disappear.

And the church? We are not immune. Many of our pastors and much of our worship will be replaced by computer algorithms and intelligently created animations. After all, a pastor who knows only a tiny fraction of the congregation face to face, and who is known only through an image on a screen will be as easily replaceable by an advanced Max H. 

The best worship leadership in the world, from choir and organ to praise band and laser light show, detached as they usually are from their audiences, will soon be created and streamed by smart machines. Indeed, most of the music coming from the major Christian publishing houses is so formulaic as to almost demand automation, and the look and feel across thousands of churches varies so little as to be negligible. 

Its easy to imagine a future where Pandora or Spotify will deliver to thousands of churches 3-D holographic worship leadership tweaked to the personal preference of the worship committee - assuming the committee isn’t replaced by careful surveys of congregational taste created for and evaluated by smart machines to maximize attendance and giving. 

The reality is that offering motivational entertainment for a market share already drawn to the higher production values of Hollywood will be literally worthless. The Christian church will either create community and foster humanity or have no value. It will be entirely our choice. Because the only proper product of humans is humanity. 

And the Gospel? The story of God’s love for the world is the greatest humanizing story ever told. But only when it is delivered in person. And that is the future of the church, or it has no future.